Tuscany Cooking Vacation
Looking for a Tuscany cooking vacation ?
Learn Tuscany cooking while having the time of your life on a dream vacation in Italy. All of the cooking classes in these Tuscan cooking vacations are 100% hands-on, done as a group of friends cooking together. Best of all, you live true Italian provincial life in the heart of Tuscany.
You will be cooking, dining, wining, relaxing, having fun throughout your vacation. During the week-long trip, you will learn some wonderful fresh recipes and techniques, and also make friends for life.
It’s the perfect way of learning to cook delicious food while discovering the provincial culture and cuisine on a Tuscany cooking vacation.
Available Tuscan Cooking Holidays:
Here is what we offer in our Tuscany cooking vacations:
- Learn to cook with 100% hands on cooking classes.
- Cooking lessons with Local Home Cooks.
- Cooking School with Michelin Star Chefs. (some itineraries)
- All Inclusive cooking vacation with included excursions every day whenever we are out of the kitchen.
- English speaking, Native Italian chefs and hosts.
- Small groups who speedily become dear friends.
- Organic farm-to-table ingredients used in all cooking classes, usually from our own farm.
- Small, hometown trattorias that are the best farm-to-table Italian food whenever we are eating out.
- Always the most authentic Italian food and wine
- Beautiful daily culinary excursions.
- All transportation.
- The Best Culinary Vacation in Italy
Like Visiting Family in Italy
We treat each guest like they are family. They discover the true Italy so few people truly experience. They live the passion for country cooking, food and wine, and regional cuisine in Tuscany which is at the heart of life in Italy.
The cooking vacations in Tuscany offer the enchanting experience of provincial Italian culture like no other vacation. They are personal and intimate, so we all become close friends. We live among the locals, shop with the villagers, explore like the Italians.
Excursions You Will Cherish Forever
Our Tuscany cooking vacations each offer four full Italian cooking classes during the week, focusing on authentic italian regional cuisine. When we are away from the kitchen, we always have something exciting and fun happening. We visit hamlets throughout Tuscany guests have always dreamed of. But we also go off the beaten path and introduce guests to our favorite hidden gems most tourists never experience.
These excursions are never about simply visiting a place. There is almost always a unique connection wherever we go. It may be a small, family-run winery in Tuscany where a delectable organic Brunello or Vino Nobile wine is made. It may be a visit to friends who run an antique olive oil mill where they still press olives into oil the way they did hundreds of years ago.
There is always a special reason for wherever we are going, and it always connects with the lifestyle in Tuscany, friends and family, and the culinary delicacies of this beautiful region of Italy.
About the Cooking Classes
Each Tuscany Cooking Vacation features four half-day cooking classes. They are not demonstrations. They are 100% hands on cooking classes. So get ready to roll up your sleeves and get wrist deep in making everything fresh, from scratch.
For those wishing to spend more time sipping wine and eating Italian food, you can participate in the cooking lessons to whatever extent your heart desires. Relax in the beautiful settings, take a stroll, or just enjoy the wonderful Italian countryside. Whether you are cooking or not, the time we spend during the cooking classes are always a highlight.
Depending on the Tuscan cooking vacation you choose, we may make fresh pappardelle pasta with home-made Bolognese sauce, Home-Made Ravioli, Tuscan Herb-Roasted Chicken, Country Wood-Fired Pizza, Eggplant Parmesan, Chicken Cacciatore, Fresh Ricotta Cheese, Home-Made Biscotti, Gelato, and much more.
Traditional Tuscan Culinary Delights
Even the meals that are not part of our cooking classes are uniquely special. After all, Tuscan cuisine is highlighted as one of the best in Italy, and the famous wine stands on its own.
Whenever possible, we select small, family-run trattorias where the ingredients came right out of their garden, and nonna is cooking in the kitchen. These are the places that are known to be the best in any given village or hamlet. The wine is always flowing during lunch and dinner, and we take pride in making sure that we're pairing the right dish with one of the wonderful local wines.
How Our Cooking Vacations in Tuscany are Different
There are many websites offering cooking and culinary vacations in Tuscany, and there are so many wonderful offerings. But each is different in their own way. The first big difference is that most of the websites you find are travel agencies that are offering a catalog of Italian cooking vacations that they are reselling. Usually, they have no idea what the experience will even be like. Culture Discovery is not an agency. When you are with us, you are with us.
You will likely be meeting the people you email or speak with. If you take all of those out, you only remain with a few. Many of those are actually hotels or restaurants that learned they could offer cooking vacations to fill their rooms or say their restaurant is a cooking school to fill tables. In other words, the cooking vacation is mostly to get you to buy their primary services. Cooking Vacations in Italy is how Culture Discovery started in 2006, and quickly grew to be the largest directly owned company of its kind in Italy. But there are a few others that are like this as well, and we really stand out in the details.
We are unique in that we look at our vacations like finely orchestrated concert from the moment you arrive, until the moment you leave. While others do cooking classes, provide accommodations, and may offer some excursions, we look at each vacation as a full experience. This is why our weeks are all-inclusive. We believe that the full experience is more about the Italian culture of family and friendship than anything else. So we start with that. Our goal is not just offer a cooking vacation or cooking school. It is to give you a full experience, so that when you leave, you will have made new life-long friends, and you will have experienced many things you never could have otherwise.
To do this, we make sure all of our meals outside of cooking classes are in small, family-run trattorias that are dear friends. When we go to wineries, you will see that there is a special bond between us and the winery. In fact, you will see that we spend more time introducing you to the winemaker than the wine. Our excursions are not "history tours", but they are excursions that bring you into the local living of Tuscany. And our cooking classes are all more like a group of friends and family cooking together for. party, than an academic class.
All of this weaves together into a dream experience that gives our guests a true sense of belonging that lasts long after the vacation itself, and this is why so many of our guests come back over and over... because they have truly become dear friends and extended family. It is not a marketing line, it is actually what we do, and why we love doing this.