Barcelona Cooking Class with Locals

Barcelona Cooking Class (+ Gazpacho Recipe)

A Barcelona cooking class is the best way to learn to cook tapas. Even better, you can learn to cook Spanish food from locals who live in Barcelona. We’re about the reveal Barcelona’s best cooking class…

Eating out is a huge part of the culture in Barcelona. The city is full of plazas and squares where friends meet for wine and tapas, and talk until the midnight hour. Most locals don’t even consider actually eating dinner until 9pm or later. Instead, Catalonians go bar-hopping in the evening and eat a different tapa at each stop.

For us early-eating Brits, a late dinner time can come as quite a shock. But it feels good to take your time, meet up for a drink, snack on tapas and unwind at the end of the day. After a while, Luke and I came to love it.

Barcelona cooking class with Barcelona Slow Travel - chopping coriander - Charlie on Travel

A Slow Travel Cooking Class in Barcelona

We found an amazing slow travel Barcelona cooking class. Unlike ordinary cooking classes, this cooking class merges concepts of slow food and slow travel. The cooking class uses locally sourced food, you learn to cook regional dishes, and you meet and share food (and local wine!) with local people.

Slow travel is an off-shoot of the slow food movement. The slow food movement advocates supporting local farmers by eating local produce and preserving regional dishes. Slow travel works off the same values. It’s about taking time to appreciate local culture and traditions, meet local people and enjoy everyday life in a new country.

Our slow travel cooking class in Barcelona wasn’t in a cookery school or restaurant. Instead, it we cooked in the apartment of a young local couple called Guillermo and Cristina. Cristina grew up in Barcelona and learned to cook traditional Spanish family recipes. Guillermo is Swiss-French and came to Barcelona to study. After falling in love with the local culture and Cristina, he never left.

What better way to learn to cook local food than in a Barcelona cooking class that embraces slow travel? I was in love with this concept.

Barcelona cooking class with Barcelona Slow Travel - Cristina and Guillermo small - Charlie on Travel

Cooking Vegetarian Tapas in Barcelona

Our Barcelona cooking class had a total of ten would-be chefs. They hailed from the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. We sat around the table, chatted and got to know each other over a glass of vermouth. Luke and I were excited to learn some vegetarian tapas recipes from Barcelona locals!

The table was full with fresh produce. We chopped, peeled and prepped around the table together. There were organic carrots, courgettes, golden mushrooms, tomatoes, and bunches of fresh coriander. The ingredients were locally-sourced. From the organic vegetables and olive oil, right down to the flavour-infused salts. We’ve never seen such a luscious array of food in a cooking class!

Love the sound of this class? Book onto a slow travel Barcelona cooking class here.

Barcelona Cooking Class Menu

The food that we cooked and wine we drank was delicious. The recipes were simple and fresh, and there was no rush. On the menu:

Vermouth — Guillermo and Cristina kicked off the evening by pouring everyone a glass of vermouth. They added that in Barcelona, vermut is the traditional local drink. While you can order a glass of sangria in restaurants and bars across the city, sangria actually hails from further south.

Pan con Tomate — The most simple of the dishes in our Barcelona cooking class! We halved fresh tomatoes and rubbed the flesh across crusty white bread. We drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt. Though the process sounds simple, the flavours were extraordinary. Fresh, local ingredients are the best! Everyone was surprised to see Luke and I also pop the smushed tomato skins in our mouths – that’s apparently not the way they do it in Barcelona!

Fig Salad — September in Barcelona is fig season and I went mad for them. I had them with yoghurt for breakfast every morning, and then as a snack every afternoon. I was delighted that they turned up in a salad medley with carrots and courgettes too.

Gazpacho — This refreshing, cold tomato soup is popular in Spain. When it’s tomato season, they have more ripe tomatoes than they know what to do with. Families make gazpacho and keep it in the fridge, drinking it throughout the day. You can check out Cristina’s family recipe at the end of this post.

Pimientos — These little, sweet green peppers are flash fried. They’re tossed over a hot flame until they make a crackling noise. I wasn’t so great at the tossing technique!

Local wine — No Spanish meal is complete without a few glasses of wine. Well, quite a few actually. And our Barcelona cooking class was no exception! We sampled delicious red and white wines with each course.

Forget the food, just want to taste some local wine? Try out the Barcelona wine tour they run too.

Guillermo and Cristina were happy to adapt the cooking class so that we had plenty of vegetarian tapas to eat. Meat eaters did get to sample local sausages, salted cod and baby squid. They also run vegan-friendly cooking classes.

Want to learn to cook these amazing vegetarian tapas yourself? Book onto a slow travel Barcelona cooking class here.

What We Learned from the Slow Travel Cooking Class

After the meal, Guillermo explained what slow travel meant to him and Cristina:

“Slow travel is a way of doing things. It’s about having local experiences, meeting local people and getting to know the culture. You don’t need lots of time to travel slowly, you can take it easy and immerse yourself in a place even if you just have three days there.”

Guillermo and Cristina discovered their passion for slow travel while travelling in South East Asia. They reminisced about their best travel memories. They weren’t memories sightseeing. Instead they were experiences which they shared around the dinner table with locals. They wanted to bring those slow travel experiences to travellers in Barcelona. That’s why they set up their own Barcelona cooking classes at Barcelona Slow Travel.

A slow travel cooking class is much more intimate experience than cooking or eating in a restaurant. Local food is at the centre, but it’s about the experience. In the cooking class, you get to know local people, try regional foods and wines, and understand where the food that you’re eating has come from.

Update May 2018: Guillermo and Cristina are expanding Barcelona Slow Travel and now organise more slow travel experiences in Barcelona with locals. Their new partner Nuria, another passionate local chef, runs cooking classes in her apartment in the centre of Barcelona just like the cooking class described in this post.

Recipe: Cristina’s Family’s Gazpacho

Ingredients: 
1 cucumber, 8 mature tomatoes, half an onion, 1 garlic clove, 1 green pepper
Extra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper, dry bread, balsamic vinegar
 
Preparation: 
Remove the yellow/green part in the middle of the garlic clove. 
Wash and prepare all of the ingredients. 
Allow the bread to soak for a few minutes in the vinegar. 
Peel the tomatoes and the cucumber. 
Mix all the ingredients together, add 1 cup of water, a pinch of salt and pepper and 20cl of olive oil then blend. Season according to taste. 
Refrigerate and serve when cool.