What is the Whole Food, Plant-Based Cooking: A Beginner's Course?
This in-depth cooking course takes the science of Whole and the support of CNS Kitchen and brings it into your kitchen, giving you the skills you need to prepare healthy, great tasting meals, with confidence, and to do so in a way that will show you that food preparation can be tasty, and stress-free. Our hope is that by the end of this course you will look forward to the time you spend in your kitchen.
The chef behind this exceptional course has over 34 years of cooking experience in vegan and WFPB kitchens. He has been teaching for over 25 years and brings you every tip and trick in the book. Although this course is entirely on-demand, host Chef Del Sroufe offers weekly office hours for all students.
After completing this course, you will be able to:
- Cook with confidence
- Create a basic menu plan
- Read and execute a recipe
- Batch cook for smaller and larger households
- Use common plant-based cooking techniques
- Use common substitutes for eggs, dairy, and oil
- Shop for whole plant-based foods
- Perform proper knife techniques
- Prepare meals when you don’t want to cook
Course Overview
This one-of-a-kind course is $199 for lifetime access and includes:
15+ Hours of Content
100+ Recipes
29 Recipe Videos
Self-Paced
Who Should Enroll?
Who Should Enroll?
This course is for those who are new to the kitchen as well as seasoned veterans who are digging into plant-based cooking for the first time. Think you don’t have time to cook? We are going to bust that myth. We’ll show you how to quickly and efficiently prepare a cost effective meal and have it on the table in less time than it takes to navigate the drive through.
Course Modules
We will take you from how to boil water to full on menu planning. We’ll show you cooking, low cooking, and even no cooking options. But, it isn’t just about the cooking. Learn how to plan a meal, build your confidence, and become an effective and organized cook who isn’t spending hours in the kitchen. Best of all, you don’t have to go it alone. You will have support from responsive peers and hosts in the community discussion as well as access to Chef Del Sroufe during weekly office hours.
Setting yourself up for Cooking Success
A clean, well-organized kitchen free of clutter is very helpful for a successful cooking experience. The work you do to ready your kitchen will save you hours down the road. Here are our top tips for getting your kitchen ready to cook.
Basic Cooking Techniques
If you are an experienced cook, you might skip past the section ”Understanding the Written Recipe,” but even experienced cooks can learn something new in this section. For the new cook, understanding how a recipe should be written can save you time and grief. After all, a well-written recipe will be one of the best cooking instructors you can have, so knowing the difference between a well-written recipe and a badly written one can make all the difference in your cooking journey.
Meal Planning Part 1
Meal planning is key to ensuring that you have healthy food options available. Incorporating batch cooking into meal planning is one strategy that can work well for big and small households. It saves time and money, reduces waste and stress, and allows you more flexibility.
Meal Planning Part 2
This lesson continues with meal planning for dinner and snacks. You’ll learn how to assemble meal bowls and a salad bar to increase variety in your meal plans. If you are part of a smaller household, remember to freeze leftovers for a future meal or to add leftovers from dinner to your lunch menu for the rest of the week. If you are a large household, you can make double batches of dishes to ensure everyone has enough to eat throughout the week.
Basic Cooking Skills
This section is where you put the cooking techniques you learn into action and begin to see all of the possibilities in WFPB cooking. Practice good knife skills to keep safety at the forefront of your cooking, and don’t forget about the basics of mise en place. It will make everything faster, more efficient, and more fun.
Whole Grain Baking in an Oil-Free Whole Food, Plant-Based Kitchen
Baking, unlike other forms of cooking, is more science than art. Most baked goods follow precise formulas to get the right flavor and texture, and those formulas hold true even in a whole food, plant-based kitchen. But the best bakers go beyond such rules. They are alchemists in the kitchen. They can achieve even better results with the right ingredients and techniques. Baking with whole grains and without highly processed ingredients like oils and highly processed sugars presents a few challenges. But this is the healthiest way to bake, and if you follow the guidelines below, you can make delicious quick breads, cookies, and other flavorful baked goods.
Dessert
Healthy living doesn't mean you can’t enjoy the occasional indulgence. Whole, unprocessed ingredients can come together in endless ways to create tasty desserts that are also good for you. If you do make desserts, remember that they are still often concentrated in calories and it is possible to overeat them.
Instructor
Chef Del Sroufe currently works as Culinary Specialist at The T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies. He works with those who are looking to adopt a whole food, plant-based diet, or who struggle to lose weight and keep it off.
Del’s cooking career began when he was just eight years old; learning to cook on the weekends along with his father. By the age of thirteen he was flaunting his culinary talents by preparing family dinners, much to his mother’s delight. After high school Del shelved his love for the kitchen and sold men’s clothing while he attended The Ohio State University School of Business. Selling suits and ties did not polish Del’s wing tipped shoes so he set out to pursue his passion, cooking. He landed a position at one of Columbus, Ohio’s popular vegetarian restaurants, The King Avenue Coffeehouse. Del spent the next eight years there, expanding his culinary skills and learning the art of vegan baking.
In 1997 Del opened his vegan bakery, Del’s Bread, where he created, prepared, and served delicious vegan pastries, breads, pot pies, calzones, smoothies, and other assorted delicacies to the delight of his Columbus-based clientele. In 2001, Del transitioned from his bakery business to start a vegan Personal Chef Service, preparing eclectic plant-based cuisine to his already captivated audience. During this time, he developed what became a very popular cooking class series, sharing many of the delicious recipes he had created over the years with his students.
In 2006, Del joined Wellness Forum Foods as Executive Chef, where he continued the tradition of delivering great-tasting plant-based meals to clients locally and throughout the continental United States. Del further expanded his culinary skills by exploring whole food, plant-based recipes made with healthy ingredients and without oil, a controversial cooking style at the time.
Del also taught cooking classes and spoke at venues around Columbus and around the country, telling his personal health story and sharing what he has learned about cooking in a whole food kitchen.
Del is the author of Forks Over Knives, The Cookbook, on the New York Bestseller list for more than 30 weeks; Better Than Vegan, the story of his struggle with weight loss and gain, and how he managed to lose over 200 pounds on a low-fat, plant-based diet; The China Study Quick and Easy Cookbook; and The China Study Family Cookbook.
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