We have been in Penang for 7 days (you can check this post for a summary) and one of the things we enjoyed a lot was to cook together with a Malaysian Chinese in a private cooking class close to Penang.
A complete guide to an amazing Penang cooking class
Price: about 35€ per person for 3 dishes
Time: Morning class starts early around 7 AM to visit the Malaysian-Chinese market close to the biggest buddhist temple of Malaysia. It finishes at 12 pm where you can enjoy your food
Highlights: market visit, breakfast in the market included, cooking traditional food, private class, tasty food.
The tour starts at 7 AM where you will be picked up from your hotel in Georgetown to go towards the market before any traffic jam builds up.Â
Once you arrive in the market you will follow the guide and chef Samuel through the narrow streets of the Malaysian-Chinese market. This part is great but we felt as if you don’t have a lot of time for exploring the market since Samuel goes very fast through the streets and tells you to keep the questions for afterwards.
Afterwards, you head up to a kind of food court where you can enjoy a traditional breakfast. Unfortunately, there is no thing such as a menu there so Samuel just asks you if you want a light or heavy breakfast and chooses himself. We would have preferred to be able to know what we might be getting in advance and decide ourselves. However, we got some tasty dim-sums filled with a local vegetable that is also popular in South American. We also got some bread that was similar to an Indian plain-dosa as well as a nutmeg juice. It was tasty and included in the course.
The next step is to go back to Georgetown to the home of Samuel where there is a nice setup ready for a cooking class. The kitchen space is beautiful with a wooden table, several kitchen gadgets and two printed papers with the recipes that you’ll be cooking.
One can notice during the entire class that Samuel used to be a chef in a hotel, probably having strict orders and leading a team as well. We felt that sometimes the corrections and orders were a little big harsh but the recipes were detailed and he helped us at all time. It was great to mix so many spices and also to learn the trick on how to do rotis like local Malaysians. In fact, after having tried the roti from the cooking class that we did ourselves, we checked the most famous place for rotis in Penang and they were doing exactly the same steps (only much better than us haha).
It was fun to do the recipes and all of them were really tasty, especially the vegetarian dish that we cooked with mushrooms and a sweet cream as well as the chicken Rendang with many tasty spices combined.Â
We hope you enjoyed this post and next time you’re in Georgetown you can maybe do a cooking class since Penang is the Malaysian capital of food, with so many varieties combining the Chinese, Malay and Indian cultures that we feel is the place to do a cooking class.