2-Day Beijing Culinary Journey: Peking Duck, Dumplings & Hutong Flavours

Morning - A market walk for the day's ingredients
Start at a neighbourhood wet market with your guide, where the morning's vegetables, freshwater fish and dried spices are laid out on the stalls. Your guide explains the ingredients behind northern Chinese cooking - the wheat rather than rice staples, the vinegar and sesame, and the pickles that carry a Beijing winter - and you buy what the workshop needs.

Lunch - Peking duck at a time-honoured restaurant
Beijing kaoya is roasted in a hung oven over fruitwood, which gives the skin its lacquered colour and the faint scent of smoke. The bird is carved at the table into thin slices, and you eat it the Beijing way: a slice of skin first, dipped in sugar, then meat and skin together with spring onion, cucumber and sweet bean sauce rolled inside a paper-thin pancake. The restaurant tradition runs back to the 1860s, when Qianmen's duck houses first built their reputation on a single dish.

Afternoon - Dumpling workshop
In a courtyard kitchen you learn jiaozi from the dough up: mixing and resting the flour, rolling the wrappers with a small wooden pin so the edges are thinner than the centre, and folding the pleats that let the dumpling stand upright in the steamer. Fillings include pork and cabbage, egg and chive, and a vegetarian option. Boiled, steamed and pan-fried versions are all tasted, and you take the recipe card home.

Evening - Hutong tea and a night walk
Close the day with a short tea tasting - jasmine, pu'er and a light green - then walk back through the lanes as the neighbourhood settles for the evening.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.

Morning - Breakfast the Beijing way
Beijing breakfast is a street business. At a corner stall your guide orders jianbing, the savoury crepe spread with egg and brushed with fermented bean sauce, wrapped around a sheet of crisp fried dough; then baozi steamed in bamboo tiers, and a bowl of warm soy milk. You eat standing, as the neighbourhood does, and learn what each stall is known for.

Mid-morning - Hutong snack crawl
Walk a stretch of old lanes and taste your way through the morning: candied haws (tanghulu) strung on bamboo, sesame balls, sweet pea-flour cakes, and luzhu - a slow-braised stew of pork, tofu and offal that has been a Beijing breakfast staple for generations. Your guide explains which snacks came from the imperial kitchens and which began as cheap food for carters and workers.

Lunch - Noodles and dumplings in a family restaurant
Zhajiangmian, the thick wheat noodles with fermented soybean sauce, is the northern answer to a bowl of pasta. It is served with shredded cucumber and radish and eaten after a brisk mix at the table.

Afternoon - Markets, tea and douzhi
Continue to a food market where you compare dried goods, sauces and preserved vegetables, and try douzhi - fermented mung-bean milk, sour and slightly fizzy, which locals either love or cannot finish.

Evening - Dinner on a snack street
Finish along a night food street with grilled skewers, griddled dumplings and Beijing-style yoghurt, choosing your own dishes with the guide's help.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.