Georgian Cooking Tour

We meet you at Tbilisi airport and settle you into your room in Old Tbilisi. In the late afternoon your guide, who is also a keen cook, walks you through Kala to a basement bakery where the baker slaps long, pointed shoti loaves onto the hot wall of a round tone oven and pulls them out with a hook. Taste one warm, the standard Tbilisi street snack. Dinner is at a family restaurant where your guide orders a spread to introduce the flavours you will be cooking all week: pkhali with walnut and coriander, badrijani, ajapsandali, a pot of lobio with mchadi cornbread, and grilled mtsvadi. Over the meal you learn the names of the herbs and spices that turn up in nearly everything, from blue fenugreek to dried marigold.

Go early to the Dezerter Bazaar near the railway station, Tbilisi's biggest food market, named after deserters who sold their kit there in the 1920s. Your guide helps you shop for the day's class: minced beef and pork, onions, bunches of coriander and dill, and a bag of khmeli suneli spice. Taste sulguni and Imeretian cheese, jonjoli pickles and dried fruit along the way. Then drive to a home kitchen in the Vake district, where a local cook teaches you to roll khinkali dough thin, season the filling with cold water so it turns to broth, and twist the top into tight pleats. You also make a quick nigvziani badrijani. Eat your khinkali the proper way, by hand, sipping the broth first. The rest of the afternoon is free.

Leave Tbilisi for Kakheti, Georgia's main wine region, and stop at Bodbe Monastery above the Alazani Valley before checking in at a family guesthouse outside Sighnaghi. After lunch the hosts show you how to make churchkhela: threading walnut halves on cotton string, then dipping them again and again into tatara, grape juice boiled down and thickened with flour, until they look like knobbly candles. They hang for days to dry, so you take home a string made earlier. Next comes the cellar, the marani, where clay qvevri are buried up to their necks in the floor. The father of the family explains how grapes ferment with skins and stems for months, and you taste his Rkatsiteli and Saperavi straight from the jar.

Spend the morning helping the family prepare a feast. Pick herbs in the garden, knead dough for khachapuri and mould mchadi, grill pork mtsvadi over vine cuttings and stir a pot of chakapuli (spring lamb with tarragon and tkemali plums) or chakhokhbili, chicken with tomato and herbs, depending on the season. In the afternoon walk the walls and lanes of Sighnaghi, built under King Erekle II in the 18th century, with the Caucasus on the horizon. By evening neighbours and relatives arrive and the supra begins. The tamada leads a fixed order of toasts: to peace, to Georgia, to parents, to those who are no longer here. You drink from horns or small bowls and learn a toast or two to give yourself. Expect polyphonic songs as the night goes on, and pace yourself.

A long but scenic day takes you west across the country, past Tbilisi and over the low Rikoti Pass that divides eastern and western Georgia. Stop at Surami for nazuki, a sweet cinnamon bread baked in roadside tone ovens, and look out for the stacks of clay pots for sale in the village of Shrosha. By late afternoon you reach Kutaisi, the capital of Imereti. A local family welcomes you to their kitchen, where you make fresh Imeretian cheese from curds, then use it in khachapuri, the round, closed bread that most Georgians treat as the standard version. You also prepare pkhali from beetroot leaves and a bowl of Imeretian kharcho. Supper is what you cooked, with a glass of Tsolikouri or Otskhanuri Sapere.

Drive an hour west into Samegrelo, a region known across Georgia for food that is rich, spicy and generous with cheese. Begin at Martvili Monastery on its hilltop, then head to a farmhouse kitchen in a nearby village. Your hosts make ghomi, a thick cornmeal porridge, and you beat lumps of sulguni into it until it stretches to elarji. Next comes gebzhalia, rolls of mint-flavoured cheese in a creamy sauce, then Megrelian khachapuri, which is like the Imeretian round but covered with a second layer of melted cheese. Expect red adjika on the table, the hot Megrelian chilli paste. After lunch take a walk or a short boat ride in the Martvili canyon to settle the meal before returning to Kutaisi.

Before leaving Kutaisi, browse the Green Bazaar in the centre, a good place to stock up on spices, tklapi fruit leather, Megrelian adjika and dried herbs to take home. Your guide shows you what to look for and how to pack it for a flight. Then visit Bagrati Cathedral, built in the 11th century on a hill above the Rioni, for a last look at the town. Lunch is at a Kutaisi restaurant where you can compare their khachapuri with the one you made. In the afternoon drive back to Tbilisi, arriving in the early evening, or take a short transfer to Kutaisi airport if you are flying out from there. We send everyone home with printed recipes from each class.