RSSRouxbe Launches the World’s First Online Cooking School
July 14th, 2008 by Joe, Co-founder of Rouxbe
The Rouxbe Cooking School offers ?how-to? and ?why-to? professional culinary instruction.
Rouxbe.com, the premium online instructional cooking site, has launched the Rouxbe Cooking School. The extensive online School delivers a professional cooking curriculum in high-quality, close-up video to home cooks around the world.
Unlike other online cooking sites that focus on recipes, celebrity chefs and short technique videos, the Rouxbe Cooking School is a fully integrated experience that mirrors an actual culinary academy, complete with close-up instructional video edible exercises”, progress reporting, evaluation quizzes, and chef and community support. The instruction is a fraction of the cost of a program at a traditional culinary institute and takes a quarter of the time to complete, allowing busy home cooks to have their cake and eat it too.
?I?ve been teaching people how to cook for 15 years and I can honestly say that the Rouxbe Cooking School can teach some concepts better than I can and in much less time,? said Tony Minichiello, Rouxbe culinary instructor, co-owner of NWCAV and avid blogger. ?Video, if well scripted and performed, is the tool of the future for any culinary learner.?
The school uses a two-prong approach that is unparalleled in the online cooking world. It pairs excellent ?how-to? content, which teaches skills and techniques necessary to drive cooking success, with unique ?why-to? content, which helps students really understand cooking and frees them from following recipes.
You can sample a lesson on here: “Wheat and Gluten.”
Rouxbe?s ?why-to? teaching approach is also the reason students will seldom see the amounts of ingredients listed in the supporting School lessons. Instead, the School teaches students how a product should feel, look and taste through guided experiments. This frees them from having to rely on measuring every ingredient.
Initially, 20 lessons will be released, which is approximately 15 percent of the total curriculum. Additional lessons will be released starting in August continuing every couple of weeks. The instructional cooking lessons at launch range from how to properly use your knives and making foundational stocks to making fresh pasta and cooking the perfect premium steaks.
The complete curriculum includes approximately 130 courses, comprising of more than 700 instructional videos shot in high-definition format. The entire School will be released by the end of 2010.
Access to the Rouxbe Cooking School is included with every Premium Membership. An Annual Membership costs $99; a Premium Lifetime Membership costs $199. Rouxbe contributes 15 percent of all Membership fees to Rouxbe for Life, which donates to hunger relief agencies that focus on sustainability, in an effort to help solve and raise awareness for the chronic-hunger crisis in developing countries.
Joe, Dawn –
This is the killer app. No, really. I’ve been with you guys for a long time now, and this is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. My wife and I sat outside in a parked car at 2 AM during South by Southwest last year arguing over this exact setup for over an hour. (Long story.)
Some of us, like me, have read enough cookbooks that we’re starting to see the same things over and over and over again, but nowhere out there – short of dumping my career and going off to culinary school – does anybody break it down into all the techniques and essentials and tie it all together.
Plus, the Rouxbe videos have always been high production value and easy to use.
Yay! I can’t wait for this and more. Well done!
I’ve started taking the classes, and they are wonderful. Just what I’ve been looking for. The videos are great, I’m going to move the laptop down to the kitchen so I can listen and do.
I’ve taken some classes etc. along the way, but these are so professional. these are the techniques I’ve been wanting to learn, thank you, thank you, thank you.
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Thank you for this course!!
I’m grateful to have found it, really.
Particularly my fingertips are grateful for the lessons on cutting techniques: I think that those lessons alone are worth the money I spent for enrolling.