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In the kitchen of the cooking school at Four Seasons Bali at Jimbaran Bay, Balinese royal Ibu Oka Purnama is dishing up a helping of culture along with roast chicken stuffed with kaffir lime and lashed with lemongrass. In a haze of garlic and shallots, she explains to apron-adorned acolytes the importance of the tooth-filing ritual -- to exorcize sins contained in the upper teeth -- in Balinese society. Then she instructs her charges in setting a Balinese table for a repast roaring with island spices.

On the other side of the world, a troupe of student cooks in Tuscany, Italy, is taking time out from breaded rabbit and fried zucchini flowers at Vancouver restaurateur Umberto Menghi's Villa Delia Cooking School. They're lunching at the tavernetta on the Machiavelli Estate, the 16th-century family home in which Niccolo Machiavelli worked in the fields by day and in the evenings adorned himself in "royal and courtly robes" to write The Prince. In the very room where Machiavelli supped, they feast on antipasto, mixed grill and too much wine, finally waddling out like a gaggle of stuffed geese.

Welcome to the 21st-century cooking school. Right now, cooking schools are hotter than habanero chilies. This sudden, consuming passion makes sense when you consider that Canadians -- like Americans, Australians, New Zealanders and, yes, Brits -- are relative newcomers to cuisine. We're the last nations of wealth to hit the stoves. We've forked out small fortunes to educate our palates. We've discovered food as recreation.

Luxury hotels now routinely offer day sessions in which chefs take guests through the techniques of signature dishes. The Hotel de la Mirande, a 14th-century manse near the Pope's Palace in Avignon, France, invites celebrated Provence chefs to hold cooking classes in French and English in its 1850s kitchen. Bangkok's legendary Oriental Hotel offers four classes a week at its Thai Cooking School. Toronto's Four Seasons sells out Sunday cooking classes with Truffles chef Jason McLeod at $150 a three-hour session.

"It's really about a natural, inherent passion for food," McLeod says. "What's changed is opportunity. People are discovering how approachable kitchens and chefs are and how simple cooking really is."

If cooking schools are the rage, the cooking vacation goes a giant step further, transporting cooks out of the kitchen and into the culture and lending food and drink dimension as part of a richer, rounder experience.

"Any cooking school worth its salt liberates cooking from the image of drudgery and shifts it into the realm of excitement," says my wife, Carol Clemens, one impassioned cook-traveller. "It allows you to connect with kindred spirits. It makes for better dinner companions when you're on holiday. Afterward, you have new friends in other parts of the world.

"The other benefit is, it connects your travels to everyday life at home. It provides that elusive, happy link. When you're home and cooking, you reach back into your holiday and rekindle some of the relaxation and memories."

A routine spin on the Internet turns up foodie vacations in Italy -- mostly Tuscany, which seems to have more cooking schools than pizza toppings -- France, Spain, Ireland, Germany, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Grenada, Indonesia, Thailand, China and at sea, aboard cruise ships.

It can be as straightforward as a day at Vancouver Island's Engeler Farm, where chef Mara Jernigan offers a hands-on approach to the sensational produce of the microclimatic Cowichan Valley. She takes visitors on gourmet farm tours to meet artisan growers and wine makers before collaborating on a multicourse meal in her wholly organic farm kitchen. And isn't that lean, lanky guy in the apron Food Network host Michael Stadtlander?

At the other end of the scale, Have Apron, Will Travel -- a travel company specializing in international culinary vacations -- is offering a 17-day journey called The Healing Cuisine of China. It transports guests from Beijing's Shun Fung Culinary College to Chongqing in Sichuan and beyond. Itinerant foodies find themselves exposed to multiple Chinese cuisines -- Imperial, Beijing, Szechwan, Shanghainese, vegetarian and medicinal -- and encounter 108 varieties of Chinese dumplings.

Tuscany, however, is the unquestionable role model for the cooking vacation. At last count, it had more than 20 cooking schools. Villa Delia -- much favoured by Canadian foodies -- is outside the town of Ripoli di Lari near Pisa. With 24 bedrooms designed for comfort, it sits in a Tuscan postcard of vineyards, shimmering blue-green olive groves and lemon trees.

For Umberto -- nobody calls him Menghi, not even his enemies -- this is more than business. It is the emigrant dream fulfilled, the triumphant return of a wandering son. He restored a ruin to the tune of $5-million and named the complex after his mother.

Opened in 1995, Villa Delia more than holds its own against rival Tuscan cooking schools. It delivers the gastronomic goods but also skirts the confines of compound living with sightseeing-dining excursions to Florence, Siena, Volterra and San Gimignano.

Under the tutelage of Umberto's sister Marietta, participants turn out grissini -- the best breadsticks in the world -- Tuscan pesto infused with walnuts, feathery gnocchi, porcini mushroom risotto, wild boar braised in wine with olives, and osso buco that cascades from the bone at the sight of a fork.

Toronto-based Four Seasons, the world's largest chain of luxury hotels, jumped into cooking vacations when classes at its acclaimed Balinese resort at Jimbaran Bay became too popular. "It was reaching the stage where cooking classes were interfering with the kitchen," recalls general manager Chris Norton. "It was actually affecting our food service."

Collaborating with Canadian executive chef Marc Miron, Norton launched the company's first free-standing cooking school. From the outset, the object was a stylish experience embracing food as culture, taking guests off-property to explore Balinese markets and learn the how-tos of entertaining, Balinese-style.

"It's not about the teaching of recipes," Norton says. "It's about a fundamental understanding of how food works."

This kitchen, designed by Hinke Zieck, who also did the resort's gorgeous spa, would put a Food Channel set to shame. Operating on the small-is-beautiful principle, it accommodates a maximum of 10 students, each with individual induction burners. It has a tandoori oven, noodle boiler, char broiler, gas-fired oven for roast duck, wine cellar, teak dining table and a shop with accessories from aprons to Balinese tableware.

Manning the kitchen is a staff of four, including jocular chef Wayan Gelgel -- "Welcome to the Balinese food processor," he says of a mortar and pestle -- and unflappable co-ordinator Paulina Bangunsasri. They act as guides to a cuisine that may be little-known outside the island but which melds 200 different spices in ways that keep travellers returning to Bali year after year.

The full course consists of four half-day modules that can be purchased individually or as a package. The bestseller is Balinese Cuisine, in which guests are out of bed at sunrise to tour the thriving Kedonganan fish market as the fleet comes in, then the Jimbaran fruit and vegetable market, one of the most colourful in Bali. They are plunged into the mysteries of black chilies, snakefruit, white mango and gindara, the wonderfully unctuous whitefish that translates from Japanese as "silver cod."

Then, senses reeling, it's back to the school with chef Gelgel to whip up dishes including satay lilit, satays of minced chicken infused with lemongrass and ginger, red snapper grilled in banana leaf and sambal matah, the signature Balinese salsa of shallots and lemongrass. The experience also incorporates ideas about the spiritual components of food and how the Balinese use food as offerings to the gods.

For cooking vacations, Bali is turning into the Tuscany of Southeast Asia. Chef Heinz Von Holzen, owner of the Balinese restaurant Bumbu Bali and author and photographer of The Food of Bali, offers a one-day blitzkrieg in Balinese cooking. A tour of the markets and a lovely al fresco breakfast set you up to go to work. And work you will, alongside Von Holzen on a daunting agenda of 33 Balinese dishes, from spice pastes to lamb braised in coconut milk.

In Thailand, Four Seasons has also unveiled a cooking school at its Regent Chiang Mai location in the Mae Rim Valley. Its Lanna Cooking School rides the Thai juggernaut. The spectacular setting is a trio of Northern Thai-style pavilions dedicated to cooking, dining and shopping.

Focusing on the evolution of the Thai kitchen since the 16th century, Lanna offers a six-day program on such themes as traditional Thai cuisine, rice, curries and entertaining, Thai-style.

Not all cooking vacations are so exotic. At Papoose Creek Lodge, a fly-fishing resort among Montana ranchlands, executive chef Jeff Miller aims for a sense of place on the plate. From Sept. 5 to 11, he offers a Taste of Montana week, in which participants attend demonstrations, tastings -- a comparative tasting of grain-fed and free-range beef should be carnivorous fun -- and pairings of local foods and wines. Yes, Montana wines.

When they're talking organic and making wine in Montana, you know the Earth is shifting.

If you go

Bumbu Bali Cooking School: Tanjung Benoa, Bali. A half-day session is $65 (all amounts in U.S. dollars), full-day is $85; phone: 62 (361) 771256; Web: http://www.balifoods.com, e-mail: hvhfood@balifoods.com.

Engeler Farm: Cobble Hill, B.C. Day trips are $65 to $140; phone: (250) 743-4267; or visit the Web site at http://www.engelerfarm.com; e-mail: engelerfarm@telus.net.

Lanna Cooking School: Chiang Mai, Thailand. The seven-day Lanna Culinary Package costs $2,875. It includes a six-day course at Regent Chiang Mai Resort. Phone: 66 (53) 29 8181; or visit the Web site at http://www.regenthotels.com.

Have Apron Will Travel: Healing Cuisine of China, 17 days, $5,500 a person, double occupancy, or $7,450 single occupancy; phone: (520) 850-8609; or visit the Web site at http://www.youwillcook.com; e-mail: nell@youwillcook.com.

Four Seasons Bali Cooking School: Jimbaran Bay, Bali. Each "module," or session, costs $90. A six-night package called Discover the Refined Art of Asian Cuisine, including participation in all four modules, costs $3,500 a person. Phone: 62 (361) 701010.

Papoose Creek Lodge: Cameron, Mont. Taste of Montana week: $2,450 to $2,700 a person, double occupancy, including all meals. Phone: (888) 674-3030; Web: http://www.papoosecreek.com; e-mail: info@papoosecreek.com.

Villa Delia: A 10-day package of cooking and sightseeing ranges from $4,370 to $5,270 a person, double occupancy, including accommodations, cooking classes, sightseeing and guide services, airport transfers, three meals daily and unlimited house wine. Phone: (604) 669-3732; Web: http://www.umberto.com; e-mail: inquire@umberto.com.