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Many restaurants and hotels in Bali, especially in picturesque Ubud, offer cooking classes. There are courses that fit all budgets spanning anywhere from just a few hours to over a span of several days.

However, what is arguably the most well-known cooking academy in the area is run by Ubud restaurateur and author Janet de Neefe. The Casa Luna Cooking School is one of the many enterprises of this Melbourne native, who is married to a Balinese.

In addition to the school, de Neefe also runs the Casa Luna and Indus restaurants and the Honeymoon Guesthouse, a bakery and a shop featuring the work of local craftswomen. She is also the founder and director of the annual Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, as well as the author of “Fragrant Rice: My Continuing Love Affair with Bali,” which is both a memoir and a cookbook.

The Casa Luna Cooking School offers half-day classes from Monday to Friday, with different dishes taught on different days. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the classes also include a market tour.

I was lucky enough to take the class on a Tuesday. After meeting at the Casa Luna restaurant at 8 a.m., our group of about 20 chefs-to-be were given a tour of the Ubud Market by a member of de Neefe’s cooking team.

By the time most visitors to Ubud make it out of their hotel rooms in the morning, the central market in town has turned into a heaving souvenir-retailing tangle of people asking, “Want sarong?”

But before 10 a.m., it is the domain of the locals. The stalls display vegetables carted into town that very morning from the surrounding farmlands and elderly women dish up Balinese breakfast staples like bubur (rice porridge) from pots and small tables that they carried all the way to work on their heads.

The tour peels back the mystery of the morning market, explaining the various fruits, vegetables and spices that make the food in Bali so delicious and unique. Taste and sniff tests were part of the discovery process and our guide always had an interesting fact or snippet of information on hard about the culinary, medicinal and ceremonial uses of the market’s staples.

After learning about the ingredients, it was time to learn how to cook using them. We were shepherded back to the beautiful Honeymoon Guesthouse open-air dining room and cooking space.

We were welcomed with bright glasses of hot-pink-but-ice-cold hibiscus tea. Before donning our aprons, we were also treated to a light snack of several Balinese street food favorites, including bubur, Bali-style gado gado , wajak (rice flour pancakes with palm sugar) and pisang rai (boiled bananas). For some of the tourists in our group, this was their first taste of these dishes.

After snacking and chatting, it was time to get down to business. Aprons on, we met de Neefe herself, who led us through the class. Calmly taking us through the planned recipes for the day and showing us the key ingredients for the spice pastes that would be used as the base of each dish, it was clear how this woman is able to juggle so many projects all at once. She clearly has a deep passion for Balinese food and culture, as well as the town she calls home, and seems to have absorbed the serenity and unflappability that seems to be an island-wide trait.

On the menu for the class, we had roasted eggplant in a spicy sauce, a tempe and tofu curry, urab (fern salad), a fish curry and the Indonesian staple mie goreng (fried noodles). For dessert, it was green coconut crepes.

While a large part of the preparation had already been completed by the cooking team, there was still chopping and plenty of crushing and grinding for us students to do to make the spice pastes in preparation for cooking our meal.

Jokes were exchanged all around and information about Balinese life and culture was interwoven with the practical cooking lessons and lots of taste tests.

The cooking class was a communal affair. Students took turns controlling the woks under the watchful eye of the members of the staff, while tips about cooking methods and variations on recipes were shared.

After, all that was left for us to do was eat. The dishes were presented on a table and we served ourselves nasi campur , or mixed rice, then sat down at the long communal table to enjoy the fruits of our labor and discuss the flavors and our favorites.

Spicy, zingy, fresh-tasting, unusual and “I want some more of that one” were just some of the descriptors being thrown around. Personally, I thought that the food was fantastic, ranking as one of the most flavorful and fresh meals I have had during my time in Bali.

By the end of the class, I felt I had a good idea of the process and method of making the dishes. All students were provided with a booklet containing the recipes from the class. However, there was one lesson at cooking school that we were thankfully allowed to skip: washing the dishes. At home, I don’t think I’d be quite so lucky.