Chefchaouen Cheese-Making — Traditional Rif Goat's Cheese (Jben)

Fresh cheese is one of Chefchaouen's quiet specialities. Walk the blue medina and you will see women selling jben — soft, white, fresh goat's or cow's cheese — wrapped in green palm or dwarf-palm leaves, made that morning on farms in the surrounding Rif hills. This class teaches you how it is made, from milk to curd, a genuine rural skill rarely offered to visitors.

You start with fresh mountain milk and learn the whole simple, ancient process: warming the milk, adding the natural coagulant, letting the curds form and separate from the whey, then draining and shaping the soft cheese. The host explains why the Rif's cool climate, mountain pasture and goat herds make this dairy tradition possible, and how the leaf wrapping both carries and lightly flavours the cheese.

Alongside jben you may make or taste other simple dairy products — a fresh whey drink, or a lightly aged version — and learn how the cheese is used in Chefchaouen cooking: crumbled into salads, spread on warm bread with honey, or folded into eggs. It is a tactile, low-tech, deeply traditional class, closer to a farm craft than a restaurant technique.

You finish by tasting your fresh cheese the local way — with mountain honey, olive oil, fresh flatbread and herb tea — and understand a piece of northern Moroccan food culture most travellers walk straight past. It pairs beautifully with a Rif farm visit.