Rouxbe On-line Culinary School

[Porthos]

A game piece from the current grocery stores Monopoly game gave me 2 months free access to Rouxbe, an on-line cooking/culinary school. I signed up.

 

I decided to start with their Food Safety course aimed at the home kitchen. I'm in the middle of it and stopping for the evening. The course does a reasonable job of explaining the 4 main sources of food-borne illnesses and what they are associated with. Until last year, I had no idea of the risks associated with cooked rice and then a culinary-school-trained friend explained that transporting a cooked rice dish at room temperature was a bad idea. I now have a better understanding of why.

 

I don't intend to blog the experience, but I will comment on things that I think are of note, positive or negative.

 

In general the user interface is very straight-forward and doesn't require much of a learning curve.

 

Learning from this course. Aside from the rice safety issues I did an exercise to see how many seconds I actually spend washing my hands. 20 seconds is the goal. My "20 seconds" was more like 14. I am going to work on that since it applies to my ren faire kitchen food safety as well.

[Porthos]

By the time I finished the Food Safety course I was weary of hearing over and over that, "Hand washing is an effective tool in preventing contaminating food  with pathogens." That's not the exact sentence but they used the same sentence over and over. I didn't count but I would venture to says that it was no less than 15 times.  I understand that repetition is part of the teaching process, but this was overkill. Every time they said that hand washing was the next step in a kitchen process they used the same long sentence.

 

Conclusion: There is a lot of good information presented, primarily aimed at people who don't know much yet about food handling safety yet.

 

Separate comment. There aren't a lot of courses to choose from, not enough for my tastes to qualify to call themselves a school. But hey, I'm getting it for free for two months.

[Porthos]

I am embarking on their "Mastering Your Frying Pan" course next.

[Martin Fisher]

It's been around for some time. I forgot about it until this thread. If it's free, I guess it's okay, but for the best in food safety, see Dr. O. Peter Snyder's stuff, especially "FOOD SAFETY HAZARDS AND CONTROLS FOR THE HOME FOOD PREPARER"

He also has a better hand washing routine.

There's also a ton of other info on his website.

In terms of food safety, there's also the USDA Foodborne Pathogenic Microorganisms and Natural Toxins Handbook.

For cooking technique, get a book by Pepin or the like.

 

Edited February 28, 2018 by DiggingDogFarm (log)

[Porthos]

Once I got going  hot and heavy with my spring season ren faire stuff I didn't really have time to do anything more with Rouxbe school website. I think the fact that there wasn't anything compelling enough for me to try and make time for is sort of my conclusion. Their offerings are something I would never pay for.