Pomelo Salad Revelation, Cooking with Chopsticks and More from My Airbnb Experiences Cooking Class in Saigon

I try and take a cooking class when on vacation, luckily my husband is game because I dragged him to a very technical pastry class in Paris and he happily complied. Cooking in Vietnam is a style that’s much easier to bring into my everyday kitchen - for a few reasons, one being that it’s very, very hot and humid there so it’s a cuisine that feels right at home in Miami. Another is that I didn’t have to measure out flour by the ounce like I did in France, instead, it was much more freewheeling a litle-bit-of-this-a-little-bit-of-that kind of cooking; more my style.

We started with about an hour in traffic, which turned out to be a quintessential cultural experience in Saigon that we had otherwise avoided, so worth it - I guess? Then we met up with Thuy who took us to a very local market, the kind she herself said was really not the kind of place tourists visit. Thuy was dope, it was like having a new local Vietnamese friend who we could ask questions to and also kind of raised an eyebrow at you when you said or asked something dumb, the way a friend would.

She quickly navigated us through vegetables and meat stands. We had emailed her a few days before with some choices from the options she provided. We went with the quicker menu and skipped the pho and oter dishes that would take about three hours - not because we didn’t want to chill with Thuy for three hours because we easily could have, but because I thought the shorter recipes would be easier to try again at home.

We walked to her apartment and got to work cutting pomelo. Jazz, my husband is not a grapefruit guy, but even he really liked the end result - a pomelo salad with cilantro, roasted peanuts, and shrimp. Also, Thuy told us that you can boil the pomelo skin and use the water to rinse your hair. Or you can take the skin and use it as a hat for your cat.

I walked away being very impressed by the use of chopsticks for cooking from stirring to flipping to dunking. I suddenly find it positively superfluous to use a spatula, tongs, and spoon while cooking - in the same way that a spoon for soup suddenly seemed very silly after I visited Japan for the first time and everyone sipped it out of the cup and used their chopsticks to fish out anything from the bottom. We made a chicken cooked in coconut water - yes, coconut water, not milk - short ribs, white rice, and the pomelo salad.

I would do this again a hundred times. Each host is so different and even though we cooked a pretty elaborate meal, I got to ask Thuy all about what Vietnamese people eat for breakfast, for special holidays, when they have friends over and other details about eating at home that you typically don’t get the chance to ask someone.

If you find yourself in Ho Chi Minh City and you’re looking for a cooking class, here’s the link.