​Taste of Taiwan Virtual Cooking Class at Home Media Event

(Images:Ruksana Hussain)

For a fun virtual session, Taiwan Tourism hosted a casual at-home cooking event to Bring a Taste of Taiwan Home. The cooking instructor was from Cookinn Taiwan which is a Tripadvisor award-winning cooking school in Taiwan offering hands-on Taiwanese cooking classes, local market tours and ​customized cooking events for groups. The session included learning to prepare scallion pancakes and bubble tea at home ready just in time for dinner. 

Of course, a little surprise box arrived with the required ingredients to get the dinner party started at home. During a little under two hours, Taiwan Tourism shared more about traveling to Taiwan this year and some ideas of places to visit and activities to indulge in. Of course, the much-awaited moment was to get started on prepping and making the scallion pancakes and bubble tea. Along with the ingredients, the instructions were provided as well.

The cook-along session with chef was an informative and interactive session with not just the walk through of the steps but also more information on the ingredients being used, the technique of cooking and the local culinary scene. It was great to have chef answer questions in real-time while also demonstrating the best way to fold in the pancakes and stir the tapioca starch to prepare the tapioca pearls for the bubble tea.

​Yours truly had a successful outcome with the scallion pancakes. Though the method initially seems cumbersome, it is eventually easy if you get the dough to the consistency you’d like to roll out the pancakes. This is like making rotis and parathas in Indian cuisine and felt natural for me to make. The bubble tea on the other hand wasn’t much of a success as I couldn’t get the tapioca pearls made in the technique chef displayed. I still drank my sweetened cold tea with milk though sans tapioca pearls!