I am looking to improve my cooking skills from A - Z with the goal of becoming a better cook but not working professionally. Now’s the time for me to start, but I have do do this online. So far I have looked at Rouxbe and Top Chef and both look good on the surface. Another alternative is go purchase some books that instruct perhaps from Le Cordon Bleu. What are your thoughts? BTW I love almost all food so this is not about becoming an expert in Italian or Asian foods etc.
I’ve never done a cooking school, but cooking is a hobby for me and I learned through videos and books plus a healthy dose of talking to chefs. (I worked in restaurants for years and some of my best friends are chefs). If you want to get started down this path I would get a copy of Mark Bittmans “How to Cook Everything”. I like this one because it is written well, comprehensive and Mr. Bittman has a lot of flexibility built into the recipes.
I think this last point is key, there are lots of good home cooks that are lost without a recipe. Great recipes are wonderful, but a good cook shouldn’t need them to make an evening meal. You need to taste, and taste again as you cook, and be willing to make adjustments as you go. Some folk get so locked into a recipe that they are afraid to change it. Learn to trust yourself, and if you have an occasional inedible result, just call it a learning experience and order take out.
Skills and technique require practice, just like anything else. Go buy a bag of onions and learn how to do a good dice by dicing a whole bag. Much cheaper than a class. Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” is a great way to learn technique, I don’t care for most of his recipes, they seem bland to me, but his techniques are solid and well tested. I tend to apply his techniques to my own recipes. Another good source of information is food blogs, but like anything on the net you have to weed out the junk from the professional stuff. Serious Eats is the best one I have found, especially recipes and skills from their “Food Lab” series. I would also look for a blog about foods you like, I have followed some Asian themed ones in the past and would kill for a decent Mexican food blog, but haven’t found one that seems to teach me anything I don’t already know. (I got into cooking because of my love for Mexican cuisine)
Next learn your ingredients and how to shop for them, you can have the best recipe in the world but if you make it with crap ingredients, the results will still be crap. Old spices from the local grocery store, using dried herbs instead of fresh, and using produce out of season that has been shipped from half a world away will always make your dishes sub par.
Lastly, have fun with it, if it becomes work and you aren’t enjoying it then you might as well eat out. I love being in the kitchen and making something nice for family and friends. Years ago I tried my hand at cooking professionally for six months, it ruined my hobby. I quit and went back to working front of the house. I had found out why most chefs never cook at home.
Second on Bittman, but I would also add The Joy of Cooking and Howard Hillmans Kitchen Science. These are solid references in not only basic techniques and derivations, but in ingredient selection and preparation.
I do find videos useful for certain techniques I may not have done often, such as deboning a whole bird, or butterflying a chicken for grilling, but never felt the need to do courses.
Are you really going to vest the time to learn all the different techniques? You can spend months just learning sauces, or stock preparation? Or do you just want to get exposed to a wider range of techniques and flavors? A-Z is a lot. I am a pretty decent amateur cook, and there is still a lot that I don’t know. Maybe you need to focus it down a bit.
You might want to look at this - http://cookingschool.epicurious.com/ - relatively cheap - joint effort with the CIA and the magazine. Not a lot of selection yet, but seems well structured for what it is doing.
I generally like books because I can annotate, make changes, etc.
I didn’t know the feed zone people did online classes
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