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On our small group Explorations tours, you can expect a deep dive into the culture of your destination. These tours are truly for curious travellers who want to see their destination in a different light. Explorations tours often bring our travellers face-to-face with unique experiences they would be hard-pressed to find on their own.
Some of our favourite foodie inclusions on these immersive tours offer a chance to get hands-on in the preparation of your food and drink. Here’s three of our favourite culinary experiences on tour:
Preparing Tagine in Morocco
On our Colours of Morocco tour, travellers head to a training center that empowers disadvantaged women with restaurant training and culinary job placement. The support of this non-profit training center makes this culinary inclusion extra fulfilling, because it’s also an Impact Moment!
Alongside the women at the training center in Marrakech, travellers gather fresh vegetables and herbs to prepare tagine – a traditional Moroccan dish. Tagine is slow cooked in a dish that’s also called a tagine. It has a low circular base and a large cone shaped lid. That lid assures that your food will remain moist, as trapped liquid will trickle back down. The meal is typically a savoury stew and a bonus – this meal is prefaced by a traditional Moroccan mint tea ceremony to provide an amazing mixture of flavours.
Taking Part in a Green Tea Ceremony in Japan
On our brand-new Japan: Past & Present tour, you can learn the art of the Japanese tea ceremony firsthand in Tokyo. Preparing the perfect matcha can be a daunting task, as can all of the steps in the ceremony! The tools like the tea scoop, bowl and whisk are just as important as the etiquette behind each step.
Cleansing one’s hands and the equipment, properly greeting and welcoming guests into the tea room, and even drinking from the bowl a certain way are a part of this culturally-rich ritual. You will leave the ceremony having taken part in something steeped in history; the tea ceremony as we know it now dates back 800 years. Keep an eye out for yummy sweets during the ceremony, too! They’re often shaped like flowers and prepared from a sweetened red bean paste.
Making Homemade Pasta with a Chef in Italy
Having fresh pasta in Italy is absolutely a bucket list item and preparing it alongside a chef would only make that experience sweeter. On our Best of Italy tour, travellers get to do just that, in the backdrop of the amazing Romagna Countryside. Two pasta shapes that are typical in this region are garganelli and strozzapreti. Garganelli is a cylindrical pasta with sharp ends like that of a quill. The pasta is made from square shapes of dough set on a board with ridges in a diamond formation. The dough is then wrapped around a dowel while pressed against the board. Strozzapreti is a twisted, long pasta shell that looks like a tube. This pasta is typically prepared without eggs, and one myth behind its name (which translates to “priest strangler”) says it was the hope of some too poor to buy eggs that noble, wealthy priests would choke on the elongated simple flour and water-based pasta.
