Culinary Travel – How-to and Secrets to Cooking Greek Food

Do you just love Greek food, and have you long wanted to get to know how to prepare some of the delicious dishes like Galaktoboureko or Moussaka? Why not combine your travel to Greece with a few days of culinary inspiration next to local Greek chefs? Cooking workshops are being organized all over Greece, where chefs are passing on secrets about Greek gastronomy and how to prepare local specialties.

List of cooking workshops in Greece

Ancient Cretan Diet

The Mediterranean Diet

The History of Greek Gastronomy

Culinary Vacation with Wine Tasting & Symposia

The Greek cuisine is an example of the healthy Mediterranean diet, featuring fresh ingredients such as fish, olives and olive oil, fruits, and vegetables. You will explore and taste traditional dishes of the Greek cuisine during your cooking lessons and the culture and natural beauty of Greece.

Cooking workshops in Greece

Greece is famous worldwide for its culinary tradition and delicious cuisine. You can learn the secret of Greek gastronomy if you take part in a cooking class during your holiday in Greece. Great local chefs will show you how to prepare some of the traditional recipes and simultaneously you will get to know the stories behind the local specialties.

Choose from the best cooking workshops in Athens, Crete, Corfu, Kea, Lefkada, Mykonos, Nafplio, Naxos, Parga, Poros, Rhodes and Santorini.

Aegean Flavours
Aegean Flavours is a tour designer company, specializing in culinary vacations and wine tours in Greece. A typical culinary tour includes picturesque Greek islands, cooking classes, winery visits, wine tastings, local restaurants, food artisans’ visits, cheese farms, olive oil producers and markets. Aegean Flavours organize culinary vacations in many Aegean Islands, in Crete as well as the Greek mainland.

Alternative Lefkada
Cooking classes, activities and Greek events

The Greek Kitchen – Athens
Join a seminar room in Athens and come out more confident in the kitchen. You’ll also have a lot of fun with the team of local, home cooks whose personalities are just as much a part of the experience as the food!

Athens Cooking Lessons
The flavours of Greece will come to life as you cook some of the most loved dishes in Greece. With expert guidance from a local cooking instructor, you will prepare a Greek Sunday dinner – then dine with your classmates under the majestic site of Acropolis.

CookinAthens
Cooking lessons in a spacious loft in the center of Athens

Onion Athens
Hands-on cooking and food experience combined with a fun party environment.

Chania Gastronomy Tours
The best way to learn about Cretan gastronomy is to explore it with your senses.

Cretan Cooking Classes
Based on authentic recipes and fresh Cretan ingredients you will learn to create healthy dishes. This is a cooking class for any level of experience, with hands-on experience at individual working stations and recipes from Crete and the Mediterranean.

Cretan Gastronomy Center
Founded by the Region of Crete, the Cretan Gastronomy Center is to be found in Argiroupoli Village near Rethymno. Its aim is to promote Cretan Gastronomy through educational and evidence-based programs for children and adults.
Find Cretan traditional recipes here

Handpicked Greece
Vacations and workshops in Crete – cooking, wine tasting, beekeeping, olive picking, artisan cosmetics and more. The choice is yours.

Kea Artisanal
Kea Artisanal introduces visitors to the Mediterranean way of eating, entertaining, and living in Kea, Cyclades

Liza’s Corfu Cooking Classes
This is 100% hands on cooking class. You will acquire the skills to cook some traditional Greek dishes in the comfort of Liza’s home.

Mykonian Spiti & Farm
Cooking classes, cooking demonstrations and traditional lunch and dinner

To Vassiliko Naxos
Cooking lessons and traditional tavern in Naxos

Platia Naxos
Cooking classes and traditional tavern in Naxos

Vioma Naxos
Cooking lessons, food tasting and cultural events will take place all year round in chosen areas of Naxos, enabling visitors to familiarize with the natural wealth of the island.

Paragaea Olive Oil Factory
Guided tours & olive oil tastings are offered, for the visitors to explore every step of the olive production and the secrets of oil. True hands-on activities are also available; The Cooking Experience, an afternoon spent being a member of a greek family and preparing a 6-course dinner of typical Greek plates to share in the end of a Paragaea wine tasting.

Santorini Gastronomy
Cooking lessons combined with local delicacies and culture

Petra Kouzina Santorini
Cooking lessons informal and relaxed, with a balance of professional and home-style culinary experience.

Selene Cooking Classes
Cooking & tasting classes in Santorini

Katerina’s Kouzina
Greek Cooking Workshop in Poros Island

Greek Cooking Odyssey
In Poros Island, Argo Saronic Region

Land Life Travel
Cooking classes in Nafplio – experience Greek nature and traditions

Ancient Cretan Diet

Excavations at Azoria in mountainous Crete, reveal a 3,000-year-old diet and its surprising connection to early Greek city life.
Research undertaken by archaeologist Donald C. Haggis of the University of North Carolina.

The Mediterranean Diet

The Mediterranean diet is a modern nutritional recommendation inspired by the traditional dietary patterns of southern Italy, Crete and much of the rest of Greece in the 1960s. The principal aspects of this diet include high olive oil consumption, high consumption of legumes, high consumption of unrefined cereals, high consumption of fruits, high consumption of vegetables, moderate consumption of dairy products (mostly as cheese and yogurt), moderate to high consumption of fish, low consumption of meat and meat products, and moderate wine consumption. Olive oil is particularly characteristic of the Mediterranean diet.

The history of Greek gastronomy

The Greek gastronomy has a long history, going all the way back to Ancient Greece, through Roman times and medieval Europe. The four pillars of Greece’s culinary culture are: cheese, wine, honey, and olive oil, deeply rooted in the collective gastronomic consciousness of all Greeks. The terrain and climate in Greece are perfect for producing wine. Flavors and colors of Greek wines are distinctive, explaining the development of appellations of origin.

Still today, ancient recipes of aromatic and old spiced wines survive in ouzo and mastíha, where spirits are flavoured with aniseed and mastic, and wine flavoured with a scent of pine resin is an ancestor of retsina today.

Olive oil, honey, mastic, saffron (Krokos Kozanis) together with sea food form part of the Mediterranean diet today. The multitude health benefits of these are all well known as are their cosmetic skin care benefits. For more than a decade apitherapy, vinotherapy and mastic therapy have been used in anti-aging cosmetic treatments as well as in spas.

Culinary vacation with wine tasting and Symposia

So go on a culinary vacation in Greece; visit the winelands and taste the great Greek wines and have a seat at one of the tables for Symposia, where sweets, nuts and fruit accompany the wine – just like it is depicted on vases from Ancient Greece.