A Certified Working Pastry Chef, for example, must have at least five years working as an entry-level pastry cook or assistant without formal education, but a high school diploma or equivalent is required.
To certify, you must meet the requirements as well as pass a written and practical examination. Shailynn Krow began writing professionally in By Shailynn Krow. Apprenticeship Apprenticeships move outside of the traditional classroom and take a hands-on approach.
Work Experience Work experience is a common way to become a pastry chef. Conversations with local chefs had persuaded her that some culinary schools were not really teaching their students how to taste their dishes, operate outside of recipes, and fix their mistakes.
These are the basics of "culinary intuition," as she calls it. And so with the SFCS, Liano has set out to correct what she perceives as a deficiency in culinary education. Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park dean of culinary arts Brendan Walsh says that from their first day of school, CIA students are also tasting, touching, and feeling ingredients, and building their perceptions of seasoning. In their freshman year, students have a physiology of food class that teaches things like why comfort foods have such a profound psychological effect.
And there are other skills, too, that Walsh thinks culinary schools ought to be teaching students in order to become successful restaurant chefs. Seeing restaurants close, he says, you realize what those skills are in terms of long-term thinking and knowing how to work with other people. Even just figuring out how to make your restaurant concept right for its community is valuable. And communications director Jeff Levine agrees, saying, " We're preparing them for life, not just how to cook an egg.
Each school has its own way of building an education. The San Francisco Cooking School offers tiny classes of 14 people that culminates in a culinary certification after six months. Working chefs come in fairly frequently for full-day sessions to show students things like how to break down a pig.
Students take field trips. Repetition is key, and so are the externship placements. SFCS has also tossed out some elements of the traditional culinary school curriculum, such as sous vide, which San Francisco chefs told Liano they could teach new cooks themselves in two days.
Rather, she says, SFCS is teaching students things like how two fats react together or why mayonnaise breaks and how to fix it. The Culinary Institute of America is a much bigger school, but it also keeps class sizes to 16 students per chef-instructor.
Each graduating class has four groups of students enrolled in the culinary arts program and one in the pastry program, so there are about 80 new students every three weeks. Classes rotate in three-week blocks, though the introductory culinary fundamentals class lasts for five three-week periods. After the culinary fundamentals course, students will begin to cook for each other and eventually even the public before graduation. The CIA program offers two sets of three-week "classes" spent operating the school's on-site and very real restaurants, and it also has an externship requirement.
After the two-year associate's degree program, a student can choose to stay for a bachelor's degree that involves some liberal arts courses. Other culinary schools overlap and differ with these programs. Prospective students should do their research into all of these options and figure out what type of curriculum best suits their own goals and temperament. It helps to examine a school's history with controversy, too, when deciding where to spend your money. Earlier this year, a group of undergraduate students staged a widely publicized protest of what they perceived as the school's weakened educational standards.
But one student, Kwame Onwuachi , insists that the small group was not representative of the student body at large. The protestors had asked him to take part in it, too, and he refused. But it's hard to know for sure the scope of the protest.
One of the walkout organizers told the New York Times back in April that "many, many more are with us, but they're afraid to publicly show their support for us. Regardless of the incident, the CIA remains generally well-regarded within the chef community. Daniel Boulud defends the school, calling the incident "embarrassing" and "ridiculous," and explaining that the students, "should have known way before they were stepping in where they were going. But protests and lawsuits at culinary schools in other parts of the country have not elicited such vigorous defenses.
In , the California School of Culinary Arts in Pasadena, the Western Culinary Institute in Portland, and San Francisco's California Culinary Academy were all sued by former students who claimed to be misled about their post-grad career opportunities. The CIA's dean of culinary arts Brendan Walsh and communications director Jeff Levine say that the for-profit culinary schools — which can afford to blast their message to a wider audience with TV ads — complicate matters for non-profits like the CIA.
The difference, Walsh says, is that the CIA's core business is education, while money is the core business for the for-profit institutions. But, of course, costs are a critique for all schools. It's also key to research the faculty before going to culinary school. Just as not every chef is going to be a good mentor, not every culinary school instructor is going to be an engaged or engaging teacher.
Corbett sees it as even more dire, saying, " I think there are few culinary schools that actually have really talented educators within the schools.
Most culinary schools are staffed by people who are done with the restaurant industry. It's up to the schools to make sure they are hiring the right faculty, and it's also up to culinary school applicants to make sure they are seeking out the right teachers.
But, I mean, that brings the question, is the program you're offering the Juilliard of culinary school? Networking is an area in which culinary school has a distinct advantage over going straight to work in a kitchen. And not just for aspiring restaurant chefs, either. At culinary school, students get the opportunity to meet chefs and food service professionals from the owners of a small California vineyard to the legendary Thomas Keller. Many culinary programs also involve some sort of externship program that provides another opportunity to interact with professional chefs and potential employers.
It's not that way everywhere. When Bill Corbett first arrived in San Francisco to work at its two-Michelin-star Michael Mina restaurant, he reached out to one of the local culinary schools to build connections and bring in students. The school never responded. Now, though, he expects to take in some students from the SFCS pastry program once they reach the externship phase.
The CIA's approved externship list includes four of the top five kitchens on the World's 50 Best Restaurant list Copenhagen's Noma being the exception. Students might also do their externships at the Food Network or the San Francisco Chronicle , depending on their interests.
To help manage these, the school has a dedicated externship office that ensures students will be doing more than just getting coffee for the chef.
Beyond these kinds of opportunities to meet established chefs, culinary schools are also a place to meet a side swath of similarly minded fellow students. These students might someday be the key to a future job or partnership. While externship and networking opportunities are helpful for obtaining a job, some culinary school programs do go a little further.
The CIA, for example, has a placement office that its alumni can use throughout the course of their careers to help find available positions. And the school hosts career fairs at the campus gym where independent restaurants, resorts, cruise lines, supermarkets, representatives from the New York State school system, and healthcare professionals turn up to recruit graduates.
So culinary school is certainly a useful leg up in job hunting. That's especially true in the hotel or corporate chef career path, where the application process is fairly rigorous. Oliver Beckert of the Four Seasons explains that candidates have to go through four to five interviews before they land a position. He likes to hire culinary school graduates and says he would probably consider them before a candidate who didn't go to culinary school.
While Beckert knows that there are plenty of cooks who learn on the job, he's looking for someone who already knows the basics. That is something that culinary school does provide. But having a culinary school degree or certification doesn't necessarily give job applicants an edge, as several other chefs have indicated. Los Angeles restaurateur Suzanne Goin says that if she had a resume in hand from a cook who had spent a year working in a restaurant with which she was familiar, she "would take that person long before I would take the culinary school person for sure.
Having a culinary school degree or certification doesn't necessarily give job applicants an edge. Chicago restaurateur Paul Kahan and Philadelphia chef Brad Spence both agree that there are a couple factors above all else when they're hiring: attitude and passion. Spence hires mainly on attitude, explaining that he can tell immediately when a cook is passionate and interested in food regardless of experience or background.
Kahan says that it doesn't matter whether a person went to culinary school. All that he's looking for is someone who is passionate about food and not the celebrity that has become a part of the restaurant world.
That comes with the territory. But the kid that comes out of culinary school and wants to have a TV career and make a million dollars is not really what our company is all about. Kwame Onwuachi already had a catering business and an endorsement from the New York Daily News as an "emerging chef to the stars," but last year Onwuachi decided he was hitting a ceiling. He needed to broaden his skills and tighten his grip on the fundamentals of cooking to take his two-year-old catering business even further.
And so he enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America. The plan was always to go back to his catering business upon graduation. He even kept the business up and running during his associate's degree program in order to help pay for school.
But now, Onwuachi says, his plans have changed. He'd like to study kaiseki in Kyoto, or perhaps, if they'll hire him, return to Per Se. It was a discovery he may have never made had he not gone to the CIA. Though communications director Jeff Levine doesn't have any specific numbers, he suspects that a good chunk of the CIA student body switches course at some point in their studies.
Some simply may not have realized that they could make a career out of research and development or nutrition, while others might learn somewhere along the way that the difficult life of a restaurant chef is not what they want.
School gives them a framework to see that there are other jobs out there that still involve cooking or food. The San Francisco Cooking School's Tony Liano puts it this way: "How will you ever discover you have a passion for pastry if you go work in an Italian restaurant for two years? On the other hand, it's a hell of a lot cheaper to change career tracks if you figure out you don't like cooking in restaurants before you pay any culinary school tuition.
Sure, you might still end up enrolling in a culinary program to enter a different field such as catering or nutrition or working in a resort, but this is why chefs like David Chang argue for aspiring cooks to get real-world kitchen experience before or instead of committing that kind of money. David Chang speculates that at least 50 percent of graduates who go to work in restaurants are no longer cooking after five years. Chang speculates that at least 50 percent of graduates who go to work in restaurants are no longer cooking after five years , pointing to record-high enrollment rates and claims of a line cook shortage in New York a shortage which Dirt Candy's Amanda Cohen has noticed as well.
Even if the five-year attrition rate were 20 percent, Chang argues that would still be too high. It would be like finding out that 20 percent of a school's medical students were no longer practicing medicine five years later, he says. Yes, these cooks might find work as a private chef or elsewhere that puts their degree to good use, a decision that Chang says makes absolute sense as "all are respected and very hard and God bless 'em because it's a fucking hard business. On the flip side, he says, there's another problem with the system when cooks take jobs at hotels and resorts straight out of culinary school.
While those jobs are better paid and usually located in beautiful locales, Chang says the skills cooks learn at some of these resorts don't always match up to the needs of a restaurant kitchen. So when those cooks are looking to move to New York and move up to a sous chef level at a fine dining restaurant, they're not necessarily qualified even if they have put in the years. CIA provost Mark Erickson takes issue with this line of thinking.
Erickson argues that one of the most powerful people in food that nobody knows is Jorge Collazo, the executive chef of New York City schools. While the CIA certainly holds working in restaurants in high regard, Erickson says he hopes students come to the school for a foundation in the culinary arts. But Chang says he does recognize the value of culinary literacy.
He stresses that his critiques of culinary school are to address the times when students fall through the cracks. A college degree offers a variety of programs for the aspiring chef. Specialized culinary classes may also focus on a specific area, such as pastry or baking. A Culinary Arts focus is a common degree choice.
In addition to meeting general education requirements, you will have an additional two years of instruction in other areas, such as budgeting, inventory and managing a staff the business stuff. Johnson and Wales University offers a Liberal Arts program for aspiring chefs, providing a broad spectrum of knowledge and skills. You usually need to complete a thesis once you have finished all of your coursework.
Also, since these degrees dive deeper into culinary theory and concepts, they often involve more intensive focus, such as nutrition, food science or hospitality.
But there are many success stories from those who have done just that. At a culinary school, you will receive a comprehensive culinary education in a relatively short span of time, providing the fast-track to a new career. The application process is also relatively easy to get into culinary school.
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