MEXICO
Oaxaca City 2023 - Day 4 - Cooking Class
So continuing off of Day 4 - Part 1, we had just wrapped up at the cultural museum and it was time to meet my fellow tourists for our cooking class. Justin was supposed to tag along but he wasn’t feeling well so I was going in solo.
I thought I wanted a snack first (which was a HUGE mistake) so I had a mushroom taco at Empanadas by Carmen. The empanadas there looked gigantic and I just wanted to tide myself over for the car ride. But of course the lesson I still hadn’t learned was even a small taco is incredibly filling and not the right thing to eat right before a cooking class.
At any rate I had a coffee to kill time at Brujula Cafe and then Justin dropped me off with my class group.
So the cooking class we did was Traditional Oaxacan cooking class by Sonia Silvia and we booked through Airbnb. Justin had done it before on his last trip to Oaxaca and loved it (sensing a theme?) but a decent amount had changed in the intervening few years.
We had a super fun group composition with folks from the UK, several from San Francisco and one lone gal from Denver. A few of them were professional cooks in their own right who came to Oaxaca to check out the cuisine. They were super fun to hang out although I do tend to get shy in groups of new people.
A driver took us to the actual grounds of the class which was on this gorgeous ranch.
This local cat wasn’t being cooperative about letting me take pictures.
Then the actual course began. They fed us and gave us mezcal to start. They were incredibly generous with the mezcal, beer and appetizers but I sensed correctly that I’d need to pace myself to make it through the multiple hours we’d be there.
Look at all this mezcal! They had infusions of all different kinds and all the different types of mezcal.
We also sampled a bunch of common Oaxacan appetizers including spiced fruits and nuts as well as insects like chapuline (grasshoppers) and ants. I barely was able to get myself to eat the ant but once I convinced my brain to let me, it was actually really good.
At this point we were up and about and listening carefully while Baldo explained the hows and whys of various foods. So my pictures are a little sparse.
This was a provided course of fried cactus, fruit salad, cheese and homemade tortilla.
Already full and feeling like I was in big trouble, it was time to get to work ourselves!
We manned the metates to grind ingredients down for mole. The motion is a little hard to get down, it’s sort of like rolling the throttle on a motorcycle. It’s not only incredibly time consuming but requires a ton of materials. A huge bunch of leaves and chiles grind down into a small amount of paste.
We were working on both green mole and black mole on these metates. The black mole requires chocolate which means the stone is kept warm to melt the chocolate into a paste.
We also worked with tortilla presses to make tortillas for empanadas and tostadas. You can see mine has a P on it for my name so I’d eat the right one later.
We also made salsa with a molcahete (or mortar and pestle) but I didn’t get any pictures.
I learned a ton and worked surprisingly hard! It was so satisfying to eat the food I helped make.
The final course we didn’t make but it was delicious and a nice wrap up. Although I don’t think I’ve ever been so full in my life.
They were also kind enough to wrap up some cake for Justin to eat since he had to miss the class. Baldo, Sonia and the rest of the staff were so wonderful! I highly recommend this.