Here at Real Food Traveler, we love having the opportunity to take a cooking class when we’re in a new destination. Not only is it a great way to hone skills, it’s a unique way to learn about culinary traditions, ingredients and methods behind dishes the area may be known for. Carole Jacobs, our Health, Fitness and Spa Editor, has compiled a useful roundup of cooking schools around the country that provide the opportunity to learn, cook, and eat locally.

Save this list of 12 great cooking schools in America to Pinterest to help you plan which ones to take. Graphic by RealFoodTraveler.com.

Cooking has never been my forte, which may explain why our local fire company has me on speed dial.

My cakes could sink ships, my biscuits could crack molars, and my misshapen Santa Claus cookies have been known to terrify small children.

The last time I made Ina Garten’s whole wheat and peanut butter dog biscuits, my pooch ducked for cover under the couch.

And, my family is still talking about the Christmas I won the national Betty Crocker bakeoff — for the ugliest gingerbread house in America! The judges dubbed it “Tobacco Road: The Debacle on 34th Street.”

Fortunately, the national obsession with cooking has sparked an avalanche of schools and classes where the kitchen-challenged like me can learn to make Pad Thai, Apple Tarte Tatin, and adorable Christmas cookies without sending the oven up in flames.

In addition, these schools will also never send you home hungry, offering tastings as you cook and often an entire meal at the end.

From American classics to obscure ethnic cuisine, you’re bound to find a cooking school that fits your needs. Many offer virtual as well as in-person classes, so classes in far-flung locales like Haiku (see #12) are just a click away.

For info on 2025 classes at the following cooking schools, be sure to check their websites. And if you’re attending a cooking school from out of town, check the tourism websites provided for each city for info on where to stay, what to do, and where to eat.

12 Great American Cooking Schools to Try Now

1. Santa Fe School Of Cooking, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Located in downtown Santa Fe, this internationally acclaimed cooking school and market offers demonstration classes, hands-on cooking classes, and Santa Fe’s original chef-led restaurant walking tours, all led by a cadre of talented chefs who have written cookbooks, won prestigious competitions, and appeared in glossy magazines. The cooking school even has Dave’s Bistro, a high-end jazz supper club showcasing their award-winning fare.

From the fiery chiles of New Mexico to the subtle spices of Native American cuisine, Santas Fe’s in-person and online classes cover the full spectrum of Southwestern gastronomy’s six categories: Traditional New Mexican, Contemporary Southwest, Mexican, Native American, Guest Chef specialties, and Holiday & Specialty classes.

“Southwestern cuisine is not what you’d get at Taco Bell,” says Michelle Chavez, a chef at the school as well as a self-described history nerd who taught New Mexico history K-12 and at the local community college.

“We are different from Mexican cuisine in that we use different varietals of chiles and in different combinations- both fresh and dried, red, and green, and “Christmas” (red and green together),” she explains.

“No one else does that combo simultaneously, and while it doesn’t seem like a big deal, it accounts for the cuisine’s unique flavors. Southern New Mexico alone produces 53,000 tons of chiles a year.”

Chavez says most people are also unaware that Southwestern cuisine is one of the oldest in the world — older than cuisines in Rome, China, Israel, and Egypt.

For time out of mind, Santa Fe was a crossroads for human migration, and the various cultures that passed through or settled here left their imprint on the food and culture.

“There are Spanish, African, Arabian, Italian and other influences,” says Chavez. “Southwestern cuisine has an elegance and sophistication, and it deserves to have a place alongside other sophisticated cuisines in the world,” she says.

The “hottest” food right now in Southwestern cuisine is tamales –“the world’s first fast food and one which pre-dates the Aztecs,” says Chavez. “Everybody who comes to the school wants to learn to make them.”

To learn more about the magic and mystery of Southwestern cuisine, what it says about you if your tortillas puff up or your salsa is too hot, and for Chef Chavez’s favorite recipe for pork tamales, click on the blue “Hungry for more?” bar below.

Learn how to make authentic Southwestern cuisine at the Santa Fe School of Cooking. Photo courtesy of the Santa Fe School of Cooking.

Hungry for more? Try this Santa Fe Cooking School recipe for Pork Tamales.

2. New Orleans School Of Cooking, New Orleans, Louisiana

If you want to get your gumbo on, this cooking school, located in a renovated 1880s molasses warehouse in the French Quarter, is right up your alley.

Since 1980, it’s been offering in-person hands-on and demonstration classes in how to create authentic Creole and Cajun cuisine classes.

The chefs will show you how to make all the New Orleans favorites like red beans and rice; chicken, crawfish, or shrimp Etouffee; Creole Fried Green Tomatoes topped with lump crabmeat salad and white remoulade sauce; Shrimp or chicken creole; yam-crab Bisque; barbeque shrimp and grits; chicken and andouille gumbo; a perfect roux for gumbo; and pralines and bananas foster crepes – all while providing fascinating tidbits about New Orleans history.

At the end of class, you’ll feast on your creations and receive a New Orleans School of Cooking apron and recipe packet. Before leaving, drop by their old-fashioned general store for aromatic spices, sauces, and unique kitchen gadgets that will increase your odds of duplicating their recipes at home.

 3. The Gourmandise School, Santa Monica, California

This cooking/baking school uses locally sourced ingredients from the nearby Santa Monica’s Downtown Farmers Market, and (hey, this is LA) promises to “develop your culinary intuition.” Their class in “Pie Therapy,” for instance, “incorporates mindfulness, discourages judgement, and tackles control issues while you assemble and bake a pie that get you take home.”

The cooking school is the brainchild of three women friends, including founding chef and co-owner Clémence De Lutz, a veteran of 20th Century Fox who began her “culinary career” by selling homemade cookies and pastries from her cubicle before transitioning into teaching them how to bake.

Today, the cooking school offers everything from a 3-hour donut class to a 2-day croissant class, a class on handmade pasta and sauce, and a 4-week primer inspired by the Great British Baking Show where you’ll learn to turn out Downton Abbey-worthy cream scones, Victoria sponge, and sticky toffee pudding. No password required!

Gourmandise even offers Cooking 101, a 4-week course focusing on the basics of slicing, dicing, and cooking meat, fish, and poultry. My husband has gently suggested I take it.

Chef Gino teaching at The Gourmandise School. Photo courtesy of The Gourmandise School.

4. Melissa Coppel’s 6-day Chocolate Boot Camp, Las Vegas, Nevada

If you’re a confirmed chocoholic who wants to take your cravings to the next level, this 6-day boot camp in August could be your sweet spot.

The Boot Camp is the creation of world-renowned chocolatier Melissa Coppel, a native of Columbia whose culinary accolades include “Chocolatier of the Year” and “Top Ten Chocolatiers in North America.”

During Bootcamp, Coppel will teach you how to make several kinds of gourmet candy, from unique flavors of ganache (Lychee Tea Marzipan & Dark Chocolate Ganache to Raspberry Jelly & Peanut Butter Ganache) to molded and enrobed bonbons;  elegant takes on American-style candy bars (Snickers, Twix, Butterfingers and Milky Ways); confections like Crème Brûlée Almonds, and Glossy Pistachios with White Chocolate and Matcha; as well as  caramels, pralinés, compotes, marzipan, and even vegan chocolates.

For Coppel, teaching, like cooking, is more than a job. It’s a mission.

“Knowledge doesn’t belong to you, it passes through you,” she says. “This profession has given me so much joy, for me it’s really about giving back and growing together, which brings meaning to my life.”

For more info on Boot Camp as well as Coppel’s year-round in-person and live online classes on making candy and pastries, visit https://school.melissacoppel.com/about/

Hungry for more? See what it’s like to attend a cooking class in Paris.

5. Whisked Away, Phoenix, Arizona

Everyone should have a neighbor like Chef Maggie Norris. Following training at Scottsdale Culinary Institute and a high-flying career at the Food Network in New York, she moved back to Arizona, where she made her neighbors’ day by starting a cooking school.

Today, Whisked Away is Arizona’s most popular cooking school, and her spacious home kitchen is her school, and her kitchen counter her demo stage for teaching cooking techniques you can duplicate at home. You can also always watch her cook on the TV morning show, Your Life Arizona, where she’s a regular guest and posts her recipes.

Chef Norris says she strives to teach students how to make home cooking more efficient, less daunting, and more fun and creative.

“Let go in the kitchen!” she advises. “Recipes are guidelines only. It’s okay if you want to get creative. That’s how some of the best things are created. Brownies were created only because someone left the flour out of a cake recipe. Don’t be afraid.”

If you’re looking for a way to throw a children’s birthday party without losing your cool, check out Norris’ Kid’s Love Cooking classes.

They include fun classes like Cupcake Wars, modeled after the popular TV show; and Magnificent Mexican, where your kids will learn how to make guacamole queso dip, chicken tamale pie, and Mexican wedding cakes.  The classes include setup, cleanup, and the dishes — all you have to do is stand by and watch while your birthday boy or girl makes a wish and blows out the candles!

6. Colorado Mountain College Cooking Classes in Breckenridge, Steamboat Springs, and Aspen

If you’re a local or are hitting the slopes this winter in any of these world-class ski towns, consider carving out some time for a hands-on cooking class at one of Colorado Mountain College’s three campuses in Breckenridge, Steamboat Springs, and Aspen.

Everyone from raw beginners to seasoned chefs have turned up to learn how to master ethnic cuisine—including alum Matt Vawter, owner/chef of Rootstalk in Breckenridge, who recently received the Best Chef – Mountain West from the James Beard Foundation.

Seasoned chefs and instructors take you on a world-tour of ethnic cuisine minus the jet lag, with classes ranging from “Breads of Italy,” and “Africa” to “Spanish Wine & Tapas,” “Paris, 1906” to “Italian Gnocchi,” “A Tour through the Vineyards of Chile and Argentina” to “Provence.”  In a culinary trip to Brazil, students make dishes ranging from simple roasted vegetables and Brazilian cheese bread to more complicated empanadas and feijoada.

You and your classmates will prepare sumptuous meals at the campuses’ commercial-grade kitchens, then savor them at the end of class with the chef.

Attendees toast to a meal well-prepared during CMC Breckenridge’s New Orleans/French Quarter recreational culinary class. Photo courtesy of Colorado Mountain College.

7. Milk Street Cooking School, Boston, Massachusetts

If you’re a foodie, you’re probably familiar with Christopher Kimball, the bow-tied food expert who founded America’s Test Kitchen (and was sued by them after he quit).

His latest venture, founded in 2018, is Milk Street, a mini-empire that includes a magazine, TV show, radio show, live touring show, cookbook—and a live stream and online cooking school that’s delivered more than 600 classes.

Kimbal is famous for saying (in his 2017 cookbook, Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street: The New Home Cooking) that “Ethnic cooking is dead. We are all simply making dinner.” 

And while Milk Street’s menu of classes is decidedly international in scope, Kimbal claims its real mission isn’t about cloning foreign foods but “going abroad and cooking with people and then bringing bits of that back home. We don’t want to replicate the dishes; it’s about coming up with a new repertoire.”

Milk Streets hosts a few in-person cooking classes a month in Boston, but most of its classes are either live stream (paid) or self-paced prerecorded lessons (free). They range from pleating perfect dumplings to shaping restaurant-worthy ravioli, and from learning to harness the power of umami-rich pantry ingredients to using spices to spice up your classic German cooking, Sweet Baking, and cooking for the Chinese New Year.

Whatever classes you take, “You won’t learn just recipes, you’ll learn new ways to approach food and cooking, giving you a reinvigorated enthusiasm for putting dinner on the table,” says Kimball.

Most people think of recipes as “belonging to a people and place, with outsiders being the interlopers,” says Kimbal. “Milk Street offers the opposite, an invitation to the cooks of the world to sit at the same table.” 

A class at Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Cooking School. Photo by April Dodd.

8. The Merry Kitchen, Portland, Oregon

This children’s cooking school doesn’t just show kids how to make healthy food – it teaches them how to grow it, too.

The school was founded by Julie Merry, a registered dietitian and graduate of Western Culinary Institute, following a successful career teaching children’s cooking classes and the Kid’s Cooking Camps for Sur la Table, and teaching an after-school cooking program for the Portland Public Schools.

While planning the school, Merry decided it was important for kids to learn how to grow the food they cooked. To that end, she completed a Master Gardener program and cultivated a 500-square-foot garden in her backyard.

Today, when Merry’s students aren’t in her kitchen, they’re in her backyard learning to grow, maintain, and harvest an organic garden. They even make compost from the scraps of each cooking class.

Coming up in 2025 are kid-friendly classes on making homemade pizza, creating healthier Happy Meals, and making a meal for Chinese’s New Year, including beef with broccoli and veggie, potstickers, and Chinese almond cookies.

Pasta-making is a group effort for the students of The Merry Kitchen. Photo courtesy of The Merry Kitchen.

9. Culinary Institute of America’s Multi-day Boot Camps in Hyde Park, New York; San Antonio, Texas; and Napa, California

CIA is the undisputed king of American cooking schools, with an original campus in Hyde Park, and two newer ones in Napa and San Antonio.

And while the king of cooking schools has trained world-class chefs who have made cooking their life, they also offer Multiday (2-5 day) Boot Camps – basically, culinary vacations for foodies who want to learn how to cook from the best.

Students work in small, intimate groups with chef instructors who lead technical demos and work with them one-on-one to prepare various recipes, which they enjoy at the end of class with the chef and their classmates. Each Boot Camp also includes a meal at one of CIA’s renowned on-campus restaurants.

Bootcamps coming up in 2025 at various CIA campuses include “The Best of Boot Camp,” a 3-day camp focusing on  knife cuts, classic cooking techniques, and regional Italian, American, and French cuisine; “Culinary Boot Camp,” a 5-day camp teaching basic culinary methods and techniques like sauteing, roasting, and baking; and a variety of boot camps focusing on a specific food or cooking method, including Mediterranean, Mexican, regional Italian, Hudson Valley cuisine, vegetarian cuisine, pastries, baking, grilling and barbecue, bistro foods, seafood cuisine, street foods, and more.

The Culinary Institue of America Napa. Photo courtesy of the CIA Napa.

10. Central Market Cooking Schools in Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, Plano, South Lake, and San Antonio, Texas

“Eating meat—even when you’re practicing a plant-based diet—is every Texan’s right,” reports Texas Monthly.

And whether you want to learn how to cook Tex-Mex, Texas BBQ, or a cowboy steak dinner, you’ll find a class for it at one of Texas’ Central Market’s cooking schools.

As you might expect from The Lone Star State, some of the school’s most popular offerings include hands-on classes like “A Cowboy Steak Dinner,” “Steakhouse with a Twist,” and classes with a “night out” theme like “French Steakhouse” and “Argentine Steakhouse.”

For those not keen on Texas cuisine, the school also offers classes on regional and ethnic cuisines—from savory & sweet crepes to sushi, lobster, Thai, Vietnamese…and even meatless cuisine! Despite Texas’ rep as a meat-loving state, both Houston and Austin were included in the 2024 Top 20 Vegan-friendly Cities in the US.  Vegetarian and vegan classes run the gamut from “Mastering Mushrooms,” and “Eggless Pasta” to “The Basics of Biscuits.”

11. Wooden Spoon, Chicago, Illinois

Since 2001, the chefs at “the Spoon,” as regulars call it (the front of the school bears a 9-foot wooden spoon) have been teaching Chicagoans how to cook and focus on the “Mise en Place” approach to cooking, a French phrase which means “putting in place” or having everything ready before you begin.

It’ll come in handy in their class on “DoughDough Dough,” where a chef will teach you how to make Chicago’s signature thin-crust tavern-style pizza dough; homemade apple hand pie (Chicago has lots of apple picking orchards nearby); and pork and red chile tamales (today, nearly a third of Chicago’s population is Hispanic).

As well as a big city, Chicago is also a vibrant tapestry of immigrant communities and ethnic neighborhoods, each with its own cuisine.

In the Spoon’s class on “World Dumplings,” you’ll make Mexican Chorizo and Cheese Empanadas with Chipotle Dipping Sauce like you’d find in Chicago’s West Side); Chinese Pork and Vegetable Potstickers with Dipping Sauce like you’d find in Chicago’s Chinatown); Greek Spanakopita Triangles with Tzatziki Sauce like you’d find in Chicago’s Greektown);  and Thai Spring Rolls and Potstickers like you’d find in Thai restaurants on Chicago’s North Broadway and North Damen streets.

Sean and Trina Sheridan are the owners of The Wooden Spoon. Photo courtesy of The Wooden Spoon.

12. Coconut Information Farm & Cooking School, Haiku, Maui, Hawaii

Owned by Ryan Burden and located on his small family farm, this workshop, educational center and cooking school will teach you everything you ever wanted to know about coconuts—from how to whack them open using a machete to how to use them in Burden’s healthy recipes, including coconut milk, coconut bacon, coconut beet soup, and his famous coconut noodles — a humble farm snack that gained notoriety after being featured on the Food Network’s “Guy Hawaiian Style.”

Burden’s journey to coconut guru began 14 years ago after he decided to swear off processed and imported foods and make his meals 100% Maui grown.

After planting sweet potato, papaya, and kale, he learned there was one plant – coconut – you could stick in the ground, never water or weed, and for the next several decades it would produce food year-round.

Burden was sold. Trading work for coconuts, he explored ways to capitalize on the fruits of his labor, from selling homemade coconut products at farmers markets to establishing a door-to-door delivery service locals dubbed “The Coconut Milkman.”

In 2015, he established his own farm in Haiku, spending the first few years clearing out invasive trees and making room for orchards.  Today, his coconuts as well as his starfruit, bananas, avocados, ulus, and jackfruit are already in production.

Then as now, Burden’s heart belongs to coconut. He makes a fresh batch of coconut milk every day for use in his coffee, smoothies, yogurt, gravy, and ice cream; uses coconut meat to make coconut noodles and flour; infuses coconut oil with vanilla bean or coffee to make skin serums and turns shredded coconut husks into garden mulch.

Can’t make it to Haiku? You can learn everything about coconuts in Burden’s online cooking course.

Make your way around the U.S., discovering the best of what’s local, while improving your own culinary skills. It’s a great way to experience culinary travel!

-Story by Carole Jacobs, Real Food Traveler’s Health, Fitness and Spa Editor

Hungry for more? Hear our podcast with the owner of a cooking experience in Mallorca, Spain.

Please note: This article contains a link to Amazon.com. RealFoodTraveler.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn a small amount of advertising fees by linking to Amazon.com while providing convenience for the reader. This in no way affects the prices of any products you may purchase in conjunction with this link.