Cooking is an essential life skill, but good cooks can elevate it into an art form. Whether you’re just looking to get friendlier with your kitchen or perfect your already impressive cooking skills, the perfect way to up your kitchen game is with cooking classes. Cooking classes can be notoriously expensive or intimidating, which is why the rise of virtual experiences is perfect for those looking to save time or money, or who simply don’t want to leave the house. Turns out, it’s easy to find a FREE online cooking class.
Whether your specialty is French cuisine or you do well to make a PB&J, you can bone up on the basics or snag some serious gourmet tips with these 10 free cooking sites.
1. Instructables
Instructables has the classes for you if you’re a cooking newbie. With six total lessons providing information about cooking supplies, knife skills, pan-frying, sautéing, boiling, simmering, stewing, baking, and roasting, these classes will get you started off on the right foot.
2. The Kitchn’s Cooking School
The Kitchn’s Cooking School also starts you out with the basics but offers 20 lessons in 20 days with the goal of becoming a better cook at home. Starting with knife skills on day one, you’ll advance to baking on day twenty.
3. America’s Test Kitchen
Although America’s Test Kitchen is only free during the 14-day trial period, you’ll have access to over 230 classes with engaging exercises and quizzes. From simple skills to advanced recipes, this site is for everyone. There are over 50 of its most recent cooking show episodes available to stream now for free!
4. Tastemade
Interested in broadening your cooking skills to worldwide cuisine? Tastemade brings you classes on the art of cooking from around the world as well as specialty cocktails and fancy party dishes.
5. Dinner Tonight
Brought to you by Texas A&M’s Agrilife Extension, Dinner Tonight helps you figure out healthy eating and cooking that’s quick and easy. It also focuses on meal planning. This is a fantastic site for busy people trying to juggle a healthy lifestyle with the demands of daily life.
6. Food Literacy Center
Bring your kids in on the fun with the Food Literacy Center, which offers cooking lessons geared toward teaching kids about cooking, nutrition, gardening, and all aspects of food literacy. PDFs of recipes are online now so you can gather ingredients. The materials are available in English, Spanish and Hmong.
7. Milk Street Cooking School
The site for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Magazine fantastic cooking school includes a section for free, self-paced classes. The website states that the videos allow you to perfect fundamental cooking techniques and provide “deep-dives into cooking theory, ingredients, and dishes will change the way you cook.”
8. The Food Network on Facebook
Michael Symon is hosting live cooking classes on Food Network’s Facebook page. These classes help you turn common items found in your pantry into delicious dishes. The Food Network Kitchen is also offering a free 30-day trial with 25 live lessons and over 800 on-demand classes.
9. Delia Online Cookery School
Delia Online Cookery School offers step-by-step instructions for chefs of all levels. Learn how to cook shellfish, prepare sauces, and even make preserves. You can learn how to cook perfect rice and pasta and get recipes for holidays, too. Delia is British, so the videos have a definite “Great British Baking Show” vibe. Also, be aware that bakers in the U.K. weigh ingredients like flour and sugar instead of using measuring cups.
10. Kitchen Chemistry
Taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kitchen Chemistry offers a “hands-on learning experience of applied chemistry” as seen in cooking, the oldest and most ongoing chemistry experiment ever! Cooking experiments help you understand the fundamentals of why and how ingredients react to each other.
This site can best be described as “Bill Nye meets Rachael Ray.” It’s an online repository for course materials used in an actual MIT class, so you’ll have to click around to find the recipe for guacamole amid the scholarly materials about the history of the avocado. If you’re just looking for a recipe for a fast weeknight dinner, this isn’t the place to go, but it’s got some interesting information if you want to geek out on food science.
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