Ifrane Trout Cooking Class - Middle Atlas Mountain Freshwater Fish

Ifrane is unlike anywhere else in Morocco - a cool, green, alpine town in the Middle Atlas, nicknamed Little Switzerland, surrounded by cedar forests, lakes and clear cold rivers. Those rivers and the region's trout farms make freshwater fish a genuine local ingredient, and this class puts the Middle Atlas trout at its centre, a world away from the sardines and sea bream of the coast.

You learn to clean and prepare the trout, then cook it two ways: a trout tagine with tomatoes, peppers, preserved lemon and olives, and a whole trout marinated in chermoula - the coriander, garlic, cumin and paprika mix - and grilled or pan-fried. Around it you make the hearty mountain sides the highlands favour, and the host explains how the cool climate, the cedar forests and the lakes shape a cuisine built on freshwater fish, apples, honey and mountain herbs.

It is a distinctive class precisely because it breaks the coastal-seafood mould, ideal if you are touring the Middle Atlas between Fes and the desert. The setting - crisp mountain air, cedar country, sometimes snow in winter - is part of the appeal, and you finish by eating your trout with bread, salads and mint tea often blended with mountain herbs.