Fez Cooking Class: Souk Market to Riad Table

The best souvenir from Fez weighs nothing. Spend a morning in a riad kitchen with a Fassi cook and you go home able to make the food, not just remember it. This is a hands-on class, not a demonstration: you shop, you chop, you build the tagine, you bake the bread, and then you eat it on the terrace.

Start at the market

We meet at your hotel and walk into the medina to buy the day ingredients. Your cook shows you how to choose a tagine vegetable, what fresh coriander should smell like, how preserved lemons are made and kept, which olives suit which dish, and how to buy spices by weight without being overcharged. You will leave the souk understanding ras el hanout, cumin, sweet paprika, saffron threads and the difference between them.

In the kitchen

Back in the riad you work at your own station. Typically you will prepare a full Moroccan meal: two or three of the small cooked salads Fez serves first (zaalouk of smoked aubergine, taktouka of pepper and tomato, carrot with cumin), then a tagine of your choosing, chicken with preserved lemon and olives, lamb with prunes and almonds, or a vegetable tagine, layered correctly so it steams rather than boils. You will also hand-mix and bake khobz, the round everyday bread, and learn msemen, the folded flatbread that defeats most people on the first try and is the single most useful thing you will learn all day.

Then you eat

The tagine comes to the table under its lid, and you eat with bread rather than cutlery, the way it is done. Mint tea is poured from a height at the end, and you will be shown how and why. You leave with the recipes written out, and with a clear sense of which spices to buy before you fly home.

Practical notes

Classes run morning or afternoon, last around four to five hours including the market walk and the meal, and work well for complete beginners. Children are welcome and usually love the bread. Vegetarian, vegan and halal menus are all standard, just tell us in advance.