Thanks "English Tutour" for clearing up the situation. First of all, as far as I understood, Anne is the lady who started this topic two years ago. My name is Jessie and I wish I could get the same reputation as hers someday. Secondly, yes, like "English Tutour" said, the price is not purely for what food cost. It includes lots of preparation in advance and teaching the knowledge and cooking skills side by side. Thirdly, in fact last year in my cooking classes, some new people joined and some quit and some came back later again. It's not like other study that you have to attend constantly, because each class is not strongly related to another and participants bear various objectives, housewives coming for learning local style of cooking for their families, young or single people coming for fun, couples coming for spending time together in a different way. Anyway, no matter the readers' focus is price or whatever, I ask you to read my plan carefully please, trying to get the idea of what I'm doing. Then from there, we could actually talk/discuss. Else, it's just wasting everybody's time.

alex, sure why not have people come over and watch and learn something i do 2 times a day. i wouldnt charge anything, just byob. i got everything else covered. you can come with me shopping also to see that 3 to 4 dishes cost less rhan 50 yuan.

lawlzohmygod, you're ridicolous. It's not just about food cost, plus skilled people usually has not time to lose like you.

I'd prefer to watch youtube recipe than attending a cooking class at less than 100 rmb. do you also drink 30 rmb wine, right?

ridicolous, that i has not. see what i did there, right? what is this magic youtube recipe, how does it taste?

I did chinese cooking classes about 10 years ago in europe, and I can give my experiences just for comparison.

I dont remember the price but i guess it would have been around the same price. 3 hours each session, timed. It was in a proper cooking school, with a swedish guy who'd been a chef in some shanghai 5 star hotel. About 10 students each time.

Firstly, being in a proper cookery school, every kind of equipment was available. 80% of that equipment is not found in a typical kitchen, so that aspect was kinda useless.

Secondly, there were 9 or 10 students. The teacher would come around once every halfhour to see how each team (yea, we were split into random teams) was doing, make some corrections, talk some bs.

Thirdly, the ingredients were totally ridiculous. One simple dish, ants climbing up a tree, had about 20 different things in it. Something i remember specifically was counting out the 35 chillis for another dish, no more no less. Hmmm..reality check?

There were some tips on shopping, for example where you could get shaoxiang (??) wine, which was forbidden in europe at the time due to its anaesthetic properties. Nothing practical at all.

A few months later i came to china and realized that nothing id learned was usefull. Literally nothing.

Now. If someone is offering to teach an evening of real cooking in a real kitchen (i say the smaller, the better), take you shopping for real ingredients in a real market, in a group of 2 or 3, for 100rmb then i think its a fair deal. The kungfu and taiji and music teachers also ask this kind of money so why not the cooks...?

On top of the cooking, students also get the stories behind the food, as well as proper english (jessies writing looks good to me) translations, as well as presumably some chinese practise (trees, food, fish, and plant names are always hardest in a language, in my opinion!)...this is a bargain.

Faraday, thanks for sharing us your experience.

I'd like to say my cooking classes are home-based, meaning unlike those professional cooking training institutions with big title chefs as trainers, my teaching happens in a small kitchen and the food I teach are just daily dishes on Chinese tables. My dishes may not be as fancy as those star hotels', but my core idea is everyone is able to cook if they want to and my motive of doing this is to teach and encourage expats to cook simple Chinese food while having lots of fun.

In terms of cookers and ingredients I use are like any other Chinese families. Practically speaking I hope my participants can find all they need for cooking Chinese food very easily. Else, what's the point if people can't perform their cooking after class? For example like the dish you mentioned: ants climbing up a tree (蚂蚁上树), my cooking needs glass noodles, pork mince, preserved chopped chili (糟辣子 in local dialect), leak, garlic and salt. That's all. I can't imagine an ordinary Chinese family would use more than 20 ingredients to cook just one simple dish. I guess if so, it will more or less kill people's passion and confidence to cook, which I want to avoid the most.

Besides, I always write bilingual names of a dish and mark some ingredients in both languages. Last year in Ningbo, my participants always called me when they went shopping, asking me to explain to shop assistants what they are looking for. This triggered an idea of a trip to markets with participants, which might be extra help on top of English receipts.

Basically, my classes work with small groups no more than three students at a time. My main consideration is each participants should do some practice and we will have some communication (not necessarily about cooking, sometime I told them stories behind a dish, or casual conversations) during the process. If it's one to one, we will do one or two dishes each time, depending the dish is easy and time consuming or not. And if there are two or three participants, each time we can do three dishes at least or team work complicated dishes. Some people enjoy group study, while some don't. Anyway, I didn't count how long each class was last year, because each of my participants is very special: an Indian housewife came twice a week to learn four dishes to take away; a British couple came on weekend afternoons, learning team work dishes like Jiaozi (饺子); a French girl always came before dinner time and we usually invited her to join our family dinner and had a couple of drinks afterwards.

Hi there. We are going to launch the 1st class this Wed (Sep 10) at 12:30 pm. Anybody also interested, pls feel free to contact me. Thanks.

Hi again. On next Wed (Sep 17) at 1pm, we are going to have a group study about a very special Chinese dish called jiaozi (dumplings). It's a complicated and time-consuming job needs team-work, because we are going to start from how to use flour to make the dumpling skin. Anyway, it would fun! We can do traditional and alternative styles cooked in three different ways. Anyone interested is more than welcome to join us. Pls grab some brunch and we can eat the jiaozi together afterwards!