About This Experience

The Art of
Moroccan Cooking

Moroccan cuisine is one of the great culinary traditions of the world. It is a living tradition built from a thousand years of Berber, Arab, Andalusian and Jewish influences, where the spices are ground by hand, the bread is baked in wood-fired clay ovens and the tagine has been simmering on a low charcoal fire since early morning. Learning to cook Moroccan food in a riad garden kitchen with a woman who has prepared these recipes every day of her life is one of the most rewarding things you can do in Marrakech.

The morning begins in the spice souks of Marrakech, where your personal guide takes you through the lanes to the stalls that the local families use. You select the saffron, the ras el hanout, the preserved lemons and the fresh coriander. You see the difference between cumin from Morocco and cumin imported from elsewhere. You smell the difference between fresh and dried rosewater. This part of the experience, the souk before the cooking, is itself something most visitors to Morocco never see.

From the souk you enter a beautiful riad garden kitchen where the cook is already at work. Nothing is demonstrated and then repeated, you do everything yourself, from washing and preparing the vegetables to grinding the spices in a stone mortar, shaping the pastilla parcels and placing the tagine on the charcoal fire. At the end of the morning you sit down together in the garden to eat the full meal you have prepared: tagine, three Moroccan salads, fresh bread from the clay oven and a pastilla, with mint tea poured from height in the traditional way. You take printed recipe cards home with you in English and French.