Odessa Cooking Class. Making Odessa Traditional Appetizer and Ukrainian Borscht in Real-Time

We are excited to welcome you to Odessa cooking class! Held online from an Odessa kitchen and organized by the founder of the Odessa original Food Tour so that you get a delicious taste of our city from your home. During this virtual cooking class we’ll show you how to cook Ukraine’s and Odessa’s very traditional, favorite and absolutely delicious local dishes. We’ll cook… Ukrainian borscht with an Odessa twist and the eggplant (aubergine) caviar. What can be more delicious than that!? And it’s definitely a full meal: either a dinner or a heavy lunch. Don’t fret if you are a vegetarian: we’ll be happy to cook a vegetarian version of borscht. The eggplant caviar suits vegetarians perfectly well.

Why have we chosen to cook these dishes? At Odessa Walks we were the first ones to launch the Odessa Original Food Tasting tour and the eggplant caviar has been one of the tour’s super hits. The dish is vegetarian, great to serve as an appetizer or a side dish with meat. Ukrainian borscht is for sure a brand dish of the country’s cuisine. But Odesseans are known for taking a recipe and adjusting it to local tastes. So, we’ll show you how to cook a Ukrainian borscht but with an Odessa twist.

Odessa’s eating traditions and lifestyle

While cooking we’ll introduce you to Odessa’s eating traditions and lifestyle. Odessa is Ukraine’s most culturally diverse city. Among its early settlers were Greeks, Italians, Bulgarians, Russians, Jews, French and Ukrainians. The city was a melting pot similar to New York or Naples. Each folk brought in their eating habits and today we say that “Odessa’s cuisine is as nourishing as Jewish, as abundant as Ukrainian, as spicy as Greek and Bulgarian and as exquisite as French.”

Odessa locals, we know quite a few recipes, fun stories and traditions, which we share during this cooking class.  The city is famous for its food markets. We’ll show you what locals traditionally buy on the market and share with you a few fun stories about how “we do the bazar”. Yes, we call a market a bazar and buying groceries on the market “to do a bazar”.

This virtual cooking class is a fun way to get a feel for Odessa. Come alone or share this experience with your friends or family.

What to bring:

To cook the eggplant caviar:

1 large eggplant. We are going to bake it in an oven.

3 fairy large red tomatoes (as ripe as you can find them!)

2 cloves of garlic

Vegetable or olive oil

Salt

Black pepper

To cook borscht:

Chicken broth, 2 liters. You can buy it canned in your local store. The vegetarian option: vegetable broth

2 large chicken thighs  (to be boiled). The vegetarian option: cooked dark beans

1 onion

3 cloves of garlic

1 carrot

3 midsize potatoes

3 midsize (or 4 small) boiled beets

4 tomatoes

1/4 of a small cabbage

1 sweet red pepper

Tomato paste or ketchup

Parsley, salt, black pepper

Joining and payment instructions

• This experience uses Zoom Video Conferencing. Don’t worry! We will email you directions and no need to create an account
• A whole family can enjoy the tour from a single computer
• Payment is made by Paypal
• If you need to cancel or reschedule for any reason, please do so within 48 hours to receive the full refund
• We do this tour as a group virtual experience (group size is limited to 15 people) or a private virtual experience. Private virtual experience means that only your company participates in it. The participants can use different devices and be in different locations

 

Here’s a sneak peak of the Odessa Virtual Cooking class