By Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT, New York University

Each of these strategies can help your students get ready for class and build their enthusiasm for the topic of the day.

The best way to motivate students and help them get ready for learning new material, reviewing old material, or trying out new skills remains starting each class session with a sparkler. A sparkler connotes something that is typically bright, draws attention, and brings everyone’s focus to one thing at one time. It can be a way to get students to focus on terms and concepts they need to learn and skills they need to develop or practice.

There are a wide range of sparklers that you can use to begin your classes.They include quotes, numbers, images, anagrams, provocative questions and outcomes. The rest of this article highlights some examples and suggests ways that you might use them.

By Brent T. Frei

Michael Holleman gets to the bottom of a top-of-mind foodservice issue.

“Sustainable” is one of the hottest buzzwords in the foodservice industry today. Yet, ask 10 people to explain what sustainable food production means, and get 10 different responses. At least one supplier has defined the term, the result of maintaining a business model that has remained virtually unchanged for more than 30 years.

Michael Holleman, corporate chef of Bemidji, Minn.-based Indian Harvest, Inc., a niche supplier of rice and rice blends, exotic grains and legumes to foodservice, believes that diners today are looking for more than food. They want an event. “It has to be something special: stunning plate presentation, culinary adventure, distinct pairing,” he says.

He also believes diners hanker for a story behind the food that brings the experience to life, evidenced by unprecedented interest in foods’ origins before they land on the plate. That’s why Indian Harvest grains and grain blends are borne of a passion that extends from farm to fork.

The third-annual Student Culinology® Competition at RCA’s 2009 conference exemplified the blending of culinary art and food science.

An enthusiastic student team from University of Cincinnati took first-place honors, along with a $5,000 cash award and industry-wide recognition as rising stars in food-product development, at the third-annual Student Culinology® Competition, May/June 7, during the Research Chefs Association’s (RCA) 2009 conference at the Sheraton Dallas Hotel. The award was presented by Agnes Jones, principal culinologist at National Starch Food Innovation, at the 2009 RCA Annual Luncheon, where nearly 500 food-product-development professionals gather each year to celebrate industry achievements.

The competition is designed to challenge and recognize the industry’s young talent in the Culinology field–the blending of culinary arts and food science.

The winning team from UC was led by faculty advisor Christopher Keegan, CEC, senior research chef at Cargill Flavor Systems, and team leader Christian A. Serrato, CC. Team members included Robert Coltrane, CC, John Parsons, CC, and Andrew Scholle, CC.

In this episode of Culinary Secrets with Chef Tomm, Chef Tomm shows us the ancient Chinese Secret of Hand Pulled Noodles. It took Chef Tomm years to learn this guarded Chinese Secret. Now he is going to teach it to you. Visit his site www.cheftomm.com for the free recipe

Crossword and word-search puzzles can be fun, effective tools for familiarizing students with important terms.

By Adam Weiner, JobTrain and the Sequoia Adult School

We all get in a rut. Line cooks start turning out dish after dish, caring less for the quality because they have done it over and over again. Customers go to the same places and order the same thing, not because they are afraid to try something new; they are just stuck on their tracks like a street car. Teachers have the same problem, and when we do, the students turn on their I-pods and tune us out.

I am always looking for new ways to teach the same old thing. New tricks to pull out of a hat. One of the things that I have found is the very effective use of puzzles in teaching.

Occasionally, I start a class with a word- search puzzle with all of the terms I am
going to cover in the class. I end the class with a “test” of a crossword puzzle using the same terms. It is, I have found, incredibly effective. The best part is that there are many places on the Internet where you can create puzzles for free.

One thing that separates professional cooks from their moms is how they present food. Here are five things students should remember when plating

By Adam Weiner, JobTrain and the Sequoia Adult School

Students new to cooking go through three stages of trauma. First, they worry about making enough food; second, they agonize on how the food tastes; and finally, they stress about how the food looks. Much of the presentation pain comes from most of the new generation of cooks experiencing “presentation” as bags of fast food in a car seat and “plating” by ordering at the mall’s food court.

I have found the best way to minimize the pain of the third stage is to tell students not to prepare anything until they have in their minds (or better yet, a drawing on paper) how the final plate will look.

Students think this is strange. They feel that if they start cooking, the plating and presentation will fall into place. I explain that if I asked them to build a car, they wouldn’t just pick up some screws, tires, sheet metal and glass and start hammering. They would first have a picture of the finished car. To build a car or a plate of food takes a picture and a plan.