When you enroll at a culinary arts school, you bring along with you the chef's number-one, indispensable ingredient: your passion for cooking. Many students who sign up for restaurant management, pastry, cooking or baking school programs already know their way around the kitchen. But for some, the kitchen is virgin territory. What neither the newbie foodie nor the sophisticated amateur chef necessarily knows is how to integrate classical, European cuisine with contemporary techniques, or how to mix international foods or dazzling desserts with perfectly matched wines and spirits.
Culinary arts school will spice up your life, whether you want to cook professionally, run a restaurant, or serve spectacular meals to family and friends (this was Julia Child's motivation, after all). If you already have an understanding of classical French cooking, a cook-book reader's knowledge of soups, stocks, and sauces, and experience folding in pastry, culinary schools can polish your skills to a professional sheen. Many culinary arts and baking school grads find satisfying culinary and hospitality management careers with restaurants, hotels, resorts and spas, or cruise lines; start catering companies; or go solo as personal chefs.
Building Your Culinary Foundation
Depending on the culinary arts school you choose, you'll begin by building a solid foundation in classical theory and core cooking methods. Foundation culinary classes typically cover the essential ingredients in mother sauces, classical and Escoffier principles, knife skills, meat (fish and poultry) preparation techniques, and food handling principles.
You'll really see a difference in your cooking after taking basic culinary classes in traditional stock preparation and food-pairing techniques that sharpen your awareness of seasoning and how to develop your own sensitive palate.
Since sauces and soups form the stock and trade of a successful restaurant, culinary schools often emphasize coursework in the saucier's art, with detailed examinations of grand and compound sauces, reductions and consommé, and salsas, infused oils, chutneys, and relishes.
Learning the Pastry Chef's Trade
Even though you may be a flash in the kitchen when it comes to whipping up Aunt Judy's double-fudge cake or an online recipe for tollhouse cookies, you won't believe what professionalizing your baking skills will let you do. Culinary arts schools offer a baking and pastry training curriculum that will have you spinning out velvety custards, mind-blowing mousses, Linzer tortes, Choux and puff pastries, gateaux cakes, petits fours, and flakey croissants.
Pastry chef courses start with essential preparation skill and ingredient training. If you hope to prepare expertly crafted yeast breads, brioche, tart crusts, and more, you'll need the hands-on mixing and forming, rolling, and kneading skills that you won't learn from a cookbook. Culinary arts schools take dessert-making seriously. You'll learn how to craft your own caramelized sugar icings, filled cakes, tea pastries, and more, while understanding the keys to presentation and plating these treats.
Working from the Culinary Core
In music, before you learn how to play jazz, you need to learn the scales. The same is true in culinary arts and restaurant management training, where you study the fundamental core cooking techniques for meat and vegetables before creating unique entrees.
Core culinary arts classes cover instruction and practice in dry-heat cooking, including sautéing, frying, deep-frying, roasting, and grilling, while moist-heat cooking classes embrace stewing, braising, poaching and steaming. You'll learn to use these essential techniques in preparing meats, vegetables, other proteins, and starches.
Grains and vegetable core classes teach culinary arts students how to meld flavors and seasonings in preparing dishes such as pilafs, grain and legume salads, risotti, polenta, soufflés and timbales.
Above all else, core culinary arts cooking classes teach you a fundamental nutritional understanding of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins so critical in menu planning and creating a successful cuisine.
Mastering Fine Wine for Culinary Wizardry
Many restaurant management and culinary arts students really benefit from detailed foundation courses in wines and spirits. You may think you know wine, but understanding wine in relation to your palate and the dishes on your menu requires a new layer of sophistication and experience.
Wine courses cover the shadings of flavor in wines and how they complement meals when paired correctly. Chefs can actually change the acid or sugar content in cuisine simply by adjusting the wine. You'll not only learn about traditional aperitifs, varietals (Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir, Zinfandel, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot), and dessert wines, but also the historical use of wines for traditional, international and regional cuisine.
No matter your current culinary aptitude--or even your lack of same -- culinary arts school can rocket you beyond the confines of online shared recipes and the well-worn pages of your family cookbook. You'll become a seasoned professional--even if you don't choose to cook for a living.