Culinary school students expect to learn the basics of cooking, including such things as knife skills, different cooking methods, sauces, broths, seasoning, etc. You may ask, then, what do you learn in culinary school that you couldn’t learn on the job? Many chefs will tell you they learned everything there is to know about being a chef by working in restaurants. Are they right?
What Do You Learn in Culinary School Besides Basic Cooking?
Learning on the job means that you will learn the ways of the particular chef you work under or the particular restaurant at which you work. When you are hired on in a restaurant kitchen, nobody has time to teach you everything. You will learn just what you need to do a particular job. As you gain experience, show initiative, and demonstrate your willingness to work hard and take on responsibility, you should be able to move up in the kitchen hierarchy to more skilled positions. Along the way, you may learn a lot of valuable lessons and make a lot of mistakes. You may also pick up some bad habits that a culinary education could have helped you avoid.
The main things you will learn in culinary school, besides the fundamentals of cooking are things you can’t pick up as easily, as quickly, or as completely on the job. Some of these things are important to help you avoid developing bad habits. For example, you may learn how a particular executive chef runs his kitchen by working for him, but he may not be teaching you the best ways to run a professional kitchen. Other things that chefs who trained on the job often lack is a knowledge of food chemistry and a theoretical knowledge of cooking.
Food Chemistry and Theoretical Cooking Knowledge
While you may gain a practical knowledge of cooking by working at restaurants, you may lack theoretical knowledge. To understand this, think not of how you prepare a dish, but of what happens to foods as you cook. A great example of this that you may be familiar with is the work of Alton Brown on his long-running Food Network show, Good Eats. Brown not only showed how to cook many basic dishes and more exotic ones, but he also explained the chemistry of food. He also showed us why you do what you do in cooking. Brown learned this in culinary school, not on the job. This is something you can expect to learn, as well.
This knowledge will be invaluable to you as theoretical knowledge can be applied to everything you do, whereas you cannot always extrapolate the theoretical from practical on-the-job learning.
Knowledge Of How A Professional Kitchen Is Run
Foundational knowledge in cooking theory is as valuable as hands-on learning. Another thing you may lack is foundational knowledge of how a professional kitchen should be run.
While there may be many ways to cook a dish, including shortcuts, there are certain things that cannot be compromised. This is not to say that a practical knowledge of cooking born of experience is not just as valuable.
Alton Brown may know much about the chemistry of food, but, in reality, he has no practical experience as a restaurant chef. He is, in effect, an educated home cook.
Some of the things you will learn in culinary school that will give you an advantage going into the restaurant industry are given below.
Culinary School Lessons Other than Cooking
- Proper food handling and food safety
- Kitchen sanitation
- Public health regulations
- Food purchasing and controlling food cost
- Food storage
- Menu planning
Those who debate whether culinary school is worth the expense and time for those wishing to become cooks in the food-service industry sometimes forget that a culinary education may not only prepare you to become a chef in a restaurant or another type of food-service establishment or institution.
It may also prepare you to enter into many other types of food-related careers without having to spend years and years working in the culinary field. For more information, see I Want to Go to Culinary School…
Often, a culinary school graduate will tell you what they did not learn, and what they had to pick up on the job.
For example, you do not get to practice a technique hundreds of times in culinary school until you perfect it. What these graduates do not seem to realize is that what is true of culinary school is true of most vocational and/or liberal educations.
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Since more and more people are seeking a virtual education online, it’s worth exploring whether some of these subjects could be learned outside the kitchen by attending an online culinary college. The answer is yes. Several well-known and reputable culinary schools offer online culinary programs, such as Rouxbe, Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts, Le Cordon Bleu, Culinary Institute of America, and Institute of Culinary Education.
You may also want to explore online culinary school opportunities at local community colleges. Many such programs may offer education as good as anything you can get at the more famous schools, at affordable prices.
