Turkish Cooking Class Chef Experience

Most visitors eat Turkish food for a week in Antalya and fly home without knowing what went into any of it. This class fixes that by putting you on the buying side of the counter first, and only then behind the stove.

The session opens with a bazaar walk to choose the ingredients you will actually use — the herbs, the long green peppers, the sheep-milk yoghurt that behaves nothing like the supermarket version at home. Turkish cooking rests on produce grown close by, and a market stall makes that obvious in a way no sentence does. Your guide translates, points out what is in season, and explains what you are looking at before it ends up in your basket.

Back in the kitchen you prepare four or five traditional dishes hands-on: a spread of meze, a kebab, baklava, and Turkish coffee brewed slowly in a cezve. Nothing is demonstrated at you from across a counter. You chop, you brush the pastry sheets, you learn why the syrup goes on cold when the baklava comes out hot. The group stays small, so everyone gets real bench space rather than a view of somebody else's.

Lunch is the food you just made, served properly at a table instead of tasted standing up. The recipes go home with you written out, which is the difference between a nice afternoon and a dish you still cook next winter.

• Pickup and drop-off at your hotel door in air-conditioned transport — no meeting point to find in an unfamiliar city.
• Entrance fees, bottled water and insurance are covered.
• The booking is held as a full-day slot although the cooking block itself runs shorter, so the market and the meal are never rushed.

Wear something you do not mind getting flour on, and closed shoes for the kitchen. The bazaar part is outdoors, so a hat helps in summer. If anyone in your group avoids meat or has an allergy, say so at booking rather than at the market — the menu is easy to adjust in advance and awkward to adjust with a basket already full.