Over the blitz of a whirring blender, Emilio Pérez, a chef and partner at Casa Jacaranda cooking school in Mexico City, yelled, “Check this out guys, come here.”
Standing in front of a burner, he incinerated a tortilla, its charred remains bound for mole sauce, before directing our attention to the blender to taste the spicy red salsa. Then it was back to the burners to see shriveled raisins — another mole ingredient — plump up, before mixing dough for tortillas.
For the next several hours, my attention volleyed from ingredient to ingredient, dish to dish, as our class of eight students prepared a Mexican menu of green tamales, chicken mole, two kinds of salsa and blue corn tortillas under the energetic tutelage of Chef Emilio, as we called him.
For cultural spice, he threw in observations such as, “We domesticated the corn and it domesticated us.”
I had come to Mexico City in February seeking just such culinary and cultural immersion. A friend had recently returned from Italy, raving about her four-day cooking school, which was more than $1,000 a day.
In the capital of Mexico, I knew I could stretch my budget — a dollar is worth about 20 pesos today — and spend about $200 a day on a D.I.Y. curriculum in one of the world’s most celebrated food traditions, cited on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list.
Part of the experience trend in travel, cooking classes are booming. They are a major component of what the market research firm Grandview Research calls culinary tourism, accounting for $11.5 billion globally and projected to grow nearly 20 percent a year to 2030.
Over three days, my husband, Dave, and I took three classes and still had time to catch a lucha libre wrestling match, visit the studios of the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and enjoy complimentary mezcal on the rooftop of NaNa Vida hotel in the bohemian Roma district (rooms from 2,888 pesos).
Learning ‘a Love Language’
In a shady square in the central Juárez neighborhood, Chef Emilio of Casa Jacaranda ($225 a person), greeted our group of seven Americans and one Canadian with a choice: Should we make tamales, mole, pipián (a sauce made with pumpkin seeds) or birria (stew)?
By majority vote, we opted for green tamales — “Something everyone can get their hands on,” Chef Emilio said — and mole with chicken.
The class, which was in English, moved on to the nearby Juárez Market for a tour. Amid towering produce stands and tiered displays of dried chiles, the chef discussed the milpa agricultural system where corn, beans and squash are grown together as the basis for Mexican food.
“We were conquered through food, as well as other ways,” he added, identifying Spanish-introduced foods such as wheat, olives, grapes and almonds.
At La Rifa Chocolatería, a nearby cafe, we sampled Mexican chocolate and discussed the importance of cacao, once traded like currency and now a key ingredient in many mole sauces.
Then, a few blocks away, we set to work around an oversize kitchen island in the colorful workshop of La Jacaranda, which shares space with an art gallery.
We roasted tomatoes, garlic and chiles for red salsa, mixed corn flour with pork fat for the tamale batter, and roasted ancho chiles before frying them in oil and boiling them in chicken stock for the 27-ingredient mole sauce.
“Mole is not a recipe, but a category,” said Chef Emilio, noting the endless ways it can be modified.
We made three sauces demonstrating the spectrum of flavors that would be blended into one mother sauce. One involved plantain, sugar and burned tortillas. Another roasted cacao and the third, fried apples, raisins and sesame seeds.
“When you make mole from scratch, that’s a love language,” he said.
Sent to wash our hands, we returned to find the work table filled with ingredients for tacos using tortillas we had pressed and seared. For the next course, with Paloma cocktails in hand, we filed into an adjacent dining room where a long table was set for our meal of fragrant tamales and rich mole served over yellow rice.
Tiny Tacos
For another culinary lesson, I turned to Airbnb Experiences where the gastronomic offerings range from street-food crawls and mezcal tastings to churro-making and bread-baking.
“Making tacos al pastor with a chef” ($66 a person) stood out for its bold attempt at a ubiquitous taqueria recipe — in which slabs of adobe-marinated pork turn on a vertical spit before an open flame — and professional instruction.
The France-born chef, Raja Elissa, worked in upscale restaurants in Paris and Los Angeles before moving to Mexico. In 2017, Chef Raja, with his wife, Pilar Moreno, turned the garage of their home in the San Ángel neighborhood into a professional kitchen with stainless steel countertops. He has been teaching there ever since.
“It’s nice to meet people from all over the world,” said the chef as he welcomed Dave and me and a couple from Germany at the Mercado Melchor Múzquiz in San Ángel by distributing shopping bags.
While picking up pork, tomatillos, pineapple and other ingredients, he divulged secrets for reading chiles, noting that the larger, darker ones are milder but those with stretch marks “will be like a volcano erupting.”
A three-stop bus ride brought us to the chef’s home where whitewashed walls concealed a shady yard and a tidy kitchen.
Donning aprons, we prepared the pork marinade with vinegar, herbs and pineapple juice colored red by mild guajillo chiles.
Normally, the lean pork used in tacos al pastor is layered and threaded onto a large rotisserie — known as a trompo — from which cooks shave outer bits of meat into tortillas. In the home version, we made mini trompos, driving wooden dowels into sturdy disks of pineapple, then impaling our marinated meat onto the stakes and roasting the assemblies in the oven.
While the meat cooked, we charred and blended ingredients for salsa, used traditional molcajetes, or volcanic stone mortars, to make guacamole, and pressed and fried tortillas.
We learned handy techniques, like how to rock a knife blade from front to back to keep from squeezing fragile produce like tomatoes; how to make a sashimi cut on a piece of pork to open it up like a book; and how to force garlic cloves from their skins by pinching them.
When we sat down to eat, we worked our way around the mini trompos, slicing meat into tortillas and topping the tacos with diced onion, cilantro and salsa.
‘The Best Way to Make a Bond’
No mole, I texted our next instructor. And no tacos, please.
“I will plan something different,” replied Alex Ortiz, an elementary schoolteacher who moonlights as a cooking instructor in his downtown apartment through the platform Traveling Spoon.
What Airbnb is to lodging, Traveling Spoon is to cooking, matching hosts — usually skilled amateurs, but occasionally professionals — with food-focused travelers.
Among seven Traveling Spoon options in Mexico City, we chose “Modern Mexican Cooking Class with a Fun-Loving Couple” ($190 a person, including a market tour and meal).
“I love to teach and I love to cook,” said Mr. Ortiz on our walk to the San Juan Market, explaining that the other half of the couple, his wife, Ale, was working.
When he started with Traveling Spoon seven years ago, Mr. Ortiz sought supplemental income. Now, having expanded his culinary training with university courses, he does it for fun a couple of times a month.
“It’s just like having friends over and eating and drinking, which is the best way to make a bond,” he said.
Mr. Ortiz’s ambitious menu included the hominy and pork stew known as pozole, two appetizers — chalupas and chicharrón de queso — salsa, guacamole and corn cake for dessert.
At the market, our guide shopped grocery stalls, produce stands and tortilla makers while pointing out a barbershop, office supply store and florist, calling the market “the original Walmart.”
Back in his tiny kitchen, I chopped cactus paddles for a zesty cactus salad. For the main dish, Dave tackled the chile-based sauce and then browned the meat, eventually transferring all the ingredients to a pressure cooker.
While it steamed, we made chicharrón de queso, shredded Gouda cheese fried in a nonstick pan until it becomes a thin crepe. Once flipped and crispy on both sides, the pliable sheet was coaxed onto a rolling pin where it stiffened into a tube shape. Once it was plated, Mr. Ortiz urged me to karate-chop it, producing decadent cheese crisps for dipping into guacamole.
Topped with radish chunks and chopped cabbage and sprinkled with ground chile, the pozole — a dish Mr. Ortiz admitted was more elevated than average home cooking — became lighter and more complex at the table.
“It’s like throwing a dinner party,” he said. “You want something better than everyday.”
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