Marketing Scoops: gastronomy

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David Bouley the trailblazing chef who died of a heart attack at his home in Connecticut has made my life complicated since 1988, ever since I ate lunch at Restaurant Bouley, his first solo venture, where he was making something old new again. French food but less French. Elegant but not stuffy. Fewer mounted butter sauces. More acid than I was used to. Nourishing, comforting, clearer, cleaner, brighter, quieter flavors…….Continue reading….

By Phyllis Grant

Source: Esquire

Critics:

Kitchen assistants are of two types, kitchen-hands and stewards/kitchen porters. Kitchen-hands assist with basic food preparation tasks under the chef’s direction. They carry out relatively unskilled tasks such as peeling potatoes and washing salad. Stewards/kitchen porters are involved in the scullery, washing up and general cleaning duties. In a smaller kitchen, these duties may be incorporated.

A communard is in charge of preparing the meal for the staff during a shift. This meal is often referred to as the staff or family meal. The escuelerie (from 15th century French and a cognate of the English “scullery”), or the more modern plongeur or dishwasher, is the keeper of dishes, having charge of dishes and keeping the kitchen clean. A common humorous title for this role in some modern kitchens is “chef de plonge” or “head dishwasher”.

Education is available from many culinary institutions offering diploma, associate, and bachelor’s degree programs in culinary arts. Depending on the level of education, this can take one to four years. An internship is often part of the curriculum. Regardless of the education received, most professional kitchens follow the apprenticeship system, and most new cooks will start at a lower-level 2nd or 1st cook position and work their way up.

Like many skilled trades, chefs usually go through a formal apprenticeship which includes many years of on-the-job training. Culinary schools and restaurants offer these apprenticeships. Apprenticeships usually take 3 to 4 years to complete and combine classroom instruction with on-the-job training. The training period for a chef is generally four years as an apprentice.

A newly qualified chef is advanced or more commonly a toquecommis-chef, consisting of first-year commis, second-year commis, and so on. The rate of pay is usually in accordance with the chefs. Like all other chefs except the executive-chef, trainees are placed in sections of the kitchen (e.g., the starter (appetizer) or entrée sections) under the guidance of a demi-chef de partie and are given relatively basic tasks.

Ideally, over time, a commis will spend a certain period in each section of the kitchen to learn the basics. Unaided, a commis may work on the vegetable station of a kitchen. The usual formal training period for a chef is two to four years in catering college. They often spend the summer in work placements. In some cases this is modified to ‘day-release’ courses; a chef will work full-time in a kitchen as an apprentice and then would have allocated days off to attend catering college.

These courses can last between one and three years. In the UK, most chefs are trained in the workplace, with most doing a formal NVQ level 2 or 3 in the workplace. An integral part of the culinary arts are the tools, known as cooking or kitchen utensils, that are used by both professional chefs and home cooks alike. Professionals in the culinary arts often call these utensils by the French term “batterie de cuisine”.

These tools vary in materials and use. Cooking implements are made with anything from wood, glass, and various types of metals, to the newer silicone and plastic that can be seen in many kitchens today. Within the realm of the culinary arts, there is a wide array of different cooking techniques that originate from various cultures and continue to develop over time as these techniques are shared between cultures and progress with new technology.

Different cooking techniques require the use of certain tools, foods and heat sources in order to produce a specific desired result. The professional kitchen may utilize certain techniques that a home cook might not, such as the use of an expensive professional grill.

Modern culinary arts students study many different aspects of food. Specific areas of study include butchery, chemistry and thermodynamics, visual presentation, food safety, human nutrition, and physiology, international history, menu planning, the manufacture of food items (such as the milling of wheat into flour or the refining of cane plants into crystalline sucrose), and many others.

Training in culinary arts is possible in most countries around the world usually at the tertiary level (university) with institutions government funded, privately funded or commercial. Professional Culinary Arts Programmes are curated educational and skills studies over a 3-year period with select Universities and Hotel and Culinary schools.

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Why Mentorship Is at the Heart of This Chef’s Mission | James Beard Foundation”.