Getting Started in the Rouxbe Cooking School (How and Why)

Start your learning on the right path!

After you’ve decided that you’d like to cook better, the first and most important thing you need to understand, is that you might have to change your approach from a recipe-driven approach, to one focused on learning proper cooking skills and techniques. For many, this may mean changing the way you approach cooking in a very big way. So be prepared. The results will convert you I promise.

Right now, there are more than 45 million home cooks online each month browsing recipe sites in search of culinary enlightenment (US alone). For some, it’s just to find a new recipe or to get some culinary inspiration for their next meal, but, for so many others, they turn to recipe sites and cookbooks for genuine cooking help.

The Rouxbe Cooking School is for the latter group – those that are motivated to become better cooks, but just can’t seem to find the right path. You may be relatively new to cooking, one that continually burns the toast, or you might just want to learn more to move yourself to the next level. You might also be looking to increase your confidence in the kitchen and be able to ‘swing’ a few recipe variations from time to time. Bottom line…you’re “motivated” and if you are, we are going to help you.

Rouxbe was created, in part, because we felt that too many people who genuinely wanted to learn to cook better, we being led down the wrong learning path – one focused exclusively on recipes. Recipes are great and can be very helpful, particularly for inspiration and for providing a general guide, but recipes are extremely poor tools for learning how to cook if you don’t have a solid background in cooking basics.

Why are recipes NOT a great solution to becoming a better cook?

For decades in professional cooking schools around the world, budding professional cooks have been taught cooking skills and techniques, not recipes. Recipes are used simply to practice skills and techniques. In fact, a recipe is really just a step-by-step set of techniques, stacked one on top of the other. For example, cut this, mix this, pan fry this, then braise this and voila…you are supposed to end up with something delicious to eat.

The challenge, however, is that each of these small steps requires skill and technique knowledge. You need to know how to handle the knife, how to mix properly, how to use a fry pan, etc. And most importantly, you need to understand “why” you do what you do when cooking and how it affects everything else moving forward. Recipes simply provide the do this, do this, do this… step-by-step direction but they don’t, and in most cases can’t, help you execute the technical parts in a recipe. Recipe methods are littered with culinary terms that provide little help to the at-home cook who doesn’t possess basic culinary knowledge (sweat, simmer, brown, sear, deglaze, sauté, etc). And the tough thing about cooking is that it’s not very forgiving. If you don’t know how to sweat for example, one small error here in the beginning of a recipe and the whole dish could easily be ruined.

[click image to watch video explanation]

It simply doesn’t matter how great the chef author is or how great the recipe is, if you don’t know the basics. You are, and will always be, plagued with hit and miss recipe success.

Fortunately, in recent months, many online sites have started to embrace this fundamental need by integrating skill and technique video content into their collections, but even this is not enough in my opinion. You can learn how to sear meat (brown or caramelize it) but the real value is in telling you why to sear it (to form a nice crust, to start the creation of sucs for a pan sauce, to add color to the eventual braised dish and sauce). Most importantly, as cooking is the end product of a series of techniques, you will need to better understand how each technique or step in a recipe impacts the next step. Learn it, understand it, then, and only then, will you start to enjoy continual success and confidence in the kitchen.

The good news

The good news is that most culinary techniques are stupidly simple. It’s true! Also, there are not a lot of basics you need to know. For example, you might think there are 1,000′s of different types of sauces out there but in fact, you only need to learn five basic sauces and then how to vary them. As for the techniques, most 5 year olds can do many of the basic cooking techniques…and I’m not trying to make chefs look less talented than they actually are, as I’m a professional chef too.

Example: a lot of cooking starts in a pan (e.g. brown the chicken). If you don’t know how to test the pan for the right pan temperature, your food is likely going to stick or burn. Has this every happened to you? Watch this two-minute video on the “water test” and it will never happen again:

[If you want, watch the whole lesson on pan frying here - it's a free sample]

Want to take control in the kitchen?

So many times, I hear people blaming cookbooks and recipes for their failures when in fact it’s usually the user’s lack of knowledge that leads to failure (acknowledging, of course, that there are thousands of recipes out there that don’t work or that are just bad recipes).

Rouxbe will expand your skill and technique knowledge and help you become a better cook. This is what we do. Our cooking lesson video content and learning platform WILL change the way you cook forever. It has worked for decades in every professional cooking school in the world and it WILL work for you.

My challenge to you:

• If you’re already a cooking school student, congratulations! If you are not, what are you waiting for?

  Join right now for as little as $29.95 per month

  We even offer a 7-day full access trial before billing commences with an easy way to cancel.

• Spend 20 minutes a week at Rouxbe, pick one lesson in the Rouxbe Cooking School per week, watch it, do the 5 minute quiz and then pick one of the practice recipes and cook that meal during the following week. Try one of the lessons links that we email(ed) you when you join(ed) the school. That’s it.

Remember, we are not asking you to leave your favorite cookbook or favorite recipe site for Rouxbe, just compliment it with some skill and technique training. If you do, your recipe experiences will improve dramatically in a very short time. You have to cook anyway, so you might as well cook something that is going to work and teach you something at the same time.

• Invite your friends. If you know anyone else out there that is interested in cooking, please pass along this post. Having a friend of family member to share the end results of your lessons with will make the experience that much richer for you. Besides, we’d love to help steer them onto the right path as well. Let them know that they can at a minimum test out the cooking school with a free 7-day trial.

Let’s start learning and then get cooking – notice the “learning” before cooking :-)

Joe Girard
Co-Founder of Rouxbe
(watch video message from me)

* In partnership with Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver.

** Rouxbe has students in over 200 countries around the world. Read what others are saying about the Cooking School in our cooking school forums or on our testimonial’s page.