Cooking Classes in Tanzania and Zanzibar

What a Tanzanian cooking class actually is

A cooking class in Tanzania, and almost always that means Zanzibar, is a half day that begins in a market and ends around a table. You go shopping with the person who will teach you, carry the bags back to a house, spend two hours doing unfamiliar physical work with wood and coconut and a charcoal fire, and then eat what you made with the family who made it with you.

The format is consistent: a market visit to choose vegetables, fish, spices and coconut and learn what they are called; often a spice farm bolted on so the spices are seen growing before being used; then two or three hours of hands-on cooking producing a multi-dish meal, usually a rice dish, a coconut curry and a vegetable; then eating it together. Three to four hours for the class alone, longer with the market and farm.

It is one of the better value activities on the islands, because unlike most things sold to visitors it produces a skill rather than a photograph, and because the setting is somebody's actual kitchen.

The market comes first

Most Stone Town classes start at Darajani, the town's main market, and the hour spent there is not a warm-up. It is where you find out that the fish counter is organised by how the fish was caught, that there are half a dozen things being sold as bananas and they are not interchangeable, and that a spice you thought you knew is sold in three forms at three different prices for three different uses.

Going with a cook rather than a guide changes what you see. A guide shows you the market. A cook argues about the tomatoes. If you have any choice in it, ask to do the shopping rather than meeting at the house with the ingredients already bought, because that hour is where a great deal of the learning is.

The markets themselves, and the street food that surrounds them, are covered in their own right under food and market tours.

The mbuzi and the kinu

Two pieces of equipment define Zanzibari home cooking, and almost nothing written about cooking classes explains either.

The mbuzi is the coconut grater. The word is Swahili for goat, and the fuller forms are mbuzi ya nazi, the goat of the coconut, or kibao cha mbuzi, the goat's board. It is a low wooden stool or bench with a serrated metal blade projecting from one end. You sit on the stool, hold half a coconut in both hands, and scrape it back and forth across the blade so the flesh falls in shreds into a bowl below. The shreds are then soaked and squeezed to make the coconut milk that carries most coastal dishes, first pressing thick, second pressing thin, and the two used for different things.

It looks trivial and it is not. Most visitors are slow, messy and sore after one coconut, and a class will get through several. The moment you understand why every coastal dish is built on coconut is the moment you have grated one yourself.

The kinu and mchi are the wooden mortar and pestle, used for pounding garlic, ginger and chilli into the base of a curry, and for pounding cassava leaves down to the soft green stew called kisamvu. Again the work is harder than it looks, and again it explains the food: the texture of a pounded paste is not the texture of anything a blender produces, and a great deal of what you taste comes from that difference.

If a class does not involve either tool, it is a demonstration rather than a lesson.

What you will actually cook

The menu varies by household, but a Zanzibar class usually produces some combination of the following.

• Pilau, rice cooked with whole spices, which is the emblematic dish of the island's Arab and Persian inheritance, and the one most worth learning because it is difficult to get right.
• A coconut curry, usually fish, sometimes octopus, built on the milk you pressed yourself, with turmeric, garlic, ginger and tamarind.
• Chapati or mandazi, the fried and griddled breads, which are where the Indian influence is most visible.
• Mchicha, amaranth greens, or kisamvu, pounded cassava leaves, usually cooked with coconut and groundnut.
• Mkate wa kumimina, the Zanzibari rice bread, on classes that run long enough for it to prove.

On the mainland the register changes completely: ugali, the stiff maize porridge that is the staple; nyama choma, grilled meat; maharage, beans; ndizi nyama, green bananas cooked with meat; makande, maize and beans together; and around Kilimanjaro mtori, a green banana soup associated with the Chagga.

Two dishes commonly promised are worth understanding before you ask for them. Urojo, the Zanzibar mix, is a turmeric-yellow sour broth built on green mango, assembled to order in a bowl with fritters, potato and chutneys piled in at the moment of serving. It is a street food precisely because it is assembled rather than simmered, which is why it rarely appears in a class. And mishkaki, the marinated grilled skewers, belong to a charcoal grill on a street corner in the evening rather than to a kitchen.

Two cuisines, not one

It helps to know that Tanzania has two food cultures that overlap rather than merge.

The coast cooks with coconut milk and spice. Zanzibari cuisine is a genuine mixture of Bantu, Arab, Portuguese, Indian, British and Chinese traditions, assembled over a thousand years of Indian Ocean trade. Arab and Persian trade from around the ninth century brought spices, coconut, mango, citrus and rice. The Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries introduced cassava, maize and pineapple, all of which became staples. Indian influence intensified after 1651 under Omani rule, bringing chutney, masala, biryani, curry and the samosa. Underneath all of it, the early Bantu inhabitants of the islands were fishing for tuna, mackerel, lobster, squid, octopus and oysters.

The mainland cooks with maize, beans, bananas and greens, grills meat over charcoal, and uses far less coconut and far fewer spices. Neither is more authentic than the other. A class in Moshi and a class in Stone Town teach different countries.

Where classes happen, and where they do not

Stone Town is where the product is concentrated, and the standard class works out of a house in the old town with the market ten minutes away. Bububu, just north of Stone Town, and Jambiani on the east coast both have documented classes. There is a culinary experience advertised on Pemba.

Two honest notes about what could not be confirmed.

First, the village women's cooperative. Cooking classes across Zanzibar are routinely sold as being run by a women's cooperative in Jambiani, Paje, Bwejuu, Kizimkazi or Nungwi. No named, currently operating cooperative cooking group could be verified in any of those villages. One women-run cooking operation near Stone Town could be verified as having a live public presence. That does not mean the others do not exist, and plenty of Zanzibari women cook for visitors independently and are paid for it. It does mean the phrase "women's cooperative" is used far more often than it is documented, and that it is worth asking what the arrangement actually is.

Second, the mainland. Classes in Arusha, Moshi and Dar es Salaam are advertised, but no named, currently operating cooking school on the mainland could be confirmed. If a mainland class matters to you, ask your operator or your accommodation to name the household or business and confirm it directly.

Where an organisation does publish claims about how much its work benefits the women involved, those are the organisation's own statements about itself rather than independently verified figures, and should be read as such.

Halal, dietary needs and Ramadan

Zanzibar is overwhelmingly Muslim and classes there are halal by default. There will be no pork, and asking for it is a mistake. On the mainland, pork is eaten and is known as kiti moto, literally the hot seat, but it is cooked at specialist butcheries and grills kept separate from kitchens catering to Muslim customers, which is a distinction worth respecting rather than testing.

Vegetarians are easy to accommodate. Coconut milk carries the coastal dishes, and the mainland staples are plant-based by default. Vegans need to ask specifically, because ghee and dried fish or fish stock are the usual hidden ingredients and are not thought of as non-vegetarian locally.

Ramadan is the thing nobody mentions and it can stop a class happening. Zanzibar restricts public eating during daylight hours and most local eateries outside hotels close during the day. Your hosts will be fasting. Classes may be rearranged to cook in the late afternoon and eat at iftar, which is a genuinely memorable way to do it, or may not run at all. Ask when you enquire rather than on the day.

Choosing a class worth taking

• Does it include the market? If not, an hour of the value has been removed for the operator's convenience.
• Is it in a home or a hotel kitchen? Both work, but they are different experiences, and the home version is what most people are imagining.
• How many people? A class of four means everyone grates a coconut. A class of fourteen means most people watch.
• Will you eat with the family? This is the part people remember, and it is not universal.
• Who is teaching, and is it their kitchen? A specific answer here is a good sign.
• Are recipes provided? Many hosts will write them out if asked in advance, and quantities in a home kitchen are otherwise a matter of the eye.

Practical points: wear something you do not mind staining, because turmeric does not come out. Tie long hair back for the charcoal fire. Eat lightly beforehand, since the portions are generous and refusing food is awkward. And if you are offered the stool and the coconut, take it, however badly it goes.

Classes bundle naturally with a spice tour, which puts the plants you are cooking with in the ground first, and the coffee equivalent of the same day is covered under coffee tours.

Questions travellers ask