Cooking holidays: food tours where you cook too

About this category

Learn it at the stove

Eating a dish teaches you what it should taste like. Cooking it beside someone who grew up making it teaches you how. Every tour in this category includes at least one hands-on class, where you work at your own place at the table, eat what you make and take the recipes home.

Italy leads. The Bologna Pasta Class and Market Walk is four and a half hours: the Quadrilatero, then a sfoglina at your elbow while you roll egg pasta with the long pin, cut tagliatelle and fold tortellini. The same class is day 2 of Emilia-Romagna: Parmigiano, Prosciutto and Balsamic. Tuscany ends with a farmhouse class near Pienza, rolling pici by hand for a garlic and tomato sauce.

Lyon and Provence has a class near the Saône for pike quenelles in sauce Nantua, gratin dauphinois and a pink praline tart. Athens and Crete cooks in a village kitchen in Apokoronas: kalitsounia cheese pies, dakos on barley rusks, wild greens with olive oil and staka with eggs.

Beyond Europe, Japan has a Kyoto home class making dashi from kombu and bonito, rolled omelet, miso soup and obanzai side dishes. Mexico City and Oaxaca spends a full day with a cocinera tradicional, toasting chiles on the comal and grinding mole negro on the metate. New Orleans and Cajun Country makes a dark roux, chicken and andouille gumbo, jambalaya and pralines.

No experience is needed, and half our guests rarely cook at home. Where a glass comes with the class lunch, in Bologna, Lyon or Crete, it is poured for guests 18 and over, with a non-alcoholic choice. Vegetarian swaps are easy with notice; the pasta and pastry classes cannot be made gluten-free.