Online cooking classes: the bill nobody quotes

A cooking subscription costs $120 to $240 a year. The ingredients to actually cook along with it will cost more than that, and no pricing page in this market mentions them.

That is the single most useful thing to know before buying one, and it changes which course you should pick: for cooking, the right course is the one whose recipes you would have shopped for anyway.

Why cooking is different from every other subject here

You cannot practise a cooking class the way you practise a drawing one. A drawing lesson costs you paper; a cooking lesson costs you a shopping list, and an unwatched cooking subscription wastes money in a second way — through ingredients bought for a lesson you then did not do.

It also means the usual advice to "just watch a few and see" works badly. Watching cooking is enjoyable and teaches you much less than cooking does, so it is unusually easy to feel you are learning while spending a year doing nothing of the sort.

The question to ask of a cooking course

1. Would I eat this on a normal week? A course built on ingredients you do not keep and would not buy again will be watched and never cooked.
2. Does it teach a technique or a set of recipes? Technique transfers; a recipe list is a cookbook you cannot leave open on the counter.
3. What equipment does it assume? This is the second unquoted bill, and it can be larger than the subscription.
4. Can I do the first lesson this weekend? If not, the momentum is gone before the refund window closes.

What the three cost

MasterClass is $120, $180 or $240 a year billed annually and is the one of the three built around named instructors, including in food. Skillshare is $167.88 a year and lists cooking among its categories.

Domestika Plus is $164.50 for a first year and renews at $329, and it is the only one where you can buy a single course and keep it — which for cooking is a genuine advantage, because a technique course is something you return to years later.

Across two years the ordering changes completely, and that comparison is the one worth making: the two-year figures are the heart of this site.

The free routes, which are strong for food

• Your public library. hoopla describes itself as "books, videos, and music - all free from your public library", and Kanopy streams free with a participating library or university card. Catalogues vary by library, so check your own — and libraries are exceptionally good on cookbooks, which remain the cheapest cooking education there is.
• OpenLearn, The Open University's free catalogue.
• YouTube, where a very large share of the best technique teaching in food now lives, free.

None of them pays this site a penny, which is why we can recommend starting there without anyone needing to trust our motives. How the money works here is set out in how this site earns.

The equipment bill, which is the third unquoted cost

Ingredients are the recurring cost and equipment is the up-front one. Neither appears on any pricing page, and for some cuisines the equipment alone exceeds a year of any subscription on this site.

Before buying a course, read its first three lessons' requirements rather than its description. If it opens with a piece of kit you do not own and would not otherwise buy, either budget for it honestly or pick a different course.

• Pans and knives you probably have, and a course that starts here is a course you can start this weekend.
• Specialist kit — a stand mixer, a pasta machine, a thermometer probe, a wok that can take real heat — is where the money goes, and it is bought once.
• Things you cannot buy, such as a domestic hob that reaches restaurant temperatures. Some techniques do not transfer to a home kitchen, and a good course says so.

Choosing the first three lessons before you subscribe

This is the practical test, and it takes ten minutes on the catalogue page. If you cannot name three specific lessons you would cook in the next month, you are buying a television subscription.

1. Pick three lessons whose shopping lists overlap your normal one.
2. Check that all three can be done in an evening or a weekend afternoon.
3. Put the dates in a calendar before you pay, not after.
4. Cook the first one inside the first fortnight, while a refund is still theoretically possible on the service you chose.

Anyone who does that will get value from a cooking subscription. Anyone who does not will spend $120 to $240 on watching, which is a legitimate thing to spend money on but should be a decision rather than an accident.

Buying one course instead

For cooking specifically, a single course you keep is often the better purchase, because technique is something you return to. The pasta course you bought four years ago is still there the week you decide to make pasta again; the subscription you cancelled is not.

Only one of the three services priced here sells courses that way, and its individual purchases also carry a fourteen-day refund window that its own subscription does not. The details, including what its countdown clock turns out to be, are in our Domestika review.

None of which changes the ingredient bill. Whatever you buy, the cooking is where the money goes, and a course that fits your normal shopping is worth more than a better course that does not.

The free route is unusually strong here too

Cooking is the subject where free material competes hardest with paid, because technique demonstrates perfectly on video and because so many accomplished cooks publish for nothing. A library card adds cookbooks, which remain the densest cooking instruction ever devised and cost you a walk to the library.

What a paid course adds is sequence and a voice you trust, which are real. What it does not add is anyone tasting what you made, and no subscription in this market provides that any more than a writing subscription provides an editor.

So the test is simple. If you would cook three specific lessons in the next month and you cannot find equivalents free, pay. If you are buying it to become the sort of person who cooks more, the charge will not do that and the ingredients will go off in the meantime.

The money page keeps every figure on this site in one place: whether a MasterClass subscription is worth paying for. Prices were read on one day, in a US-configured browser; open the seller’s panel yourself before you agree to anything.