What is a culinary tour of Morocco?

On a culinary tour the food is not a side note between sights — it is the spine of the trip. A typical day might start in a vegetable and spice market with a local cook, choosing produce, smelling cumin and ras el hanout fresh from the sack, then move to a riad rooftop or a private home to cook what you bought: a proper tagine slow-cooked in its conical pot, hand-rolled couscous, the sweet-savoury pigeon (or chicken) pastilla dusted with cinnamon and sugar. You eat what you make, and you leave actually able to recreate it.

Beyond the cooking classes, the magic is in the eating culture itself. We do street-food crawls through Marrakech — snail soup, grilled merguez, msemen pancakes, freshly fried sfenj doughnuts — and evening grazing in the Jemaa el-Fnaa food stalls. In Fes you trace the city’s more refined, layered cuisine; on the coast at Essaouira you eat grilled sardines straight off the boats. There are mint-tea ceremonies, argan and amlou tastings at women’s co-operatives, and, where we can arrange it, a meal shared in a family home, which is invariably the highlight.

It is a wonderfully social and sensory way to travel, and it self-selects lovely company — food-curious people tend to be open, generous travellers. The pace is gentler than a landscape-driven tour because you are lingering at tables and markets rather than racing between distant sights, and it works beautifully as a city-focused trip (Marrakech, Fes, Essaouira) or woven through a broader itinerary so each region’s distinct cooking comes through.

My honest guidance: a culinary tour is ideal for repeat visitors, couples, and anyone for whom a trip is half about what they ate. If you have dietary needs we plan around them easily — Moroccan cooking is naturally rich in vegetables, legumes and grains, so vegetarians eat very well. And tell me early if you want it food-led but still desert-and-mountains broad, versus a deep, slow dive into the markets and kitchens of one or two cities; both are wonderful, but they are quite different trips.