Learn How To Pick the Perfect Culinary School for You

Every culinary school offers unique experiences, some you’ll get no place else. The basic format and curriculum is the same but every instructor is an entirely unique individual who is often quite passionate about his or her culinary niche.

A culinary school instructor passionate about the very freshest ingredients possible is likely to insist on field trips that involve foraging through the forest for wild mushrooms or traipsing across the countryside to gather wild strawberries.

A seafood aficcionado might lead his or her culinary school class to the seashore where breakfast is likely to consist of toast points and fresh sea urchin or snails gathered moments before from the rocks and coral formations hugging the coastline. Freshly harvested kelp and other edible seaweeds are available to round out the meal and add a hint of salt to the flavors.

Under the tutelage of a culinary school instructor of this ilk, it’s not unusual to be handed a shovel, a bucket, and instructions for digging and identifying clams. A quick glance down the beach might reveal a glimpse of the whole class, bottoms up and arms shoulder deep in the sand, in a race to see who can actually capture the most of these strangely mobile mollusks.

This culinary school lesson won’t end at the beach, however. The clam chowder you’ll make once you’re back in the school’s kitchens will be a chowder you’ll remember fondly forever.

Your butchery classes in culinary school may present you with a side of beef, a whole lamb, or perhaps a halibut as big as a table that needs to be cleaned, dressed, carved, and whittled down to single serving-size portions.

Fancy food is pretty food and you’ll surely find yourself playing artistically with your food while in culinary school. You’ll become adept at making edible mushroom flowers, root vegetable roses, pinecone carrots, onion firecrackers, and intricate mosaics made from sour cream and gelatin.

You’ll learn how to carve a garden-full of freesia flowers from just one carrot that will add an elegant touch to the simplest of salads and how to carve a graceful and elegant swan from a big block of ice.

In culinary school, you’ll most likely learn that there are 101 pleats in the tall chef’s hats, each pleat representing a different way to cook an egg. You’ll master them all.

Oh, sure. Even in culinary school you’ll have hours and hours of boring lectures, tons of homework, and enough tests to unnerve even the most hardy student. Those things are a given in schools of all kinds.

But it’s only in culinary school that you’ll get graded for making the most over the top, sinfully rich, mouthwateringly decadent ice creams your imagination can dream up.