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Eating well on holiday isn’t always enough – clients want to learn how to cook well too. Rob Gill finds five holidays that send clients home with new kitchen skills.
The destination is packed with a “symphony of flavours thanks to the influences of various cultures”, says David Carlaw, head of Faraway product at Premier Holidays, which offers a seven-night escorted culinary tour.
First stop is Malacca, home of Peranakan cuisine (a blend of Malay and Chinese), for visits to a fresh food or “wet” market, cooking demonstrations and a traditional lunch.It’s then on to Kuala Lumpur to attend a Malaysian home cooking school, where guests get to prepare their own three-course lunch.
Another demonstration is held at the Tropical Spice Garden in Penang, followed by a visit to Chowrasta market to learn how spring rolls and dumplings are made. There is also a chance to sample Penang street food.
Book it: The tour is priced from £2,025pp including flights, cookery demonstrations and most meals.
Holidaymakers staying at Hunter Valley Resort, two hours’ drive from Sydney, New South Wales, can create their own three-course meal as part of the estate’s cooking school, which is led by executive chef Phillip Collis. It kicks off with a vineyard inspection and tasting before heading for the kitchen.
This culinary experience (£119pp) is recommended by Rachel McMurdo, Travel 2’s assistant product manager – Oceania, who adds: “The hands-on class and all the dishes are cooked from scratch using local organic produce.”
For guests with a sweet tooth, the resort offers a one-hour Big Kids Candy class, where they can learn to make marshmallows and peanut brittle.
Book it: Travel 2 offers a trip to Australia with three nights at the Hunter Valley Resort and three nights in Sydney from £1,379pp including flights and car hire.
The island is known for its exotic cooking styles including Creole, French, Chinese and Indian, and guests at the Constance Belle Mare Plage can learn more about this rich culinary heritage in cookery classes.
Chefs Frederic Goisset and Patrick Travady run the two-hour class (approx £73pp), which include a 15-minute session with the resort’s head sommelier on how to pair wines with the food being prepared.
Gold Medal’s Indian Ocean assistant product manager Melanie Burton says: “Dishes that guests can learn to cook include steamed prawns with kaffir lime, pineapple with spicy salt, tapioca and coconut milk, and chicken with garam masala and local spices.”
Book it: Gold Medal offers seven nights half-board at the Constance Belle Mare Plage from £1,360pp including flights.
Clients can learn to cook the Tuscan way when they prepare a traditional rustic lunch for themselves, during a Back-Roads Touring itinerary taking in some of Italy’s most iconic sights.
Other culinary highlights of the 13-day Italian Indulgence itinerary, which runs from Rome to Venice, include hunting for truffles with a local farmer in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, wine tasting in the Valpolicella area near Verona, and sipping regional liquors complemented by chocolate and handmade nougat at a distillery in Asti.
The trip also visits Florence, Lucca Pisa, Lake Orta and Lake Maggiore.
Book it: The Italian Indulgence tour with Back-Roads is priced from £2,426pp including some meals, Tuscan cooking class and tastings. Flights are not included in the price.
For those who want to learn more about the secrets of preparing authentic Thai cuisine, Tell Tale Travel runs a series of cookery-based tours around the country.
These itineraries include the two-week Tamarind and Spice escorted trip visiting four major areas in Thailand, starting with a cookery lesson in the bustling capital, Bangkok.
The tour then heads for the rice fields of Thailand’s central plains before travelling north to Chiang Mai, where holidaymakers will visit an organic farm and try the region’s “Lanna” cuisine.
The final stop is the Andaman coast of southern Thailand, where the group will learn to cook massaman curries and visit a night market packed with food stalls.
Book it: Tell Tale Travel’s Tamarind and Spice tour is priced from £2,225pp including flights departing in February and October 2017.
