Salads have gotten a bad reputation. The idea is that a salad is a small offering and that if you order it in a restaurant, you’re trying to lose weight. But salads can be every bit as delicious as soups, entrees, and maybe even desserts. In this lesson, you will learn how to craft a unique dressing to complement salad greens that range from sweet and tender to bitter and coarse.

Pastry doughs fall into two main categories that are defined by their textures: crumbly or flaky. In our first lesson, we discussed crumbly doughs made by the creaming method, which is how butter is distributed evenly throughout a dough. In this lesson, we’ll see how to make a flaky dough using the rubbed-in dough method, and we’ll learn how to make the two most common types of rubbed-in doughs, those for piecrusts and biscuits.

Roasting is a dry-heat cooking method without fat. The circulating air in the oven chamber is actually what does the cooking. Air is not a great conductor of heat, so roasting is a gentler cooking technique. There are many benefits to roasting, but perhaps the best is that it seems like there are always leftovers on hand for a sandwich or a roast beef hash. There are also the benefits of the warmth of the oven and the captivating aroma in the house that develops as you are roasting.

Over the course of the following 24 lessons, you will learn foundational cooking techniques that will open up a broader world of food and cooking for your enjoyment. The goal of this comprehensive program is to help you become a better cook—one that is more confident, more aware, and more likely to draw satisfaction from the craft of preparing food. This program is based on three broad themes. The first is understanding that ingredients have to be of good quality and that you can only expect those ingredients to do certain things. The second broad theme is learning some foundational cooking techniques. Finally, it is important that you understand the interaction of taste and flavor, which is the focus of this lesson.