Morning - buying the ingredients
A Sichuan dish is decided in the shopping, not in the pan. The class starts at a wholesale spice and dry-goods market, where your teacher walks you through the ingredients that carry the flavour: dried chillies in three or four grades, Sichuan peppercorn, Pixian fermented broad-bean paste aged two years or more, black cardamom, bay leaf, star anise, cassia and fennel. You smell and taste as you go, so that by the end of the aisle you can tell a chilli that provides aroma from one that provides heat, and understand why the same dish can taste completely different in two restaurants a street apart.
Midday - the class
In a teaching kitchen set up for six to twelve people, with an English-speaking instructor and a kitchen hand for each pair of guests, you cook three dishes, taking turns at the wok.
Laziji is Chongqing's own: cubes of chicken, marinated and fried twice, then tossed in a wokful of dried chillies and peppercorn so numerous that the classic joke is that you are searching for the chicken. The dish comes from Gele Mountain inside the city. The technique you learn is controlling the oil temperature - the first fry cooks, the second crisps, and both are hopeless if the oil is wrong.
Maoxuewang, "blood curd with tripe and more", is kitchen-sink Sichuan: duck blood curd, tripe, luncheon meat, soybean sprouts, wood-ear, all blanched and then drowned at the table in boiling chilli-and-tallow broth. It is technically a stew assembled backwards, and it teaches the last piece of the grammar - building a base and finishing it with hot oil.
Dan dan noodles comes from the wider Sichuan canon rather than from Chongqing itself, and it is the simplest of the three: a sauce of chilli oil, sesame paste, soy, peppercorn powder and preserved vegetables, with the noodles and the meat crumb added on top. It is also the dish guests cook again at home, so the class ends with it.
Lunch
You eat what you cooked, with rice and a clear soup from the kitchen. The restaurant's own version of each dish is served alongside yours, so the difference is obvious and instructive. A mild portion of every dish is prepared by the kitchen in parallel for anyone who wants it.
Afternoon - notes and recipes
The class finishes with printed English recipe cards scaled for home kitchens, a list of the ingredients and where to buy them outside China, and a sealed jar of the base you made if you want to carry it home. Classes run in English and are designed for complete beginners; knife work and wok stands are adapted for left-handed cooks on request.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.
