Over the blitz of a whirring blender, Emilio Pérez, a chef and partner at Casa Jacaranda cooking school in Mexico City, yelled, “Check this out guys, come here.”

Standing in front of a burner, he incinerated a tortilla, its charred remains bound for mole sauce, before directing our attention to the blender to taste the spicy red salsa. Then it was back to the burners to see shriveled raisins — another mole ingredient — plump up, before mixing dough for tortillas.

For the next several hours, my attention volleyed from ingredient to ingredient, dish to dish, as our class of eight students prepared a Mexican menu of green tamales, chicken mole, two kinds of salsa and blue corn tortillas under the energetic tutelage of Chef Emilio, as we called him.
For cultural spice, he threw in observations such as, “We domesticated the corn and it domesticated us.”

I had come to Mexico City in February seeking just such culinary and cultural immersion. A friend had recently returned from Italy, raving about her four-day cooking school, which was more than $1,000 a day.

In the capital of Mexico, I knew I could stretch my budget — a dollar is worth about 20 pesos today — and spend about $200 a day on a D.I.Y. curriculum in one of the world’s most celebrated food traditions, cited on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list.
Part of the experience trend in travel, cooking classes are booming. They are a major component of what the market research firm Grandview Research calls culinary tourism, accounting for $11.5 billion globally and projected to grow nearly 20 percent a year to 2030.

Over three days, my husband, Dave, and I took three classes and still had time to catch a lucha libre wrestling match, visit the studios of the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and enjoy complimentary mezcal on the rooftop of NaNa Vida hotel in the bohemian Roma district (rooms from 2,888 pesos).