Hoi An Cooking Class

In Hoi An, I took a super fun cooking class at the Morning Glory Cooking School. We made green mango salad, egg pancakes, two kinds of dumplings, and some amazing noodles. It was a feast!

The mango salad starts with mango (naturally) but the catch is that it was a green mango. Slightly unripe. Not so unripe that you’d make a 😝 face if you ate it, but nowhere near ripe enough to put it in a smoothie. Unripe mangos are firm to the touch and slightly green-tasting with a sweet undertone. Refreshingly tart.

We started the salad by prepping the mango in three simple steps. Peel the mango. Make long vertical cuts all around the outside. Then use the peeler to shave off the outside. That’s it! Three steps that create long, gorgeous ribbons of fruit.

Next, we mixed everything together in a big bowl. I started with thinly sliced onions and mint for freshness, fried shallots for crunch, shredded chicken for fat, and sesame seeds for nuttiness. I topped it off with a chili garlic dressing. After mixing everything together I plated it and dug in. Yum!

one of the few photos in which I’m not sweating profusely in Vietnam (the school was air conditioned woohoo)

Fueled by our mango salad, we moved onto the next dish: egg pancake with shrimp. My love for Vietnam’s take on shrimp is no secret. Sometimes, the shrimp take center stage as the star of the show. Here, shrimp are mere adornment. Sort of like a cherry on a sundae, or a hat on an elderly English lady at a wedding. But I digress.

I set the pan on fire!!! 🔥🍳🔥

How? I’m not really sure. But the instructor said it was a good sign. In fact, a tall open flame is what you’re aiming for when you make shrimp pancakes. Who knew? Alas, I have no proof. And, like the old saying goes, “pic or it didn’t happen.” But I assure you I almost burned the cooking school down. Not really, but I did make a super high flame that made the other students gasp so let’s just say I’m doing it right. 😎🔥

Back to pancakes. Basically, you make a pancake from these ingredients: bacon fat, fresh mung beans, eggs, and shrimp. Cook everything in a pan that is hot hot hot.

After that, layer the rest of the ingredients like so: rice wrapper on the bottom, egg pancake in the middle, and on top, mix the lettuce with herbs and sliced cucumbers for freshness and crunch.

Roll everything up like a burrito, and there you have it! It’s rich and satisfying thanks to the bacon fat and egg, crunchy from the cucumber, and fresh from the herbs. Occasionally you bite into a lil shrimp, which is always a treat.

Next up on the menu: shrimp dumplings. “Wait, more shrimp?!” you ask. “Why yes” I’d answer. More shrimp!! Can you ever have enough shrimp? Depends on who you’re asking. In my opinion, there’s never enough shrimp.

Now I have to admit, these shrimp dumplings were not easy to make. In theory, they’re simple. It’s just mashed raw shrimp folded inside rice paper. It’s the folding that takes a lot of skill. The goal was to make the dumpling look like a “white rose.” Unfortunately, my dumplings looked more like I sat on them. But if you squint your eyes and use your imagination, they do kind of look like a rose. Right? Right.

The dumplings on the bottom left are meant to resemble “white roses.”

Once the rice paper cooks, it turns translucent. That’s how you know they’re done. Then we sprinkled the soft cooked dumplings with crispy fried shallots and to get a crunchy, craveable combo. YUM.

We also made some veggie dumplings because, well, balance. The filling consisted of cooked mung beans, carrots, and green onions.

Each veggie dumpling had a beautiful scalloped edge that looked delicate and refined. It was preeetty difficult to make evenly-sized scallops. As a result, the veggie dumplings were even more difficult to fold than the shrimp. Of course the instructor was amazing at folding dumplings, so I sneakily asked him to fold a few for me. Here’s what a proper dumpling made by a master dumpling maker should look like.

Oh and there was a tasty dipping sauce, of course. Since this is Vietnam.

I totally loved my class at the Morning Glory Cooking School. The instructors were fun and lively and the space was large, well-designed, and modern. Also, the food was delicious. If I’m ever in Vietnam again, a cooking class here will certainly be on my to-do list.