“And if you are ever in the Boston area, maybe I’ll see you in one of my classes.”
As you know, I teach cooking classes (I mean in real life, not just on YouTube) and I thought
it might be interesting to make a video about my teaching philosophy and strategy.
But first I want to thank my amazing patreon supporters.
It’s you that makes somewhat unusual and thought provoking videos happen.
If anyone else wants to join my community of supporters, the patreon link is below.
Have you ever been to a paint bar?
You know one of those places where people drink wine and all paint the same picture.
There is no experience more intolerable to me than a paint bar.
It gives you a sense of accomplishment, while having learned absolutely nothing.
It’s hands-on.
You are the one who made every single stroke on that canvas, but if you go home and try
to paint something, you might not see any improvement in your painting skills.
I find that most recreational cooking classes suffer from the same problem.
They provide a sense of accomplishment without actually improving someone’s cooking skills.
The instructor gives a little demo, divides people into groups and each group works on
some recipe with the instructor walking around and offering helpful tips.
The trouble is that most cooking procedures have a crucial step, like seasoning or testing
for doneness.
The odds of your instructor circling to your group at that crucial moment are slim.
These kinds of cooking classes are great for socializing, meeting new friends, unwinding
after a busy work day, cooking something new and unfamiliar, getting over your fear of
being in the kitchen.
But becoming a better cook after a typical adult ed cooking class might not happen.
If you love the paint bars and normal cooking classes, that’s wonderful.
Hanging out with friends over a glass of wine and meeting new people are way better for
your mental health than obsessing over the doneness of your steak.
But for some obsessive, socially ill-adjusted people like me, those experiences are not
really satisfying.
Throughout most of human history cooking wasn’t taught in 3 hour classes.
Normally, it was (and still is) taught through an ongoing apprenticeship with a relative,
like your Mom or Dad, or a professional chef if you want to cook professionally.
A cooking class is a simulation of sorts.
It’s a somewhat artificial environment.
When your time is limited to 3 hours, you have to be very strategic in how you use them.
So here are some of my strategies.
If a task requires manual dexterity, like knife skills or working with doughs, it’s
important for every student to have hands-on experience with it in class.
It’s also important for every student to have my undivided attention even if it’s
for a few minutes, and to get feedback on their performance.
In other words, I can’t just give a demo on how to hone a knife, leave a honing rod
out and tell the students to periodically use it as they cook.
Immediately after my demo, I have each student spend 1 to 2 minutes honing one at a time
while I am correcting their angle until they get it.
While they are honing, the other students are watching and learning from their successes
and failures.
The mistakes are rarely unique to one particular student.
If one person is messing something up in a particular way, most of the class will probably
struggle with it too, so watching me correct one student helps everyone, not just the person
who is honing at the moment.
Seeing every dish start to finish is not the goal.
You have to pick your battles wisely.
Some tasks in preparing that dish can be easily explained by a recipe, while others can really
benefit from hands-on practice.
I’ll give you an example, the goal of my pasta class is to get you proficiency with
the dough.
This means that making of the dough, rolling it out, shaping it into ravioli and cutting
it into pappardelle happens in class.
That’s the tasks I’ll demo and the tasks that every student will get to practice.
The only way that can happen in a 3 hour class is to get bolognese and the ravioli filling
done ahead of time.
And that’s ok.
Those components are much easier to learn from a recipe than the dough, rolling, and
shaping.
Sure, bolognese requires some chopping, but that’s what the knife skills class is for.
Basically, I choose what the class covers not based on which dish that component is
going into, but which skill we are trying to master.
I have a strong preference for depth over breadth in learning.
That’s one of the reasons I rarely teach classes that include an appetizer, entree,
and dessert.
What makes a pleasant meal doesn’t offer enough repetition for you to notice patterns.
Having a class where you cook only fish or only vegetables or only meat does not make
for the most varied and pleasant eating experience, but it does result in way more skill development
and understanding.
Many tasks in cooking have nothing to do with manual dexterity.
They have to do with judgment.
How much salt to add, how to tell when the fish is done -- all of those are judgment
calls.
I think that judgment is the most difficult thing to teach whether it’s in medicine,
writing, programming, or cooking.
One of the reasons for this difficulty are practical constraints.
I can give you a ton of carrots and celery to chop in a knife skills class.
I can give you plenty of flour, eggs, and butter to make dough.
As long as I have plenty of counter space, we can have many students working at the same
time.
There is no crucial moment with chopping or kneading.
If it takes me a few extra minutes to give a student feedback, there is no loss of a
learning opportunity.
But let’s take cooking fish as an example.
I take 8 students per class.
To give each one hands-on experience with cooking their own fish from start to finish
would require a lot of stoves, skillets, and fish -- all of which are expensive.
What’s worse is that to get any helpful feedback from me, they’d need my attention
at a very specific moment.
Even 1 minute can make or break your fish.
Having a situation when all 8 students need the teacher's attention at a very specific
time is risky.
The way I’ve seen this situation handled in most cooking classes is that a teacher
does a demo on one fish (for example, salmon), then divides the students into groups.
One group is cooking swordfish, another trout, another snapper, etc.
This does create a lot of busy work for students.
Most of that busy work is reading the recipe, finding the equipment and getting used to
it because cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen is hard.
Basically, a lot of effort is exerted with no impact to the bottom line.
But that crucial moment of judgment is usually wasted.
Salmon and swordfish are not the same thing.
By the time the instructor can intervene, the fish is overcooked.
The people who cooked swordfish, missed out on how to cook trout.
I once took a cooking boot camp program at CIA.
It was a whole week of classes with this structure.
Given the duration and the cost of this program, you’d think it would turn me into a better
cook.
This was very long ago and I was a very green cook back then.
There was plenty of room for improvement.
But this course barely made a dent.
Just because the classes are hands-on, doesn't mean they are good.
The way I teach judgment is using a system commonly employed in restaurants called shadowing.
In a video or a cooking show, the instructor will suddenly announce that “oh look, our
fish is done.”
You can’t learn much from that.
For shadowing to work, you have to walk the students through your decision making process.
I have to explain what I am looking for, when, and why.
If we are testing fish, I’ll talk them through the whole process and will test one piece.
Then I’ll volunteer one of the students to test a different piece of fish using the
same method.
That piece of fish is likely to have slightly different dimensions.
They’ll need to figure out where exactly to separate the flakes and how to judge it.
I find that the students learn more from watching another student than from watching me.
When I insert a fork into a fish filet or a thermometer into a steak, I’ll usually
find the very center.
But when a student does it, they might misjudge.
This simulates the mistakes most of the other students would make, and then I can show them
how to fix it.
That’s how the cooks learn in restaurants.
I had a friend ask me once what’s the point of making someone cook rice for a full year
in a sushi restaurant before letting them work with the fish.
Is that just some form of hazing?
No, it’s not.
The cook who is making rice for a year is not just making rice.
They are watching and learning how to work with fish.
Just being around is incredibly useful.
By the time they’ll graduate to fish, they’ll have a lot of intuition from that year of
watching.
When I worked in a restaurant, I didn't cook a single entree.
I was a lowly prep cook.
Eventually, I worked the salad station.
But that doesn’t mean that the other stations didn’t rub off on me.
I would watch what the saute cooks were doing, go home and try to do that.
If something didn’t work, I’d ask them questions.
Then I’d go home and try again.
Most people learn to write by reading good literature and most people learn to cook by
eating good food.
Thoughtful analytical tasting is the most important cooking skill.
The main difference between watching one of my videos and attending a live class is tasting
the food, NOT hands-on work.
You can cook along with one of my videos without being in class.
But judging the food by its looks doesn’t really work.
You have to taste it.
I take the quality of the food in class very seriously.
It’s not just because I want people to have a pleasant experience.
Of course I do, but that’s not the main reason.
Without tasting the final dish, a cooking technique is just a bunch of meaningless steps.
They only matter if they lead to an outcome that is desirable to you.
Just because I like something, doesn’t mean that you’ll like it too.
But if you do like how it tastes in class, I can tell you how to achieve that result.
Let’s take salt for example.
When students see me salt in class, they are often surprised at how much salt I use.
Then they taste the dish and realize that it’s not “salty”, it’s delicious.
And of course, there are some students who find it too salty or not salty enough.
This lets everyone learn something.
The people who liked the salt level now know how much to use at home and the people who
didn’t like it know which way to adjust it.
If you divide the students into groups and they all cook something and then you have
a nice little pot luck, there is no way to make a connection between what you are eating
and what the process was to get there.
This doesn’t mean that I take over every single task that requires judgment.
I do ask students to salt things and test them for doneness.
But I make sure that the entire class including me is focused on that task with them.
This way I can give them feedback in real time.
It’s like learning to drive with the instructor next to you who has a brake pedal.
You probably know about Amy Chua who wrote “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.”
I remember her saying that nothing is fun until you are good at it.
And I agree.
If all your attempts at an activity are failures, you will not enjoy it.
But here is where I disagree with Amy.
Amy’s solution is brute force practice.
My solution is to speed up success.
Humans love patterns.
Patterns are delightful and almost addictive once you see them -- whether it’s in music,
language, math, or cooking.
The problem is that left to their own devices, not everyone sees the patterns.
People who are naturally good at something notice these patterns automatically.
They often can’t verbalize it.
It’s subconscious.
This makes practice enjoyable.
And people for whom practice is enjoyable, practice more.
The more they practice, the more patterns they notice, and they get better and better
quickly.
That’s called talent.
But I am mostly interested in teaching people who don’t have the talent.
Their lack of practice is not laziness.
They don’t practice because they don’t naturally see the patterns and this makes
practice unrewarding.
I also love teaching people who have the talent, but don’t have the time.
They are busy professionals who can’t cook as much as they’d like to.
Some of the patterns they’ll notice on their own, but some I can point out to them saving
them time.
An “aha” moment is pleasurable whether you got there on your own or with help.
You are probably thinking -- don’t all teachers want their students to succeed?
In theory yes, but in practice, many teachers are not at all strategic about it.
I see a lot of cooking classes where an instructor waxes poetic about the importance of local
organic produce, but doesn’t mention the importance of salt and browning.
They are not against salt and browning, but they take it for granted.
They don’t spend much time figuring out all the variables that control salt and browning
and being explicit about them.
When a student goes home after class and their squash doesn’t brown, they have no idea
why.
They might even blame it on the quality of the squash.
Maybe it wasn’t local enough.
My strategy is to be aggressive with teaching the patterns.
I don’t wait for the intuition to kick in and the students to figure them out on their
own.
And that’s what creates quick success.
I believe these teaching principles apply to any discipline, whether it’s writing,
programming, playing a musical instrument, or a sport.
Have you ever had an amazing teacher?
I am not just talking about cooking, but anything -- from art to finance.
What did you like about them?
Let me know in the comments, and if you can, send that teacher a note.
I am sure they’d love to hear from you.
Here are more thought provoking videos for you to check out, and if you are ever in the
Boston area, maybe I’ll see you in one of my classes.