MasterClass provides in-depth and engaging classes taught by experts in various fields. The classes are designed to bring your favorite experts to your home in an engaging online experience, which includes state of the art pre-recorded videos, workbooks, and stimulating assignments. Your yearly Annual Membership gives you access to 85+ world-renowned instructors on Film and TV, Culinary Arts, Design, Photography, Fashion, Sports, Science and Technology and so much more. Instructors include world-famous chef Gordon Ramsay, bestselling author Margaret Atwood and many more. The classes have about 20 lectures, each about 10 minutes so you can watch and re-watch at anytime. Video lessons can easily be watched on the MasterClass mobile app, on your desktop, Google Chromecast, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, and Roku devices. Check out our MasterClass review to find out more details!
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This is a review of Alice Waters Teaches The Art of Home Cooking course from MasterClass!
The MasterClass Instructor – Alice Waters
This class opens with an introduction to Alice Waters’ philosophy of food. She talks about how cooking should engage all five senses. Her goal in this class is to challenge viewers to learn how to think about food in a different way. This different way focuses on fresh, clean, and fair ingredients, which guide your meals and free viewers from following strict recipes. For those who are not familiar with Alice Waters, she is one of the founders of the farm to table movement. In this class and in her cooking, she focuses on sustainable food choices to create amazing meals, while simultaneously limiting one’s carbon footprint.
Alice Waters is a chef, author, food activist, and the founder and owner of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California. She has been a champion of local, sustainable agriculture for over four decades. In 1995, she founded the Edible Schoolyard Project, which advocates for a free school lunch for all children and a sustainable food curriculum in every public school. She has been vice president of Slow Food International since 2002. She conceived and helped create the Yale Sustainable Food Project in 2003 and the Rome Sustainable Food Project at the American Academy in Rome in 2007.
Alice Waters has designed this class to share her food philosophy, while also walking viewers through her thought process and techniques for finding the best ingredients, building your pantry, and how to utilize your ingredients to create flavorful and easy meals.
The Art of Home Cooking – Who is it for?
Anyone—anyone—can learn to do this. I never had a formal culinary education before I opened Chez Panisse at 27. But what I loved to do—and still do!—is bring people together around a table with food that’s vibrant and flavorful and alive.
This class is for anyone looking to revolutionize their cooking and eating practices. If you want to be more conscious about your food choices, this class will be your guide to what questions you should ask at the farmers’ market, how to plan your meals based on what ingredients you find, and how to create a reliable pantry. This class is for any experience level. She does a great job of explaining why she uses certain ingredients and encourages viewers to ask questions about where their food comes from.
MasterClass Alice Waters – Main Themes
- Eat locally and seasonally
- Conserve, compost, recycle
- Cook simple, engaging all the senses
- Cook and eat together
- Food is precious
MasterClass Workbook – Alice Waters
The workbook opens with a beautiful letter from Alice Waters about her goals for teaching this class and an introduction to her philosophy of food. She talks about her approach to shopping for ingredients and how sustainable eating allows us to eat delicious food, that is economically and environmentally conscious.
It’s about the conversations we have with the farmers who care for the land, and the connections we make when our family and friends gather at the dinner table. It’s about helping our children explore the incredible biodiversity of our planet, letting them dig in the soil with their own hands, growing and harvesting and cooking their own food so that they effortlessly absorb lessons of sustainability. And more than anything, it’s about taste and pleasure.
Whether you are taking this class to transform your home cooking or to get inspired to use fresh and organic ingredients, this workbook is a great reference tool. It outlines a review of each lesson and includes all of the recipes used in the class.
MasterClass the Art of Home Cooking Takeaways
This class teaches the art of cooking by using the best ingredients, whether they come from the grocery store, the farmers’ market, or your own backyard garden. The most important lesson in this course is how to pick your ingredients, because when it comes down to it, what matters the most is having the freshest and organically grown ingredients. After understanding how to pick your ingredients, this class walks you through Alice Waters’ favorite recipes. She also provides a great foundation on essential kitchen tools, what to always have in your pantry, and the importance of seasonal eating.
This isn’t about adhering to a set of recipes or strict rules—it’s about exploring and marrying flavors and ingredients as they change through the seasons. I want you to be able to cook with spontaneity, building your confidence so that you can leap away from a script.
Alice Waters also takes the time to share her inspiration for the Edible Schoolyard Project, which is a program that teaches young students how to garden and cook meals with the ingredients they grew. The goal is to provide young students with an edible education, where they learn history, math, and science through the process of growing and cooking their own food. While these students are learning sustainable food practices at a young age, Alice Waters reinforces the idea that it is never too late to change ones’ relationship with food and this class is the perfect first step in this transformation.
Final Thoughts on Alice Waters MasterClass
I found this class unique and inspiring! Not only did the class provide the tools to eat better, but it challenges viewers to be environmentally conscious and to really understand the importance of food in every aspect of our lives. If you are interested making sustainable food choices, while also becoming more educated about the food you eat, this class is amazing!
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Where can I access my
Alice Waters workbook?