|
Travel news - wellbeing in Thailand |
MANDARA ACADEMY OF SPA CUISINE
Located at the Bangkok Marriott Resort & Spa near the Krung Thep Bridge, the Mandara Academy of Spa Cuisine offers more than just spa ambience. Physically rejuvenating first-class treatment aside, the academy1 offers you a chance to learn how to prepare spa cuisine, not the usual Thai cooking classes available elsewhere. It claims to the first of its kind in Thailand.
Spa cuisine is meals or dishes prepared from ingredients selected based on their nutritional value. It doesn't necessarily mean vegetarian food; salmon, tuna and seafood are also used to create spa cuisine.
The cooking class doesn't begin with shopping for herbs or vegetables at the local fresh food market, as is the norm, but at the academy the chef prepares most of the ingredients and then proceeds to demonstrate how to cook the dishes.
Each dish is uniquely fusion in style, a mixture of locally-found ingredients to lend authentic Thai taste, and others borrowed from Japanese and Italian kitchens like mustard and olive oil.
Before the actual cooking, the chef explains the medicinal and nutritional value of the ingredients and why they are added to a particular dish.
In all the chef prepares 20 dishes, four to a set, each set comprising appetiser, soup, main course and dessert. Students are taught to cook all the dishes, one set at a time.
The academy has three cooking stations, each catering to four to six persons. The cost is 6,000 baht per person and includes one-hour spa treatment. Without the treatment the cost is 5,000 baht.
Bangkok Post August 2005 www.bangkokpost.com
|
