By Wendy Gay, CHE

Hosting meetings where food and beverages are the stars can provide great learning opportunities for students.

An important group will be meeting at your facility. While there, they will need breakfasts, lunches, snacks, a dinner and even a “happy hour” mixer along the way. What to do? Simple buffet service would be easiest for each of these, so that is suggested. But this visit can provide great opportunity to expand the skills of your students. What other choices might you have?

By Christopher Koetke, CEC, CCE

Sharing your best ideas can be rewarding.

Hard to believe that the first decade of the new millennium is behind us. It certainly wasn’t an easy one, but it was momentous. And in one aspect, it was stellar—sustainability, once dubbed the “wave of the future,” has definitely gone mainstream. And as we move forward, it is our graduates who will be the catalyst for change that will propel the industry on our collective sustainability journey.

By Kirk T. Bachmann, M.Ed., CEC, AAC

In culinary and pâtisserie arts, assessment should be structured so that the emphasis in practical, hands-on skill development is on cooking and baking skills and their respective applications. Here, Chef Bachmann uses the proper teaching of the classical mother sauces and their derivates to illustrate.

Before students fully grasp the specific techniques involved in cooking and baking, it is imperative that they first develop a thorough understanding of fundamental skills or techniques. In developing meaningful learning activities that leverage behavioral learning principles, dynamic educators focus on increasing the frequency of their students correctly achieving their assigned task or tasks. The goal of any robust learning activity is to facilitate an observable change in behavior.

As a long-time educator with Le Cordon Bleu, I take great pride in developing learning activities for adult learners enrolled in our various culinary-arts and pâtisserie and baking programs. A percentage of our students are cooking enthusiasts, many are career changers, but most are recent high-school graduates. Adult learners are unique. They are interested in academic application that is interdisciplinary in nature and incorporates previously learned proficiencies. “Adults are autonomous and self-directed. They need to be free to direct themselves. Their teachers must actively involve student participation in the learning process and serve as facilitators for them” (Lieb, 1991).

By Renee Zonka, RD, CEC, CHE, MBA

Just when we finally had our mouths wrapped around the fifth taste sense of umami, a newly discovered sixth taste, kokumi, emerges. How will this affect our teaching of flavor development?

After several years, umami has been firmly acknowledged as the fifth flavor profile, joining salt, sweet, sour and bitter. It has been described as the overall sensation of “savory meatiness” and is present in foods high in glutamic acid or the once-forbidden monosodium glutamate (MSG).

By Brian Campbell, CEC, CCE

Restaurants need students who can not only create and reproduce quality independent sauces (cold and hot), but also know how to use them properly.

I have taught several different classes over the years: Classical French, International, Stocks and Sauces, Traditional European, New World (Cuisine of the Americas) and, most recently, Garde Manger. It is in the latter that I have found myself settling for an extended stay. At our school, Garde Manger is a sophomore-level class that, more often than not, follows an externship in the industry that lasts a full term (about 12 weeks). I mention this only to put into perspective the experience level of the students when they enter my class. They have a year of freshman-level skill-based classes and at least some work experience (externship) that ideally placed them in a full rotation in the kitchen where they were able to put these skills into practice.