Resources and inspiration for an aspiring chef are everywhere. From famous cook books and television shows to TikTok shorts and online courses, there’s an endless supply of opportunities to learn about cooking. This has many people, inspired by food and the Culinary Arts, wondering what they might actually learn in culinary school that they can’t learn practicing on their own at home.
While an amateur chef or at home cook will certainly find some useful tips and tricks for cooking from books, videos and online courses, the business of culinary, the profession of restaurants and commercial kitchens, while based on the same principles, is worlds apart from cooking at home for family and friends.
Culinary school is great for your first career. It’s also useful if you’re mid-career and looking to advance in your job or the hospitality industry. And, there’s even value for the passionate amateur chef looking to gain new skills. You can learn a great deal in culinary school, no matter your intention. Read on to get some real details about what you’ll learn and why it’s of benefit to everyone.
Some basic skills learned in a Culinary Arts program useful for home chefs might include:
- Timing, preparation and organization
- Taste and taste combinations
- Knife skills and types of cuts
- Basic butchery and fish preparation
- Safe handling of foods
Industrial Grade Kitchen Experience
Culinary school will teach you the much sought after knife skills and the timing of dishes. These are great skills to have, but the focus of a culinary education and what you’ll really learn is how to work in commercial kitchens. Professional chefs and bakers share their experiences. They’ll each you to work side-by-side with others in a professional setting. Culinary school is career education. It prepares you for a lifelong career in restaurants and hotels. It teaches you to prepare creative meals in large quantities, of different types, for a range of customers in different settings.
You’ll get comfortable with professional equipment and get a sense of what it’s like to work on a busy brigade line. You’ll be on a busy line, at least part of the time. Sure, you’ll study, read texts, hear lectures and prepare assignments, but you’ll also get practice and practical experience. It’s the practice and experience which leads to confidence, creativity and success in a fast-paced restaurant and hospitality industry.
Trained Professional Culinary Instructors
Culinary schools give you access to the knowledge, experience and resources of chef instructors. Each chef instructor shares with you their hard earned industry experience and professional insights. Culinary Arts instructors come from professional kitchens and commercial bakeries. They’ll instruct you in commercial kitchen best practices and answer your questions. It’s a much lower-pressure environment than a busy restaurant. There’s room for learning and developing skills. It’s trial by fire in commercial kitchens and restaurants and there’s little room for questions. Instructors know this as they have, literally, been in your apron before.
Culinary Arts instructors come from professional kitchens and commercial bakeries.
It’s important to make this distinction between the Culinary Arts and at home cooking. At the same time, many of the tools, tips and techniques do translate to cooking at home. It’s also good to note that many culinary schools, like the Laney College Culinary Arts department, feature certification and single-year programs. There are certificate programs designed for those with culinary career goals and culinary foundations programs for those who want to hone their culinary craft without the career aspirations.
Working as a Culinary Team
A Culinary Arts program will teach you to work as a team, in a commercial kitchen, in both theory and practice. You’ll learn the vocabulary of professional kitchens and how to work on a brigade line preparing dishes. You’ll get to work in every role, as every part of the team, not just a single job. It’s a chance to explore what you love and get a sense for what you don’t. You might just excel as the garde manger or find your passion as a patissier.
Successful full-service restaurants operate with the highest degrees of precision. Each member of the team is assigned a particular role. It is the effective performance of each role and the maintenance of a hierarchy, like an army brigade, that streamlines operations and allows for quality at high volumes. Often called a “brigade system” or “brigade de cuisine,” this system was popularized in France in the 19th century and is based on principles developed in the French military. While not strictly adhered to in many modern restaurants, the division of labor and resulting efficiency has endured, in some form or another, in the modern commercial kitchen across the globe. Remnants of this system remain to this day.
Roles and Stations in a Brigade Kitchen
Your culinary lessons will teach you the theory and every aspect of working in a kitchen brigade. You’ll learn the different roles and how to work as a cook on a line. As part of a larger team of professionals, you will get acquainted with and understand the stations and roles throughout a kitchen and within a fully functioning restaurant.
Stations and roles taught in a Culinary Arts program may include:
- Prep and clean-up areas
- Dessert preparation stations
- Pantry and salads stations
- Fryer, grill and saute areas
- Storage and dish washing
You’ll also learn the names and functions of a kitchen brigade and gain practice in roles like:
- Expediter (the link between the kitchen staff and customers)
- Executive Chef
- Chef de Cuisine (Kitchen Leader)
- Sous chef or Sous Chef de Cuisine
- Garde Manger (Pantry Chef)
- Patissier (Pastry Chef)
- Chef de Partie (Line Cooks)
- Saucier (Sauce Chef)
- Boucher (Butcher)
- Plongeur (Dishwasher)
Being prepared to take on any of these roles as you enter a commercial kitchen can be of great advantage to your career. The brigade system not only ensures efficiency, it allows advancement within a kitchen. Certain roles command more importance. With this is more responsibility and increased salaries. That’s not to say that a dishwasher (plongeur) is less important than a garde manger. It’s just that you may need to show initiative and drive in order to move up the ranks to Chef de Cuisine or Executive Chef.
In addition to roles and responsibilities, you’ll learn how to safely and effectively move in a kitchen. This skill is best honed before you’re under pressure and moving fast with knives and steaming foods during a Saturday dinner rush.
Practical Cooking Skills and Techniques
Working in a brigade kitchen and cooking on a line are invaluable skills for those interested in lifelong culinary careers. These skills will serve you well. A Culinary Arts education will also earn you the valuable experience of managing and directing a team in preparing to make and serve your own culinary creations. To understand and prepare your own creations, you’ll learn practical cooking skills and techniques. These skills can be applied both in commercial kitchens and at home.
A Culinary Arts program with give you the skills to:
- Prepare hot and cold sauces for pastas, proteins, starches and vegetables.
- Understand standard cooking methods for pastas, proteins, starches and vegetables.
- Bake breads, cakes and pastries.
- Properly cut vegetables, quarter and prepare whole chickens and cut beef.
- Apply proper cooking methods like poaching, braising, grilling, roasting, frying, sautéing, sous vide, forcemeat, galantine and ballotine.
- Integrate flavors, ingredients, seasonings and cooking techniques of major world cuisines.
- Understand both current and traditional techniques in global cuisine.
- Employ techniques, tools and basic guidelines to optimize appearance, flavor, taste, texture and doneness of foods.
- Understand presentation and nutritional content of a variety of international cuisines.
- Fix a dish that has gone wrong or account for dietary requirements and restrictions.
By the time you’ve earned a Culinary Arts certification or degree, you’ll be prepared to read recipes and scale them when appropriate, take instructions and complete unit conversions. You’ll learn how to apply the principles of culinary mathematics and understand the science of weights and measures.
Safe Handling, Hygiene and Sanitation Practices
In learning to prepare dishes in a professional kitchen, you’ll also learn to safely handle food. Safe food handling is of crucial importance for the health and safety of the at home cook as well as the professional chef. While no one wants to get sick from mishandled food, commercial kitchens are totally dependent upon the standard of food safety and the appropriate sanitary procedures learned in culinary school.
In learning to prepare dishes in a professional kitchen, you’ll also learn to safely handle food.
With such a critical emphasis, one of the first and perhaps most important subjects for culinary students is safe food handling, preparation and proper hygiene. In culinary school and in a professional kitchen setting you should be ready and prepared to clean. A lot. There’s obvious reasons for this as lazy or unhygienic food practices can sicken, injure or even kill restaurant patrons. A restaurant business couldn’t survive poisoning its customers. Local health departments shut down operations found violating safe handling and sanitation guidelines. So, early culinary lessons include understanding the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point program and ways of applying these to the professional food service kitchens.
Safe handling and effective materials handling also include:
- The ability to describe food-borne illness symptoms and prevention methods.
- Demonstrating effective mis en place or set up.
- Sanitation and safe handling of foods, including raw ingredients.
- Teamwork and task coordination in food preparation and service.
- Food purchasing, receiving, storing and issuing controls.
- Construction of food production control systems.
- Staging, preparation and planning.
Hiring, Team and Staff Management
Safety and safe food handling starts at the top. It extends across the entire kitchen. Everyone from the Executive Chef to the dishwashers, expediters and wait staff follow safe-handling procedures. In a Culinary Arts program, you’ll learn each of these roles and what they entail, including Executive Chef and management roles. A Culinary Arts certificate program will teach you the standard tools and practices for screening kitchen staff. You’ll learn to select the best person for a job as well as the legal considerations around hiring and managing kitchen teams.
Operating a Restaurant Business
A Culinary Arts education is more than learning how to cook or work in a kitchen. The education prepares you, as we’ve explored, to succeed in a lifelong career in commercial kitchens, hotels, hospitals, cruise-ships or anywhere quality dishes are prepared in commercial settings. So, while the amateur cook does learn knife skills (with plenty of necessary practice), a full culinary education includes operations and restaurant management, from purchasing and costing to staff recruitment and professional development.
… a full culinary education includes operations and restaurant management…
Culinary School gives you the opportunity to learn how to operate as an Executive Chef or Restaurant Manager. Your culinary education is an opportunity to develop skills to:
- Identify the essential elements in a successful staff training program and how to develop such a program.
- Outline the steps of the performance review process and their associated legal and ethical considerations.
- Define the four essential elements of successful discipline and explain the importance of each.
- Define the concepts of responsibility, authority and accountability.
- Explain their relationship of authority and accountability to delegation and efficiency as well as the associated legal considerations.
- Discuss and design procedures for monitoring performance and taking corrective action.
Dining Room Techniques
A comprehensive culinary education does not forget the customer or the front of the house. This is really where the magic happens, where valued customers get to experience the joy that is the Culinary Arts. As much as a brigade relies on roles, efficiency and accountability, the front of the house is critically important to the success of any restaurant.
Many Culinary Arts schools, like Laney College of Culinary Arts, operate restaurants and kitchens, like the Laney Bistro. These working kitchens and restaurants give culinary students the opportunity to learn and experience important front-of-house work and techniques like:
- Polishing glasses and silverware
- Proper tablecloth placement
- Fixing wobbly tables or chairs
- Best practices for greeting and serving guests
- Wine pouring
Food Appearance and Presentation
As critical as front of house techniques are for a remarkable culinary experience, no amount of front-of-house work can make an ugly or poorly presented dish look any better. A culinary education will teach you a range of appearance and presentation techniques to ensure your guests are enjoying the full, dazzling sensory experience that is the hallmark and pursuit of the Culinary Arts.
A culinary education will allow you to:
- Analyze and prepare traditional charcuterie and garde-manger (cold food items and storage) recipes appropriate to the contemporary modern restaurant.
- Use basic guidelines to prepare hors d’oeuvres, appetizers and canapés and demonstrate classic presentation and garnishing techniques.
The Business of Culinary
(How to Run a Profitable Restaurant)
You’ve learned killer knife skills, operating as a team in a brigade kitchen, working safely with food and as a manager. It’s fantastic to know how to prepare delightful dishes from around the world and this might be enough for some looking to work in a kitchen as part of a team, but many who enter culinary school are looking to launch their own business or build skills for an existing business. A Culinary Arts degree or certification will prepare you to run a profitable business, the business of Culinary Arts. From Mathematics to English and Spanish courses, Culinary programs like those at Laney College can teach you to be a better, more thoughtful and skilled business person. The experience can expose you to new ideas, critical thinking skills and the resources you’ll need to communicate, prepare proposals and run a profitable hospitality or restaurant business.
Skills you can learn during your Culinary Arts education include:
- Assessing and illustrating effective inventory management practices.
- Recognizing and creating effective food cost control systems.
- Explaining and interpreting effective beverage purchasing, receiving, storing and issuing controls.
- Understanding and analyzing the cost/volume/profit relationship.
- Demonstrating and appraising menu analysis techniques.
- Describing and analyzing food sales controls.
- Identifying and evaluating labor cost considerations.
- Standardizing recipes and costing items.
Start Your Culinary Arts Education
Whether you’re interested in amazing your family and friends at the dinner table, or are seeking a life-long and rewarding career in the restaurant and hospitality industry, what you’ll learn at a culinary school will open up an entirely new world of possibilities in the Culinary Arts.
With the affordable tuition and financial aid offered at community colleges around the country, there’s very little reason not to explore a culinary education. So, sharpen your knives and pull out your aprons, it’s time to learn the business and pleasures of the Culinary Arts.
