Tetouan Calentita Class — Northern Morocco's Chickpea Bake

Calentita (also called karan) is one of the more unusual things you can cook in Morocco: a baked savoury cake of chickpea flour, water, olive oil and egg, seasoned with cumin and pepper, baked until set with a golden top and eaten warm in slices. Its roots are Spanish — a cousin of the panisse and farinata of the western Mediterranean — and it travelled into northern Morocco's Andalusian towns, making Tetouan a fitting place to learn it.

This class teaches you to make calentita from scratch — whisking the chickpea batter to the right consistency, seasoning it, and baking it so it sets soft inside with a crisp top — a simple, forgiving recipe that reveals a lot about the Spanish-Moroccan crossover of the north. It is honest street food, sold from trays and eaten as a cheap, filling snack, quite unlike the tagines of the interior.

Around it, the host teaches other Hispano-Moorish and northern bites — perhaps a Spanish-influenced fried fish or a simple Andalusian-style dish — so you understand how Tetouan's cuisine sits at the meeting point of two cultures. The story of how Andalusian settlers and their recipes shaped the city runs through the whole session.

It is a fun, unpretentious, budget-friendly class, ideal for the curious cook interested in food history and culinary crossovers rather than the usual tagine-and-couscous. You eat what you make warm, the way it is sold on Tetouan's streets, and leave with a genuinely unusual recipe from Morocco's most Andalusian corner.