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.
