Cooking Class in Crete: What to Expect and How to Book

A cooking class in Crete means a few hours in a home, farm or restaurant kitchen, cooking traditional Cretan dishes with a local host and then eating the meal you made. Most classes run 2 to 4 hours, cost roughly €60 to €120 ($65 to $130, £52 to £104) per adult, and sit in or near Chania, and you book them directly with the host or through a tour marketplace.

I hate to cook. I really do. But I love to eat, and that is how I ended up rolling dough in a Cretan woman’s kitchen in Chania, on the island of Crete, Greece. What follows is the inside of one of these classes: who taught it, what we cooked, what surprised me, and what I would check before booking one now.

What a cooking class in Crete involves

A cooking class in Crete involves preparing several traditional dishes with a Cretan host and then sitting down to eat them together. The class is as much a meal as a lesson, and on Crete the meal is the point.

The features most classes share are listed below.

• Length: length is 2 to 4 hours for most classes, with short single-dish workshops at the lower end.
• Cost: cost is roughly €60 to €120 ($65 to $130, £52 to £104) per adult, and several places charge a reduced rate for children.
• Group size: group size is usually small, so you are cooking rather than watching from the back.
• Dishes: dishes usually number four to six, covering a pie or pastry, a salad and a main course.
• What is included: included are the ingredients, written recipes to take home and the meal itself, often with local wine and bread.
• Extras: extras at some classes include cheese making or an olive oil tasting.

Where to take a cooking class in Crete

Most cooking classes in Crete are based in and around Chania, at the western end of the island. Chania’s old town and the villages behind it, Vamos in the Apokoronas hills among them, hold the largest concentration, and Rethymno, Heraklion and eastern villages such as Kritsa near Agios Nikolaos have their own.

Book a class near where you are sleeping. Chania and Heraklion sit roughly 140 km (87 mi) apart on the north-coast road, so a class at the wrong end of the island turns an afternoon into a whole day, and you will have wine with the meal you cooked.

Meeting our local teacher

Our teacher was Maria, a Cretan woman who gave cooking classes in the Chania house she was born in. Maria had not always lived there: she moved to Athens for a while and then came back, and she told us that Chania and that house would always be home.

Her class is no longer running, so read the rest of this as a picture of what a Cretan home kitchen class is like rather than a booking you can copy.

We turned up at her door as the sun was setting on our first night on the island. The group was Jennifer from Moi, mes souliers, Amanda from MarocMama, Erin from Explore with Erin and me. Some of it was what I had pictured: plenty of olive oil, ingredients bought that week, food that tasted of itself. Most of it was not, and I could tell within about five minutes.

The cooking experience

The cooking experience was less a class than an afternoon of helping in someone’s kitchen. I had pictured a room of identical stoves, each of us making the same Cretan recipes to Maria’s instructions. Instead we sat in Maria’s own kitchen, surrounded by bottles of olive oil and jars of condiments, preparing ingredients for her while she worked the stove and the oven.

That suited me. I watched and took photographs while the others cut, cleaned and arranged potatoes, zucchini and mint. Only near the end did anyone decide I should cook some of my own dinner, at which point I was handed the dough and put in charge of rolling it. Rolling dough by hand is heavy on the arms, and I have respected cooks more ever since.

Did you know the Ancient Greeks ate their meals lying down? There are plenty more fun facts about Greece where that one came from.

Our Greek dishes

We made four dishes: a zucchini and cheese pie, a Greek salad, lamb in egg-lemon sauce and spanakopita triangles. Each one is a traditional Cretan or Greek recipe you will meet again on taverna menus across the island.

Zucchini and Greek cheese pie

The zucchini and Greek cheese pie took most of the class. It is built in a baking dish as a layer of sliced potatoes and then alternating layers of Greek cheese, mint and zucchini.

Nothing went in raw and whole. Erin sliced the zucchini into near-identical millimetre-thin rounds, which then sat in a bowl of salt to draw the water out and were squeezed dry before they went anywhere near the dish. The mint was cut just as fine. The cheese was crumbled over each layer, and it was not feta: it looked like feta but was much softer, the way Crete’s fresh white cheeses behave, mizithra and anthotyro among them. Jennifer filled the dish, the whole thing was drizzled with olive oil, and it went into the oven for an hour. It came out under a cheesy crust.

The Greek salad

A Greek salad is tomato, cucumber, feta, red onion, olives and a lot of olive oil. Maria added a little green pepper, which the bowl needed more than I expected it to.

We made it as a side rather than a course, to eat alongside the zucchini pie and the lamb. That is how it usually appears on a Greek table: not a starter you finish before the food arrives, but a bowl that stays there for the whole meal.

Lamb with egg-lemon sauce

Lamb with egg-lemon sauce is lamb finished in avgolemono, the egg and lemon sauce used all over Greek cooking. Maria had lamb chops for us, and none of us had made the sauce before.

The trick is temperature. You beat the eggs with lemon juice, then add the hot cooking liquid to them slowly, a ladle at a time, so the eggs warm through instead of scrambling. Rush it and the sauce turns grainy.

Maria served a wild green alongside, the sort Cretan cooks reach for constantly and call horta. It looked like long strings of lettuce and tasted far stronger and more bitter than lettuce. I was not a fan. The lamb was excellent.

Spanakopita triangles

Spanakopita triangles are small parcels of pastry filled with spinach and cheese, and they are what all that dough rolling was for. Maria made a cheese-only version alongside them, which Greek menus normally call tiropita rather than spanakopita.

I have no photograph of the finished ones. They came out of the oven, we were starving, and they were gone.

What I did leave with was a proper appetite for Cretan food. A food tour in Chania is the easiest way to keep going with it, and the pink beach of Crete is a good place to walk it off.

How to choose a cooking class in Crete

Choose a cooking class in Crete on location, format and menu, in that order. The five checks worth running before you book are listed below.

1. Check the location: check where the kitchen actually is, because a class in a village 40 minutes inland is a different afternoon from one in Chania old town, and only one of them needs a car.
2. Check the format: check whether every guest cooks or whether the host cooks while you help, since both are good afternoons but they are not the same booking.
3. Check the menu: check that the listing names its dishes, because a menu you can read is easier to judge than a promise of traditional Cretan cuisine.
4. Check the meal: check that the price includes sitting down to eat what you made, with drinks, rather than tasting it standing up.
5. Check dietary needs first: check dietary requirements when you book, as Cretan cooking is generous with vegetables and pulses and vegetarian menus are straightforward if the host knows in advance.

The cooking classes and food experiences running on Crete right now are listed below, with live prices and availability.

Plan your vacation on Crete

Plan the rest of the trip around the class with the handful of sites I use for every trip. They cover the things you have to book on an island: a bed, a flight or ferry, a car and the tours themselves.

• Hotels: compare places to stay across Crete on Booking.com, which has the widest set of filters and a Genius discount once the account has a few bookings on it.
• Apartments: for a whole apartment or a room in someone’s house, search Vrbo, where the reviews often tell you more about the host than the listing does.
• Flights: compare fares into Chania and Heraklion on Trip.com and set a price alert on the route rather than checking it by hand.
• Ferries: if you are coming down from Athens instead, check sailings from Piraeus with Direct Ferries, which lists the overnight crossings to Chania and Heraklion.
• Car hire: compare rental companies across the island through DiscoverCars, which pulls hundreds of suppliers into one search.
• Airport transfers: arrange a driver in advance with Welcome Pickups, whose bookings can be cancelled up to 24 hours ahead.
• Tours and tickets: day trips, cooking classes and skip-the-line tickets are all on GetYourGuide.

Don’t forget travel insurance

Travel insurance covers the parts of a trip you cannot plan around: a cancelled reservation, a twisted ankle on a Chania cobblestone, a camera that meets the floor.

I have kept ongoing travel insurance since I started travelling, because a year-round policy works out cheaper than a separate one per trip once you go more than a few times a year. If you travel two or three times a year, per-trip cover is usually the sensible choice instead.

Buy cover before you go if you have none, and check whether the policy can start after you have already left home, because most cannot. That is what SafetyWing does differently, and when I caught COVID it reimbursed every expense without a fuss.

Cooking classes in Crete: common questions

What food is Crete famous for?

Crete is famous for olive oil, wild greens, barley rusk and its sheep and goat cheeses. The dishes that carry them include dakos (barley rusk topped with grated tomato, soft cheese and oregano), horta (boiled wild greens with olive oil and lemon), kalitsounia (small cheese or herb pies) and slow-cooked lamb and goat.

How is Cretan food different from Greek food?

Cretan food is a regional branch of Greek food with its own staples. It uses more olive oil, treats wild greens as an everyday vegetable, puts barley rusk where the mainland puts bread, and has its own cheeses such as graviera Kritis, mizithra and anthotyro.

How long does a cooking class in Crete take?

Most cooking classes in Crete take 2 to 4 hours, including the meal at the end. Short single-dish workshops, such as a session making small pies, take about 2 hours.

Do you need to be able to cook?

No. Most classes are pitched at people who cook occasionally or not at all, and the host handles the parts that need judgement. I cannot cook, and I still left having made dinner.

Wonderful Wanderings was offered this cooking workshop by Viator. I write honestly about comped experiences: I would not have eaten all of it if it had not been good.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

The 4 tips below come from the afternoon in Maria’s kitchen rather than from any recipe card, and they are the things I would not have known to do at home.

1. Salt the courgette and squeeze it dry before it goes anywhere near the dish. Cut into millimetre-thin rounds, sat in a bowl of salt to draw the water out, then wrung out. That step is why the pie sets under a cheese crust rather than turning to soup in the oven, and it is the one thing every recipe I had read left out.
2. Do not buy feta for the Cretan recipes you bring home. The cheese crumbled over each layer looked like feta and was far softer, the way Crete’s own fresh white cheeses behave, mizithra and anthotyro among them. A supermarket block of feta gives you a different dish.
3. Serve the Greek salad alongside, not first. It went on the table with the courgette pie and the lamb rather than as a course of its own, so plan it as the thing that cuts the olive oil in everything else rather than as the opening act.
4. Volunteer for the dough. In a class where the host runs the stove and the guests do the prep, rolling the pastry for the spanakopita triangles is the job you learn most from, and it is harder work than it looks. I have respected cooks more ever since.

About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the first-hand notes in this post come from her cooking class in a family kitchen in Chania, on Crete. The team covers Crete and the rest of Greece for independent travellers, including the cooking classes, food tours, hotels, car hire and travel insurance worth booking, and updates this page when prices, dates and rules change.