Review: The French Pastry School’s Introduction to Pastry Arts Course at Rouxbe

Like many people, I've developed some new, hard-set habits during the pandemic, both good and bad. I run or walk the same route in the same counterclockwise direction almost every day. I've become even more of a night owl. I try to check in on my friends more often. I've also found it hard to dig in on big projects, but when the chance to try out an ambitious online cooking class came up, I took it.

After reading about its “world-class online education,” I signed up for a thorough-sounding pastry course from Chicago's French Pastry School via a cooking platform called Rouxbe. Pastry has always been a weak spot in my cooking knowledge, and I was curious to find out whether spending $700 on a course to close that gap would feel like a worthy investment.

The Introduction to Pastry Arts course is broken down into 229 individual tasks in 20 units. There are written lessons with photos and videos; quizzes and exams; recipe demos; and the recipes themselves, which you make at home, photographing several steps along the way. The French Pastry School calls it a “120-day course,” but what that really means is that you have a 120-day access pass to the more interactive side of it, like submitting your work and getting feedback, but you have access to the content for life. The course is thorough! It includes cookies and tarts, brownies and breads, mousse and macarons. There are weeks worth of hands-on assignments.

The first several units set expectations, explain the course's structure, and determine what you know—which also gives you a sense of what you're in for. You start with the smart basics: kitchen sanitation, the danger zone for bacteria, FIFO (first in, first out, aka “use the old stuff first”). There is a magnificent emphasis on using kitchen scales to measure ingredients by weight. There's a fair amount of classwork that happens before any baking occurs, and when the instructors finally ask you to tie your apron on, your first kitchen assignment is to “make anything you like.” I chose no-knead bread, uploading photos as I went. I sent a picture of my mise en place—all of the ingredients weighed out and ready to go before baking begins. I snapped one of the dough after it had its overnight proof and one more of the finished loaf, cut in two to show both crust and crumb. It was a little peculiar signing up for a class then immediately making something I already knew how to make, but it's also a smart, gentle invitation to start things off on the right foot.

While I've worked happily as a line cook in restaurant kitchens, pastry is very much its own discipline. I was quickly moving into a new realm and wanted to succeed. The courses also emphasized how extremely detail-oriented baking is, something which gave my OCD side the warm fuzzies.

I started a dedicated notebook and filled pages with notes on whipping egg whites and heavy cream together, and more on how to fold them into a mixture. (Light into heavy, in stages, gently, if you're curious.) I also got into pie dough, making classic pâte sucrée, where working with room-temperature ingredients is key for creating the dough, but then letting it chill in the fridge is best for rolling it out.

Photograph: Rouxbe

Not long afterward, I made chocolate chip cookies, giant beauties large enough to have crispy exteriors and pillowy centers. They contained a no-holds-barred amount of semisweet chips (one-third more than any other ingredient) and a handful of rolled oats, which I'm guessing are mostly in there for structural purposes. I shared these with a group of neighborhood friends I see once a week, The Hot Tub Club, and the cookies received high marks.

For grading, I uploaded pictures of my 13 individual cookie ingredients, all weighed out in their own little bowls, next to my name tag, which students put in every photo as a way to verify that they're submitting their own work. I also uploaded a shot of the dough and pictures of the finished cookies, both whole and in cross sections. You also type up a little summary of the baking process and any hurdles you overcame. A few days later, you get a grade and a paragraph or two of comments from instructors who consider your work and react to your summary. If you have questions along the way you can hit a Q&A button and get a response within 48 hours.

Classes went over concepts like creaming (combining fat and sugar until light and fluffy, then adding eggs slowly, followed by any other ingredients) and emulsifications (when you combine liquids that don't play well together, like oil and water). Slowly, I was learning. And this training was starting to pay dividends, something I could see while making a batch of blueberry muffins. As someone who likes but struggles to get all of his mise en place set before diving into a recipe, I liked how the class enforced this step by requiring me to have it all “en place” for a photo before I could move on. I learned that if I watched for certain waypoints, I could see into the future; if the batter didn't look fully emulsified after I'd added eggs to creamed butter and sugar, things would only continue to go sideways. The better I understood what was happening, the better the food came out.

Photograph: Rouxbe

Building on what I'd learned and made, I got all citrusy, making lemon pound cake and lemon bars, picking up new techniques as I went. The loaf pan for the pound cake, for example, gets brushed with butter and floured before you neatly tuck parchment paper in it and then brush that with butter. It feels over the top while you're doing it, but at the end, when the cake pops out of the pan like it's spring loaded, you're a happy baker.

Finally, I got a nice, full-circle feeling, using some pâte sucrée dough to make those lemon bars. Deftly combining inexperience and a lack of proper equipment, I struggled to get the dough rolled out and tucked correctly into the quarter-sheet pan. It felt like something that would have been much easier in an in-person class, where an attentive instructor could have perhaps seen trouble coming and lent a hand. I got this feeling occasionally, and I didn't love it, but considering there's a pandemic on and this would be fantastic for someone in a rural area, I tended to overlook the inconvenience. You should also bear in mind that there's a fair amount of specialty gear for baking that the average home cook may not own, so plan on laying out an additional chunk of change on pans, mixers, and utensils.

I powered through the rest of the recipe. The lemon-curd end of things was fun to make, and the bars set beautifully in the oven. The Hot Tub Club ate them in a heartbeat.

The big question with a $700 online cooking class is whether it's worth it, but to figure that out, maybe just ask yourself a short series of questions: Do I have the money to spend on myself? Am I interested in taking a semi-pro deep dive? Am I going stir crazy? Would I like to replace my nightly hour of doomscrolling with something more productive?

If you've got the money and answered yes to one of two of the other questions, go for it. Take a class, enjoy the good food, and make something delicious that you can share once this pandemic is fully behind us.