At Swich, we want to help you start thinking like a professional cook—to start thinking about all the little decisions, steps, indicators, and techniques that contribute to a successful end result. Don’t worry, you don’t have to aspire to be a professional chef, but the things they learn are now at your disposal with Swich.

We also want to empower you to think beyond cooking, and to consider the impact that your decisions will have on your health, and the people you cook for.

The Map of Cooking will help you make more informed decisions, organize your meal planning, decipher recipes, apply the right techniques, better understand flavor development, and ultimately help you better understand the world of food and cooking.

The best way to understand the Map of Cooking is to use it. Throughout your Swich experience, you’ll be able to refer back to this map to help organize and rewire your brain. Too often home cooks get caught up in following recipes like they’re a drone driven by words on a page, rather than using their own brain and cooking knowledge to make their own decisions. Once you’re able to see the world of food and cooking in this manner, you’ll begin to unleash yourself from recipes and be able to start creating delicious meals all on your own. Or, at a minimum, you’ll have better success executing recipes that you do follow. I know, it sounds a bit over-whelming right now, but if you trust the process, we’re certain you will gain a great deal of confidence.

So, how do you make sense of millions of recipes? How is this really helpful for most people? How do you know which recipe is tested or even well written? Where do you start?

The problem with all this information is that it rarely takes into consideration the process of cooking. Instead, it directs you to the end result—glossing over the actual steps along the way that are critical for success. Swich (powered by the Rouxbe Cooking School) focuses on the steps to success—the process, the techniques, and the building blocks that ultimately make a cook more confident and intuitive.

Okay, so here’s the good news. In general, 99% of all recipes are built around a very limited number of cooking techniques and methods. And the even better news, is that each of these techniques (e.g. sweating, sautéing, stir frying, steaming, etc.), can be learned in under twenty minutes. Mastering them will take a great deal of practice and effort but most are not rocket-science. They are within your reach and they will become life skills that you use for a very long time.

We’ll leave you with a Technique Wheel graphic which outlines the basic cooking techniques and methods. Learn one at a time, apply, practice and then jump onto another one.