Cooking Classes in Taiwan

Taipei has a dozen or so English-language cooking schools, most running small groups of four to ten in a home-style kitchen. The standard menu is xiaolongbao (soup dumplings, where you learn to make the gelatine-set broth and fold the pleats), beef noodle soup, potstickers, scallion pancakes, and three-cup chicken, often finished with a pot of bubble tea with tapioca you boil yourself. Classes run about three hours and end with you eating what you made.

Prices start at about NT$2,650 (about 85 USD) for a three-hour class without a market visit, and classes that add a guided wet market tour typically cost about 80 to 95 USD per person when booked through class platforms such as Cookly. Vegetarian versions are easy to arrange, since Taiwan has a large Buddhist vegetarian cooking tradition; say so when you book.

The best classes start at a traditional market at 8 or 9am, when the stalls are full. Classes near Dongmen meet by the MRT and walk through the market on the edge of Yongkang Street, while those in Dadaocheng cover Yongle Market and Dihua Street, Taipei’s old dried goods street, where shops sell mushrooms, dried scallops, Chinese herbs and karasumi (mullet roe). A good guide explains which greens are in season, how Taiwanese buy pork by cut and time of day, and how to read a tea shop’s grades. You then cook with what you bought.

A guided walk through a night market solves the main problem of Taiwanese street food for visitors: knowing what to order at 100 stalls with menus only in Chinese. Taipei tours usually spend two to three hours in Raohe, Ningxia or Shilin, with ten or more tastes such as pepper buns, oyster omelette, stinky tofu, braised pork rice, gua bao and shaved ice. Raohe is compact and easy to walk; Ningxia is smaller and more local. Prices vary widely by group size and how much food is included.

Tainan has fewer formal schools but the deepest food culture on the island. Morning walks with local guides start at beef soup shops that open around 5am, then cover milkfish congee, coffin bread and danzai noodles in the lanes around Guohua Street and Shennong Street. Some guesthouses arrange home cooking sessions on request.

In Taichung, the city that claims bubble tea, tea houses run sessions where you shake your own pearl milk tea, and bakeries offer pineapple cake and sun cake DIY classes, a popular choice with families. Kaohsiung is better for eating than for classes: the seafood stalls of Cijin and the Liuhe and Ruifeng night markets.

Tea is the best food experience outside the cities. Near Taipei, Maokong is a gondola ride from the zoo, with teahouses among the Tieguanyin and Baozhong plantations, and Pinglin, on the road to Yilan, has a tea museum and farms that let you pick and hand-roll leaves if you call ahead. In the central mountains, the farms of Alishan grow high-mountain oolong at over 1,000 m, and growers in the hills offer tastings and stays during picking season in spring and winter.

At Sun Moon Lake, Yuchi township grows the Assam-type black tea first planted under Japanese rule. Tea estates there run half-day DIY sessions: a walk in the garden, a talk on processing, rolling and drying your own tea, and a tasting.

Book Taipei classes a few days ahead, more around Chinese New Year and summer holidays, when many close or fill. Classes usually include recipes by email and all ingredients; drinks are extra. Tell the school about allergies when you book, since peanut powder, shellfish and pork stock appear in many Taiwanese recipes.