Everyone has their own reasons for signing up for cooking classes, but learning the intricacies of fine cuisine in a hands-on environment not only gives you a unique dining experience, but will surely give you the skills and confidence to demonstrate your culinary talents with family and friends. If you're approaching something as a novice, like a new technique or a new kitchen, cooking classes can be helpful. But if you have an average degree of culinary skill, most classes probably won't be too useful compared to just learning on your own. Almost as soon as the lockdown began, my social media feed filled with ads for MasterClass.
This subscription platform promised online courses in everything from writing to film and yoga, taught by true standouts in their fields. Most of the time I ignored the ads until I saw one of a course on bread taught by Apollonia Poilâne, and I couldn't resist. Poilâne is one of my lifelong favorite bakeries in Paris, and its bread is one I've always wanted to achieve. For me, it would be worth the investment if I could learn the secrets of that recipe.
But if I were able to really justify the expense, I would have to take advantage of more than that kind. There are currently 19 virtual cooking classes available in MasterClass, and we'll explore if they're worth it for the price. I'll pay a heavy price for cooking classes for information I can't get from YouTube, Google, hundreds of cooking programs or the eG forums. But no matter what the state of our collective public health, we'll still have lazy rainy days, cold winter weekends, and holidays ahead of us, and your best new binge eating might just be a cooking class that will stay with you longer than any true crime drama or sitcom.
Cooking classes are short courses aimed at amateur amateurs or undergraduate courses aimed at working professionals. A cooking class is geared at the pace of the average student, so if you're significantly above average, you're unlikely to get much out of it. My classes are limited to 16 students in an open kitchen format, which means students sit in front while I cook. The school made me rain 15k a year for the introduction to baking and cooking (it was culinary management, so I had math classes and certifications as well) was a 2-year program.
Most of these (knife skills, timing, shredding a chicken) are skills that you can learn through this class or YouTube and watching cooking programs, but you won't know without practice. And I'd rather take a less expensive class from a really solid, non-famous chef than an expensive class from a famous one, unless it was someone I was a big fan of. I took the evening culinary arts classes without any desire to break into the restaurant industry, since I know what it's like to work BOH and FOH, but I wanted to learn how to cook things properly and learn the science behind food. With more than 100 expert-led classes available to subscribers, a MasterClass subscription gives you access to any topic you want for just a couple of dollars per class.
Each class is taught by experts in their field, such as celebrity chefs for cooking content, so you know you're learning from the best. According to new research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, people who frequently cook at home eat healthier and consume fewer calories than those who cook less.
