Learning cooking from online video courses is a better alternative than buying expensive recipe books -is this true?
Over many years I have bought recipe books which I have stored in my kitchen cupboard – I have used these from time to time but in the last few months I have started to investigate on-line cooking courses.
By following this approach of teaching myself cooking by using online cooking courses, I come across some astounding information – many of the courses are extremely expensive and you have to physically attend the facility – there are obvious advantages in doing this but what I decided to concentrate on is the home chef, who cannot attend an expensive culinary school.
The home chef simply wants to cook a better meal for the family and get hints and ideas to help him or her to achieve this.
I had become really bored with my cooking and so had my family – so I decided to start researching online cooking courses. This is what I found:
There are numerous online cooking courses that give the home chef as well as the person wanting to eventually become a professional chef, a great insight into cooking and understanding the basic concepts of how to cook. The courses cover topics like knife skills, preparing stocks and sauces, how to cook the basic food items like chicken, meat, fish and vegetables.
The main emphases of these courses vary from basic topics to more advanced topics as well as specializing in different areas like raw food preparation.
In addition I discovered to my amazement that some of the renowned cooking schools like The Escoffier School for Culinary Arts are now offering online course to budding chefs – what a break through – maybe this is the future of the expensive culinary schools.
Going back to my research, I registered and did many of the cooking courses online – some of them were really weak with bad quality video and content that was really hard to follow. However there were a few really good ones that were easy to follow and really cheap and conducted by well know institutions and chefs.
After attending the online courses, my cooking really started to improve and I found that I really did not need my recipe books anymore as I began to understand the basics of cooking – it was like learning to ride a bike as once you know how to say do a stock properly, then you do not need to read about it anymore.
The biggest advantage of following this approach is that it was very visual – what I mean here is that when you hear and see something in an online cooking video then mentally it stays with you.
So what is the conclusion?
I strongly recommend this approach of attending online cooking courses as it also has the added advantage of being mobile – that means that if you go on holiday or are away from home – thanks to mobile technology today, you have your cooking techniques online and you do not have to take heavy recipe books with you.
I have found not only has my cooking improved but I have become more confident in trying new things and am continuously picking up shortcuts on preparation techniques – even my plating skills have improved and when I bring the food to the table, my family are really surprised how good the food looks -and best of all the kids are eating well – hooray!