Rouxbe Cooking School
Say you’ve always wanted to be a better cook. Maybe you grew up in a household where the stove was a piece of furniture to be dusted and dinner was something that came from between a set of swinging double doors at the back of a restaurant. Or maybe you know how to boil water and fry an egg, but you want to expand your horizons a bit and can’t quite swing the big bucks for culinary school. Or perhaps you’re all set to enroll in a culinary program but you’re feeling a bit shy about jumping into class not knowing your Santoku from your shiitake. If so, then the Rouxbe online cooking school is for you.
Billed as “professional cooking training in the comfort of your own home,” Rouxbe’s lessons are presented in a progressive series of videos, which are accessed from the Rouxbe site. The cooking school lessons are premium content, and are therefore subject to a membership fee. There are two options for membership, yearly and lifetime, and both are reasonable. Rouxbe donates 15% of all membership fees toward feeding impoverished children through the United Nation’s World Food Program. (Rouxbe’s Web site says that one annual Premium Membership will help feed 60 children!)
So what does Rouxbe teach you? Quite a bit. Well-constructed videos present lessons on everything from knife skills to making stock to preparing sauces, pasta, and salads to an exploration of various cooking methods. Each video lesson is accompanied by goals for that lesson, “edible exercises” and supporting recipes to help you practice what you’re learning, and a quiz to test that knowledge. Your quiz scores are recorded on a “Report Card” so you can track your progress through the lessons.
In addition to the Cooking School, you’ll also have access to a database of video and text recipes; “Drill-downs” providing tips, tricks, techniques, and culinary definitions; a community of Rouxbe forums; and an online store where you can buy equipment and tools used in the Rouxbe kitchens. Much of the ancillary content on the Rouxbe site is free; the Cooking School falls under a subscription-based Premium Membership, and Rouxbe offers a free 30-day trial period.
I found the lessons to be clear, professionally produced, and instructive. The production values behind these are top-notch, so your focus remains on the material in the lesson, not the graininess of the film or a wonky camera angle, as it might in an inferior recording. Want to see for yourself? Click here for a sample Drill-down video on the rolling knife technique. Here is a sample lesson on wheat and gluten to check out.
The drawbacks of learning to cook this way - and distance learning in general - are that you’re essentially working in isolation. You can’t turn to the person next to you and say, “Help, my veloute is clumping!” Rouxbe’s answer is their Community Forums, where the Cooking School has it’s own channel and students can ask questions, discuss recipe ideas, and hopefully work through difficulties they’re experiencing in their home kitchens.
For the money, Rouxbe cooking school strikes me as an incredible bargain. This is real cooking school, brought to you in your own home. True, you do have to bring the motivation and follow through on all the exercises and supporting recipes to gain the full benefits of each lesson, but if you’re willing to do that, you can really learn something here. I was impressed with the quality of Rouxbe’s efforts, and I’m looking forward to staying tuned as their upcoming lessons unfold.
