Rouxbe, pronounced roo-bee, Online Cooking School could be for your, if you don’t need a culinary degree but would love to hone your knife skills. Rouxbe offers high quality, close-up instructional videos designed to teach you a specific skill. The program offers lessons on cooking fundamentals, and it’s a great way for novice cooks to become comfortable behind the stove and for experienced cooks to fill in gaps and learn new skills.

Paul Bloom, CEO of Rouxbe Online Cooking School, is a foodie in his own right. An engineer and businessman, gourmet food is close to his heart. His wife is a pastry chef from Le Cordon Bleu. He is the face to the cooking school’s chefs who are working hard to finish the courses you would learn in a traditional in-class setting. Although you can’t earn a degree from this school, several culinary programs across the nation have begun licensing some of the videos to provide in-depth training.

This subscription program takes a culinary school’s curriculum and makes short videos teaching the skills you would develop in school. If you want to learn to cook, you should watch these videos rather than downloading a complicated recipe. There are over 1000 videos online, and the curriculum is still growing.

Bloom indicates his map manager on his phone. “You can’t learn to drive by staring at a map. You can’t learn to cook by staring at a recipe.”

The founding chefs, from Vancouver, BC, were surprised by their friends who just wanted to learn how to cook. Instead of driving themselves nuts going from kitchen to kitchen, they decided to create these online videos. Rouxbe has partnered with the Northwest Culinary Academy to build out its curriculum, and the work has paid off. You will definitely learn some new tricks and tips from these videos.

The lessons are taught like an online curriculum. There is a course overview, learning objectives, and a quiz. Don’t worry. You can’t fail cooking school. There is also a place to submit questions and provide feedback. The videos are not designed for couch cooks, those who read recipes for entertainment, but it is designed for cooks who would like to hone their skills.

If you’d like to preview the curriculum, then click here for a complementary two-week subscription.

Rouxbe’s videos are also formatted for Apple’s iPad, so you can take your videos into the kitchen.