What Education Do I Need to Become a Chef?

Video Transcript

"Well I'll you about for our program anyway, the first class you take is a sanitation class and safety. You learn about how to keep things clean in the kitchen, why you got to keep them clean, how to store foods so they don't go bad, how to rotate foods so you're using the older product before the new. Safety as far as if you look around our kitchen here you'll see all the, some different equipment, the knives, we've got mechanical equipment with knife blades on them, not just a food processor but we've got food processors on steroids that are a foot and a half wide with three blades in them that will take your arm off and then some and don't stop. Meat grinds, you've got to have a sense of safety there. We were talking about ice carvings, you use a chainsaw, even though you're used to doing that cutting wood, we still would go through all the processes of what to do and what not to do with a chainsaw and a lot of, even in those classes, the formatory classes. From there you're going to go to a basic skills class, basic culinary skills class where we teach which end of the knife to hold, what pots are used for what type of cooking and then different types of cooking methods whether it's sauteing or boiling or poaching, braising meats, grilling, those kinds of things. So you get the nuts and the bolts and the way the program works is it's just like a house, you're building a foundation and then we put the sides and the floors and then the last bit is putting the roof on and outfitting. So each course that you go through is building on the next one. Now there are some remedial studies in there of course but there's certain things we want to make sure we're reinforcing and that's how that goes. If you're interested in specifics, you can do a baking program where you're going to do pastries, breads, European torts and so on, cake decorating, sugar work, chocolate work."