Tag: Culinary Arts

Education as a Requirement to Become a Chef

How does one become a chef? Many people have asked these and each may have different answers to offer.

A chef is the overseer of all the activities in a kitchen. He is the person that prepares, innovates and cooks food professionally. There are various types of chef careers that one could try looking into. But each has its own requirement. But central among them is- the love for food.

Without the capacity to create and innovate recipes, chefs would be turned into mere cooks. But even the cooks could be called chef if he is working professionally and he is the only one working in the kitchen since basically, chef is the French term for a chief. Thus, the chef in any kitchen is just the manager of every business occurring in it.

So, what are the paths towards becoming a chef?

Well, many would tell you to get educated in the industry of kitchen, garlic and Caesars Salad. You could start with a one-year program from a school that offers culinary arts. However, you also have the choice to enroll for a bachelor’s degree in culinary arts. Which ever way, your only real hope is to have a break or you might end up preparing gravies.

In formal education, you could further have options. Among the many are apprenticeship and institutional training. The latter delves deeper on study program while apprenticeship helps students learn by observing what and how professional chefs do it while being employed.

Apprenticeship seems to be the best option since it will not incur you to spend as much as with enrolling yourself into an institution. Plus you get the pleasure of observing people do some real great stuff like turning ordinary ingredient into extraordinary meals. Through observation, you will be able to really examine if you the vocation for cooking.

This kind of training will also expose you to the core actions of a chef’s life and give you the real element of hands-on experiences. This would also give you the standpoint between choosing if you truly want to pursue culinary arts as a career.

Any school on culinary arts would be able to help you get formal class studies and application. Be sure to check on the credentials of the instructors and the curriculum. Remember that you’ll be paying cash for them, it’s just proper that you get the other end of the bargain.

Your training and education could be your entry towards a chef’s career. It will arm you with tangible proofs of your proficiency in cooking and preparing food. But still, nothing beats passion on cooking and sheer love for food.

After school you will need to have some years of experiences. You might start as a dishwasher or as a help on the executive chef. You might even have tasks such as preparation of utensils or peeling and cutting ingredients.

But that doesnt matter since all you need is to survive this stage. This must not discourage you from pursuing your course of life. Instead, look at these experiences as extra trainings that will help you find better-paying jobs afterwards. This hard training will hone you more to become resolute in pursuing careers.

After years of dealing with this kind of life, you can now actually move into the real business of a chef. As you move up the ladder, you will take with you the education you earned from formal training and apprenticeship, hardwork and achievement.

Be Inspired, Become a Celebrity Chef!

Whoever in the world does not appreciate a well-cooked food? Do you know that those cuisines that you have fallen in love with in the fancy restaurants are prepared and cooked by the well-equipped chefs? It feels utterly significant to you that people appreciate and in fact love your cooking. Now who has the right to become chefs themselves? Who deserves to enjoy the feeling of being appreciated and revered? Everybody does! And if someone has the talent for cooking, definitely he could officially become a certified chef.

Who ever thought that being in the limelight is all what the celebrities could be good at? There are a lot of celebrities who have other careers to busy themselves with. Many of them have long realized that they could excel in other areas and one of which is in the cooking arena. Yes, many of today’s actors, actresses, and directors are in fact good cooks. They have their own specialties as well. Moreover, some of them have taken the right path and have landed themselves in the reputations of great celebrity chefs. Among them are Julia Child, Alton Brown and Wolfgang Puck.

What are the components of becoming a great celebrity chef? They could be the combination of proper timing, talent, strong personality, dependable education, and the will to excel in the field.

One of the best schools, the CHIC or Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago is aimed at preparing the learners in handling several careers that are related to the culinary arts by the use of the influences on food preparation in the areas of the traditional, Midwest, American, and the European settings. Let us take a look at the celebrated great celebrity chefs of all time.

Julia Child lived in the outskirts of Marseilles and Paris right after the Second World War. It was in this time when she took interest in learning the French culinary arts. She took classes at the Le Cordon Bleu and cooked for her family and friends. Her focus was on mystery meats and casserole so the Americans loved her craft.

Alton Brown basically grew up assisting his grandmother and mother in the kitchen. He found a career as a video director and cinematographer but because of his passion for foods, he came up with a niche to expose his culinary knowledge. Now, he is the host of Good Eats of the Food Network.

Wolfgang Puck is a restaurateur whose name could be spotted in several malls. His Franco-Californian attack on food recipes has definitely warmed the hearts of millions of food lovers. He started mastering the culinary arts at fourteen.

There are great differences between the educations received by these well-known celebrity chefs but they agree at one point and that is in terms of sharing a similar passion and the drive to share that passion to the rest of the world. These great celebrity chefs encourage the budding chefs out there to only believe that they could excel in other aspects of life and that learning could not only be confined in one shell.

Becoming a celebrity chef is not a dream that would be hard to fulfill. Equipped with the right components, attitude, and point of view in life, you could also gain a credible reputation for yourself. It is a matter of faith in yourself!

Gourmet Recipes – Choosing the Right Gourmet Recipes Online

You can log into the internet and do a search for gourmet recipies, and you will immediately have a wide variety of different completely mouth watering and totally irresistible recipes that you can print out and try right now. You can try these gourmet recipies at home with your family or you can cook for your friends and your loved ones. While many online recipes are protected by the people that developed them, there are too many gourmet recipies available online for completely free, meaning that you can print them out and try them tonight.

The first thing that you need to consider when it comes to finding online gourmet recipies is whether or not you are making the best choices. Any time that you feel in the mood for cooking gourmet food at home, the following information will prove to be extremely useful. Understanding what the concept of gourmet means and is all about is an important foundation for understanding how you can create gourmet cuisine of your own. Gourmet is a concept that has everything to do with the sensuous enjoyment of food as well as drink. Gourmet, by definition, is an ideal that is associated with culinary arts and the creation of fine food and fine drink.

* When making gourmet recipies at home, you want to make sure that you are always using the freshest and the highest quality ingredients. Any recipe that is requiring a specific cut of meat needs to use that specific cut of meat, even if it may cost a little more to do it the way that the gourmet recipies dictate. There are elements that make gourmet eating what it is, and messing with these elements will spoil your chances of a real gourmet meal.

* While you are cooking, you may want to use a convection oven rather than a conventional oven, and yes, this does matter when it comes to gourmet recipies. You should probably need to use a temperature converter to make sure that you are making the necessary heating adjustments depending on what type of oven you are using and what type of oven was used when the gourmet recipies were developed.

* Sometimes you will come across ingredients in your gourmet recipies that will be difficult for you to find. Unfortunately, when you substitute items in a gourmet recipe, you may be messing up the final results. For this reason, you do need to make sure that you are using the exact ingredients that are being called out for in the gourmet recipies that you are following, otherwise you may not end up with what the recipe developer intended, which spoils the entire concept of a recipe-driven gourmet meal.

Follow these simple rules for gourmet recipies and you should be able to turn out some truly wonderful gourmet meals for yourself, your friends and family and other loved ones.