The Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico

From a convent built on top of a pyramid to the ingredients in cochinita pibil to a world class softball team based in a tiny Mayan village, Yucatán culture exists because of the melding, clashing and coexisting of many peoples. On this 8-day journey throughout interior Yucatán, we’ll explore the region’s ancestral and contemporary life through its cuisines. Based in rich Mayan cultural heritage and informed by Spanish colonial influence, the foundational foods are centuries (if not millennia) old: beans, squash, corn, chilis, pork, vanilla, chocolate, wild game, fish and rojo, negro and blanco recados (spice pastes). We will learn about and eat them all. We start in the colonial outpost of Merida, a city rich in political, economic and culinary history. Then we head out of town to visit vanilla and henequen farms, a small-scale producer of chocolate and honey and a garden-to-table restaurant. We’ll also meet and cook with Mayan community members and sample dishes that don’t make restaurant menus. But we’d only learn a partial story about this vast region if we did not also explore its contemporary cuisine. In Merida and the countryside, we’ll meet chefs and eat at restaurants participating in a present-day global exchange of flavors and techniques. After all, change is constant, especially in a place as central to travel and migration as the Yucatán Peninsula.

Trip highlights: Cook with Mayan chefs in a tiny inland village; tour a vanilla farm and eat vanilla-scented desserts; learn to make the three recados, or spice pastes, that are the foundation of Yucatán cuisine; eat standing up at roadside stands and at fine restaurants in colonial-era mansions; sample traditional dishes made with ancestral methods and innovative interpretations of classics; participate in the opening of a pibil, or earthen oven, where banana leaf-wrapped pork has been slow-cooking for hours; watch henequen become sisal—the fiber that turned the Yucatán into the wealthiest region in Mexico; swim in fresh-water cenotes; and visit fascinating Izamal, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Who you’ll travel with: Trip Leader Paco de Santiago and, on this first departure only, Milk Street’s Rosemary Gill

A sample of what you’ll eat and make: Cochinita pibil, the culinary holy grail of the Yucatan; wild game tacos; vanilla-scented desserts on a vanilla farm; octopus cooked over a hardwood fire; lime soup; relleno negro, a dark sauce rich in spices and paired with chicken; the three fundamental Yucantán recados; small-batch chocolate and honey; salbutes and panuchos, deep-fried corn tortillas topped high with ingredients; pork poc chuc, a Mayan dish of grilled pork marinated in sour orange juice and house-smoked longaniza sausages.

Per person cost: $5,000 (Single room supplement: $1,100)
Nonrefundable deposit due at booking: $500