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Daily Classes In Mediterranean Cuisine from the Heart of Andalusia
Recommended by the Miami Herald
Mediterranean Cookery, 4-day program, starting December 26, 2006, January 4, January
18, March 22, April 5, 2007 including visits to food markets, Renaissance palaces, olive culture museum, and culinary
school degustacion
Sephardic Cuisine, starting January 11, 2007 including a tour of the Alhambra Palace
Mediterranean Wine School: March 29, April 12, May 3, 2007
| Teaching Kitchen and Unique Cave Pantry |
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| Casa Azahar, Albaycin, Granada, Spain |
The Mediterranean Cooking School is located in the upper Albaycin district of Granada, the historic Arab neighborhood
across the Dauro River from the Alhambra Palace.
The School focuses on the cookery of the Mediterranean basin, a style that has given shape to what is known as the Mediterranean
diet and has produced such wonderful variations as the cuisine of Genova, Provence, and Istanbul. Your instructors have over
decades travelled, lived, and cooked throughout the region, based in Granada, Spain since 2002. Their voyages have included
nearly all of Italy, Mediterranean France, Corsica, Istanbul, Morocco, and the Spanish coast. They are members of the Italian-based
Slow Food Movement and are among only a handful of North Americans inducted into the French Cheesemakers Guild.
The Cooking School features a spacious and well-appointed teaching kitchen with 2 5-burner Bosch cooking stations, a
unique cave-pantry that includes a pastry production area, and beautiful Goa Verde granite countertops. Outside the kitchen
door is delightful Andalusian courtyard, surrounded by mutliple terraces with views of the Alhambra, Sierra Nevada mountains,
and Generalife summer palace.
Your cooking vacation includes time for visiting the Alhambra and other historic sites in Granada, as well as raoming
the enchanting Albaycin. Day trips may include visits to wineries in the Malaga or Montilla (Cordoba) regions, to the olive
groves of Jaen province and its Museum of Olive Culture, and stops to experience the wonderful cooking of the Hotel School
at Baeza, which is itself a gem of a Renaissance city and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Casa Azahar also boasts spacious apartments, where cooking school participants may choose to stay for multi-day
cooking vacations.
Chef-instructors Vaughn Perret and Charles Leary have lived in Granada since 2002 when not cooking and teaching at Trout
Point Lodge of Nova Scotia and the Inn at Coyote Mountain in Costa Rica.
Caves
A unique aspect of the Cooking School and Casa Azahar are the property's cave dwellings. Cave living has existed since
Roman and Arab times in Andalusia and specifically in Granada, where the entire neighborhood of Sacromonte consists of cave
houses. The house at Calle San Luis No. 12 was once the center of a large Morisco Carmen (extended house with gardens) that
was made up in large part of cave rooms.
Casa Azahar has a completely renovated 2-bedroom Casa Cueva (cave house) and a large cave kitchen as part of the Mediterranean
Cooking School. The caves maintain an even and pleasant temperature, block out unwanted noise, and are completely eco-friendly.
The walls are treated with a white limestone wash, which provides a bright and airy environment. These are hard clay caves,
hand-dug over centuries.
Part of your experience at the Mediterranean will be working (and perhaps living) in the caves, where we have work counters,
age cheese, cellar wine, hams, and embutidos.
To read an article on cave living written by the chef-instructors, click on the link below.
| The Kitchen Cave |
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| Making dough |
Down to Earth Living
| Built-in Wine Cellar |
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| The Kitchen Cave |
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The Mediterranean Cooking School of Granada, Spain offers daily classes in Mediterranean cookery using fresh local ingredients
of the highest quality. Learn the intricacies of this delicious style of cooking in a specially-designed teaching kitchen
at Casa Azahar, in the historic Arab quarter of Granada.
Instructors Charles L. Leary, Ph.D. and Vaughn J. Perret, co-authors of the Trout Point Lodge Cookbook: Creole Cuisine
from New Orleans to Nova Scotia (Random House), teach using boths hands-on instruction in a fully-equipped kithcen
as well as demonstration of techniques. The course also covers ingredients, market trips, and hikes into San Miguel
Park to learn about wild Mediterranean herbs.
The School also hosts food market walking tours during the mornings and wine and food tastings in the evenings on the
School's several outdoor terraces with vistas of the Alhambra Palace, mountains, and Albaycin.
| Casa Cueva Vacation Rental |
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| The Dining Room |
| The Mediterranean Sea |
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| Granada Cooking School teaches culinary techniques from Italy and France to Spain and Turkey |
The steaming Amazonian forests and the ice-crags of Jan Mayen appeal since yesterday to our catholic taste; but
whoever takes the antique point of view will still accord the palm to the Mediterranean. Here, true beauty resides with its
harmony of form and hue--here the works of man stand out in just relation to those of nature, each supplementing the other.
. . . Here, too, an ancient world, our ancient world, lies spread out in rare charm of colour and outline, and every footstep
is fraught with memories.
Norman Douglas, Siren Land
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"SPAIN: WHAT'S COOKIN'
The Mediterranean Cooking School opened earlier this month in the Albaycin district of Granada, the historic
Arab neighborhood across the Dauro River from the Alhambra Palace. The school offers 3- and 4-day culinary vacations, walking
food market tours, and food and wine tastings from within the ancient Arab district. Your well-traveled hosts -- Daniel Abel,
Vaughn Perret and Charles Leary -- are also the proprietors of Trout Point Lodge in Nova Scotia and the Inn at Coyote Mountain
in Costa Rica. The school offers rental apartments, including a cave house that dates back more than 800 years. Oh, and part
of the kitchen is in a cave as well."
Charles Buhman, Miami Herald, April 30, 2006
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