Your Gold Medal Classroom wrapped year-in-review is here. Every issue in 2025 contained stories geared specifically toward culinary educators. The monthly issues featured up-to-date information on topics such as flavor trends, building strong culinary programs, insightful professional chef profiles, pedagogy and more.

If readers missed scanning even one issue, they may have skipped valuable, useable information. Many articles contain links to helpful resources such as websites, lesson plan resources like PDFs and videos, and additional classroom instructional materials.

Take a minute to rewind through the videos and stories from 2025. And, don’t miss a 2026 e-zine by clicking here to register for every GMC edition announcement. With topics covering areas like food as medicine, sustainability in food sourcing and preparation of emerging flavors and ingredients, the upcoming year looks to be a real showstopper. 

FEATURES

Teaching and Student stories:

• Taste Happens in the Brain (Not Just the Mouth): Curating a delicious multisensory dish is like reading a riveting culinary nove
• Pasta Resources at an Instructor’s Fingertips: Teaching culinary students to identify and describe more than 40 pasta cuts.
• Change Unites Instructors, Students, Foodservice Industry: Sara Johannes discusses how St. Paul College navigates change while uplifting students and providing good value.
• Invest in Your Continuing Culinary Education: Online courses help culinary educators keep skills sharp and may count toward ACF recertification hours.
• Build a Stronger Program Through Community Partnerships: Connect future culinarians to the world they will one day feed.
• A Balanced Approach to Integrating Modern Culinary Trends into Culinary Classrooms: Field trips, updated lessons and guest speakers help Tracy Figueroa’s students learn relevance amid the classics.
• The Gold Standard: A Classroom Without Walls: Connecting learning to life through collaboration, creativity and community connection.
• Research Article: Industry Partnerships in the Culinary Arts Classroom Point Toward a Greater Problem: A practical and research-based analysis of culinary education’s challenging partnership with the foodservice industry.
• Canaries in the Coal Mine: Industry Partnerships in the Culinary Arts Classroom Point Toward a Greater Problem: A practical and research-based analysis of culinary education’s challenging partnership with the foodservice industry.
• Health Checkup for Culinary Schools: Feeling the Temperature of Industry Partnerships: Take the business and education partnership self-assessment tool and discover your program’s temperature and its effect on the education experience.
• The Best of Both Worlds: Classroom Training and Kitchen Mentoring: Sun Valley Culinary Institute illustrates how students can pursue a cost-effective education featuring classroom instruction and mentoring in professional kitchens.

Ingredients:

• Cracking Open the Culinary Potential of Walnuts: Journey from Orchard to Plate: Read this versatile nut’s story of transformation, creativity and sustainability and find an ingredient that can build a flavor framework of new possibilities.
• Teaching the Layered Basics of Four Roman Pasta Dishes: Watch short videos and pair basic dishes and their histories for a student pasta tutorial.
• The Economics of Eggs: Egg prices soar as farmers work around the clock to protect their flocks.
• Pushing International Culinary Boundaries with Pears: Two chefs show off their Can-Do pear contributions.
• California Avocados: Grown Locally, Enjoyed Universally: There is more inside a California Avocado than you think.
• Understanding and Applying the Power of the Egg: Teaching the functional (and unexpected) benefits of eggs including mouth feel, viscosity and richness.
• Creating Visual Interest with Potatoes Offers Affordable, Stunning Culinary Lessons: Techniques like mandolin slices and Hasselback cuts help teach students food tastes great without taking a bite. 
• Spaghetti Beyond Meatballs: A Surprising Ingredient Across Day and Menu Parts: Teaching how to incorporate spaghetti into breakfast, dessert and global applications helps students more-fully appreciate this loved pasta. 
• Reimagining Almonds: Transforming a Classic Ingredient into a Platform for Innovation: Chefs are looking to almonds not just for their health halo, but as a dynamic base for formulating richer textures and elevated flavor experiences. 
• Eggs Contribute Multi-Dimensional Effects in Beverages: Discover how eggs create structure and learn techniques that level-up cocktails, mocktails and functional beverages.

Trends:

• McCormick For Chefs® Uncovers the 25th Flavor Forecast Edition and Flavor of the Year: McCormick announced Aji Amarillo 2025 Flavor of the Year along with three flavor trends that will shape 2025 menus.
• Authentically Translating Global Flavors Locally: California ingredients and cooking techniques ingrained at a young age helped Chef Wise build an authentic restaurant serving Northern Mexican cuisine.

Miscellaneous:

• Lesson Plan: Timed Chicken Lab from Fabrication to Plating: Chef Daniel Pliska delivers a detailed timeline and ingredient list to teach 101 culinary students how to manage time and create a multi-layered chicken dish.
• Focusing on Change and Change Agents: CAFÉ’s annual conferences and award scholarships focus on change: the need for it and those who are doing it best.
• CAFÉ’s Summer Conferences focus on What’s New and What’s Next: 19th Annual CAFÉ Leadership Conference and Deans and Directors Retreat held this June in Pittsburgh.
• Maryland Teacher Phillip Cropper Named ProStart Teacher of the Year by the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation: Cropper named 2025 James H. Maynard Teacher of the Year during National ProStart Invitational.
• San Dimas High School and Chalmette High School Capture National Honors in Culinary and Restaurant Management Competition: Teams outshine competition from 47 states and the District of Columbia to win the National ProStart Invitational.
• CAFÉ Names 2025 Culinary Education Award Recipients: Eight culinary education leaders and a college student recognized for innovative approaches and positive impacts on culinary education.
• CAFÉ Blows into the Windy City for 2026 Conferenc: Chicago’s Kendall College hosts the 2026 CAFÉ conference and Best Practice submissions are now open. 

COLUMNS

Future Thinking in Education:

• The Importance of Education and Educators: Education is meant to draw forth not necessarily force feed by engaging inquisitiveness.        
• Teach the Details in 2025: Here are a few things I know about teaching that may be true for you and your students as well.
• Embrace the Paradigm Shift and Stay Ahead of Change: Instructors can embrace change driven by uncertainty or get run over by its natural force. The choice is ours.
• Curriculum Content Built from Flavor Outcomes: Build a culinary education around flavor components with courses like Taste 101, Smell 121, and Communications/Storytelling.
• Investing in Yourself: The best teachers and leaders understand the connection between effort, results and personal growth.
• How to Spend Your Summer Vacation: Read these books that plant seeds of possibilities in your mind.
• Guiding Principles to Incorporate Now: Commit to these guidelines and observe how your program changes the world one student at a time.
• Building an Environment of Excellence: Making excellence the foundation keeps mediocrity off the table.
• It’s All About a Team: The greatest environment a teacher can create is one of collaboration that allows the team to build and find a way to win.
• Preparing the Whole Person: Tips and suggestions on how to prepare students for success in and out of the kitchen.
• Cooking and Becoming a Cook Are Different: Participating in a family meal helps students transition from the process of cooking to being a cook.

Meet the Growers:

• Sustainably Operated Dairy Farm Produces High-quality Milk from Highly Cared-for Cows
• Growing Avocados with Wonder and Appreciation: Rob Brokaw’s family began the Hass avocado movement and he continues to watch the future of this global fruit.

Chef Profile: Career Path Insights

• Taylor DeVries
  Senior Account Supervisor 
  Blaze PR
• Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon
  Chef and Owner
  Kalaya
• Dylan Ambrose
  Product Development Chef
  Reser’s Fine Foods
• Dr. Ty Wagoner
  Senior Innovation Manager
  California Milk Advisory Board
• Milena Jimenez
  Chef Manager, Cater To You, a member of Elior North America
  Friends Seminary School NY, NY
• David Edgar
  Lodi Unified School District 
  Lodi, California 
• Rebecca Peizer
  Owner
  All Things Culinary LLC
• Megan McKenna
  Senior Director of Marketing & Foodservice
  National Watermelon Promotion

Click here to read the 2024 Gold Medal Classroom article index.