Culinary School 101

So what exactly do you learn in culinary school anyway? How does it work? Are you there every day? What happens at the end? Are you going to work in a restaurant?

ICC is located in the Soho neighborhood of NYC.

These are some questions I’ve been getting about my choice to go to school, so I figured I’d sum it up here.

I will be pursuing a professional culinary arts degree from the International Culinary Center, which used to be called the French Culinary Institute, for those who might remember it before its rebrand. This school boasts some amazing alumni, including David Chang (Momofuku), Christina Tosi (Milk Bar), Wylie Dufresne (WD50), Dan Barber (Blue Hill), and Bobby Flay (Food Network and more). Not too shabby!

My specific program has a farm to table focus designed by Dan Barber (see above), which means that over the course of the standard culinary arts program, we also take extra field trips to markets, farms, dairies, and wineries. At the end, we have a weeklong immersion at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the storied restaurant at the renowned agricultural center. There, we will learn about farm to table practices by working on their farm and in their kitchen. I’ll explain more about the culinary arts program below, but it involves traditional savory cooking as well as a little bit of pastry.

So that’s the overall description of the program. My plan is to write about my progress every week or two (will see how motivated I am, and how long my homework takes me), which will be my experiences of the coursework described below.

Now, onto the nitty gritty:

Time frame: The entire course is 600 hours over the course of 6 months. 400 of those will be in the classroom / kitchen, and the remaining 200 will be an externship at a restaurant or other culinary institution. Think of any great restaurant around the city, and they probably have culinary externs there. People also go to bakeries, test kitchens, hotels, catering companies, and more.

Content overview: I will learn all the skills needed to work in a professional kitchen, including:

• knife skills

• stocks and sauces

• vegetables

• grains

• butchery

• poultry and game birds

• fish and shellfish

• meat and eggs

• pastry and desserts

• all the various techniques for the above

• plating and menu design

• food safety and sanitation

What happens at the end: I get a certification in professional culinary arts and then go out into the world — to be covered in a different post!

Continue reading for details on the program…

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The program has four “levels” excluding the externship. I am going to copy/paste from the ICC website here for the sake of completeness of this post, with some slight edits for conciseness:

Level 1: Introduction to Culinary Techniques

• Learn to cook: Vegetables, salads and vinaigrettes, potatoes, fish, shellfish, poultry, beef, pork, lamb

• Techniques: Poaching, grilling, frying, blanching, glazing, baking, puréeing

• Additional detail:

  • Knife Skills: Learn which knives are best for which jobs, and proper care for them. Through tailiage (cutting vegetables into even sizes and shapes), we’ll learn different techniques such as émincer (thin slice), batonnet (small sticks), brunoise (small dice) and paysanne (tile-shaped).

  • Food Safety: Gain an understanding of the general rules of hygiene as well as comprehensive food handling and safety issues for a kitchen environment

  • Ingredient Identification and Classification:
    Learn to use all five senses to identify and classify a wide range of proteins, vegetables, starches, grains, herbs and spices.

  • Stocks and Sauces: Learn how to combine humble ingredients, such as bones from chicken, beef, veal or fish, with aromatic vegetables and herbs to create brown, white, fish, marmite and vegetable stocks—and how to marry stocks with binding elements, such as starches and proteins, to create the five “mother” sauces: velouté, Espagnole, hollandaise, béchamel and tomato, as well many of their derivatives.

  • Food preservation: Brining, pickling, confit and dehydration are used to prevent food from spoiling in pre-refrigeration days; today, we rely on these methods for the complex flavors they infuse into dishes.

Level 2: Building Culinary Foundations

• Learn to cook: Veal, game, offal and forcemeats, eggs, grains and pasta, doughs and tarts, mousses and soufflés, desserts, crêpes

• Techniques: Braising, stewing, stuffing, trussing

• Additional detail:

  • Seasonality, Sustainability and Nutrition: A modern chef needs to connect to the source of his/her ingredients, harnessing the optimal flavor of seasonal and sustainable products. Also covered: nutrition basics and the principles for healthy, balanced meals.

  • Cheese, Wine and Spirits: Gain insight into the cheese-making process, as well how to classify a vast assortment of cheeses; sample, select and serve the correct portion size; and how wine and spirits complement the dining experience.

  • Food Costing and Menu Planning: For all the creativity that goes into being a chef, it’s essential to understand the financial health of one’s operation. We’ll learn about recipe development and costing, menu development and pricing, as well as how to determine the costs that go into food prep and service to make wise business decisions.

  • Menu and Plating Design: Explore how composition, garnishes, sauces and color add to a dish. We’ll also spend time looking at the bigger picture, learning how aesthetics and practical issues factor into menu composition.

Level 3: Buffet, charcuterie, and volume cooking

• Learn to cook: a buffet for 50 guests, pork shoulder fabrication, charcuterie (sausages, pate, galantines, balantines, gravlax, head cheese), companion condiments, plus platter design and presentation

• Additional detail: this module will also involve making “family meal” which is what other students and staff eat during the day at ICC

Level 4: Skills for consistency and refinement

• Rotate through the various traditional kitchen stations: Garde Manger (salads and cold preparations), Poissoner (fish and seafood), Saucier (sauces and meat), Pâtissier (pastry and desserts)

• Techniques: Sous-vide, low-temperature cooking, build on butchery, filleting and boning

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So there we go! My program in a (detailed) nutshell. As always, please leave comments and questions :)