The fragrance of cooked rice filled the air. Sometimes it was mixed with the smell of burning wood. In front of me were two large round button woks, called krata bai bua in Thai, on two big charcoal stoves. Standing behind the cooking woks was Kamol Pruksa, 71, who was in charge of the cooking station.
"The rice is almost done," he said, adding: "I will show you how to make our traditional rice snack soon."
Kamol is the president of Ban Wang Wa Community Based Tourism in Klaeng, Rayong. The village was founded in 1897. The name Wang Wa comes from the location where the community is located.
Wang means a deep part of a river and wa refers to the name of the big ton wa (Java plum tree) found at the location, he explained.
The community jumped on the tourism wagon a couple of years ago. The cooking demonstration hosted in the community learning centre is part of its half-day programme to introduce visitors to local food.
Kamol Pruksa cooking the rice snack.
The mixture of oil and seasoning is spread over the cooking rice to make it tasty.
The snack that Kamol cooked is called khao tang boran, a traditional crispy rice cracker. Normally, rice crackers these days are made of deep fried dried rice which may have cane sugar on top.
But in Ban Wang Wa, the snack is a way to salvage leftover rice that had stuck to the pan.
"It is my favourite snack," said Walailuk Jumroon, an agricultural research assistant of the Tambon Administrative Organisation of Wang Wa, who helps develop the community's tourism programme.
"It is a hard-to-find treat nowadays. Since I was young, we have only ever had the chance to eat khao tang boran when there was a big celebration, such as a kathina ceremony [monk's robe presentation], a pha pa merit-making ceremony or a wedding. Only for those events would hosts need to cook rice in big woks," she said.
The idea of the snack started when their ancestors decided not to keep wasting grains of cooked rice that had stuck to the cooking pan. They would cover the rice in lard and let it cook for a while to make it crispy, then add seasonings for taste.
To the rendered lard, Kamol added fish sauce, sugar, sliced garlic, shallots and fresh chillies.
Then, he swiftly scraped the rice out of the pan, which came out easily and in big pieces, and put it in a tray.
"Try it while it's still hot," he told us.
The smell of the snack made me hungry. I took a big bite of it. It was crispy, a little salty and sweet. Its local popularity was evident from the appeal it had even for elders in the learning centre.
In addition to khao tang boran, we got to make another local food called krarang krabok, which is made of kernels of luk krabok, the fruits of Barking deer's mango trees.
Luk krabok is also known as "wild almond", due to its thin, almond-like shape and its nutty taste.
Sao Bamrungsin, who is in her 70s, taught us how to make the dish, which is usually a side served with rice.
The nuts were already boiled for us to roast them until their colour turned gold.
"We still use a mortar and pestle to pound and grind the nuts until they are busted up," she said. She told us that a blender can also help speed up the process, but she just preferred the old grinding method.
After the nuts clumped together, she added sugar and salt, tasted it and kept pounding until it turned into a golden-brown buttery paste. The blend looked much like peanut butter to me and it did taste like it, too. It was nutty, sweet and salty.
But people in Ban Wang Wa do not spread the nutty paste on bread but rather mix it in with rice.
"The rice must be hot to produce that good taste," she said, adding that it's a vegetarian dish.
Krarang krabok, the nutty spread, and the raw kernels of Barking deer's mango fruits.
The khla mat.
A villager demonstrates how to make the khla mat.
For the leftover krabok spread, Sao told us to spoon the paste into small cones made of jackfruit leaves and let it dry for a couple of hours. This preserves the food to be eaten and reheated later.
The locals of Ban Wang Wa also prepared durian, rambutans, longkong and mangosteen for us. These came from their orchards, which are also open to visitors.
Before leaving the learning centre, we were shown how locals weave a mat from khla (Schumannianthus dichotomus), the plant that grows in the wetland.
Walailuk explained to us that khla mats are also known as "cool mats" and used to be a popular product in the past.
"When I was young, I also slept on the khla mat," she said, adding that today the mat was quite hard to find as those who know how to weave it were getting older and the places where the plant could be found in the community were getting fewer.
"The learning centre in Ban Wang Wa is the place where we try to keep our tradition alive. When visitors are interested in our way of life, we hope that our young generation will be proud of it and help us preserve it too," she said.
