How Can I Improve My Cooking Through Education?

Many people enjoy cooking in their own homes. Providing their friends and families with a delicious meal means the world to them and they work their hardest to ensure they are serving their very best food. But others want to take their love of cooking a step further and become a professional chef. But how can education improve a skill that is so hands on? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just practice your cooking instead of going to college?

Why Education is Imperative to Professional Cooking

While there are many things an individual can do to improve themselves without the help of formal education, an intensive degree program filled with theory, hands-on methods, and careful feedback on your food, can teach you far much more. Culinary arts education is centered around doing. While some worry that they will be trapped in a classroom learning nothing but the history French chefs who have been dead for hundreds of years, chances are your history lessons will be brief and will apply directly to what you will be cooking later on.

While you are in the kitchens cooking up a fantastic dish, culinary arts education will also provide you the information as to why you’re doing what you’re doing. Not only can it help explain food science and best practices, it can also provide feedback. Which is something you won’t get from a video course or website.

Valuable Feedback: Being Taught by a Professional Chef

Feedback from a professional chef can give you important information. They will know if something is undercooked, overcooked, too salty, etc. and not only that, but how to fix the problem for the next time you prepare a dish. Chef instructors will also keep you from picking up bad habits such as sloppy knife skills or poor kitchen management. A video program will tell you you’re doing a great job no matter how you’re actually performing.

Resources You’ll Need to Work as a Professional Chef

Networking while in school is also highly important for students. You never know if the restaurant owner who talks to you at an open house will one day want to hire you or if a culinary school friend gets a job lead and they recommend you apply as well. If you learn on your own, chances are it’s just you and the YouTube instructor who might be difficult or impossible to reach. Schools have connections they can use to help you along your career path.

Validating your Skills in Professional Cooking

While some kitchens might accept your insistence that you’ve read Julia Child’s entire cookbook series as proof of your culinary expertise, it’s very simple to show a potential employer your résumé and tell them you earned your degree at a culinary school. A degree shows you were under the tutelage of experts and are not only a competent cook, but possess the ability to take direction, improve on mistakes, and study within a guided program.

Are you interested in becoming a professional chef? If you want to earn an Associate of Applied Science Degree in Culinary Arts, consider ECPI University’s Culinary Institute of Virginia. With an accelerated schedule and year-round classes,  you could earn your degree faster. For more information on this exciting opportunity, connect with a friendly admissions advisor today.

It could be the Best Decision You Ever Make!

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Gainful Employment Information – Culinary Arts - Associate’s

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