If you are considering becoming a chef make sure that you have a serious love of foods.  There are many aspects of food preparation that are not as glamorous as the “Food Channel” may indicate. Also make sure that you know what is involved in your decision. There are always exceptions to every rule but typically you can expect to work very long hours for many, many years at fairly low pay before you will find yourself in a place where you are making any money.

There are two routes into the chef trade.  The route first is to go to some form of a culinary institute for some serious training. Depending on where you go the programs will vary from 2 to 4 years.  You will get a good grounding in all aspects of the cooking trade from all sides of the classical kitchen.  You will learn the theory along with the practice. A friend who went to C.I.A. (Culinary institute of America) tells the story of the 1 egg hollandaise sauce that they managed to build with 23 cups of butter before it broke. You will be exposed to sauces, soups, baking, decorative practices, hone your knife skills and catch glimpses of many aspects of the chef trade.

The other route is that of apprenticing yourself to a chef who would be willing to take you under his umbrella.  He will teach you the trade from his perspective. You will probably spend a long time doing seemingly monotonous things.  To hone your knife skills you will go through several thousands of pounds of vegetables. You will learn best food handling and cleanliness practices in a hurry when you are told that the health inspector is on the way into the kitchen. You will be assigned a task in the morning to produce a 1000 of this or that appetizer, then asked why you are not finished at 1:00.

After a while you will be sent to the cooking line to prepare meals for guests.  Now your time constraints are significantly increased.  Especially when someone forgets to place the order on time or a late customer joins the group.  Pay attention however at this point is the first opportunity for your creativity to shine forth; here you will learn the differences that make for quality and customer appreciation.  Never serve something that you are not very proud to eat yourself.

Either route that you choose you are guaranteed that time constraints and craziness will be a part of the whole mix.  Dealing with customers means that, in spite of your timing to bring all the parts of a meal together in one moment, it may not be their timing.  You cannot make a steak rare again or a puffed pastry “en croute” hold for very long in a steam table.  To make a long story short, in addition to making every effort to do your best, there are lots of circumstances that are beyond your control. The road to becoming a chef can be very stressful.

At some point you will arrive at a space where you have learned enough, matured enough to be given the opportunity to put your own special touches on your own culinary creations.  That is a very satisfying time, when you are competent enough to bend the rules by adding your own creativity to the process.  The price you will pay will be countless years of 60 to 70 hour weeks, with occasional 15 hour days. That is the name of the game in the chef’s trade. Just a little something to think about, if you are dedicated to the art of food preparation then go for it, but beware of the pitfalls along the way.

Becoming a chef does not mean that you have to cook in a professional situation.  You could simply get the training you need to learn the basics and the subtle nuances of creating fine dishes with out going through the agony of several years of apprenticeship.  It is possible to learn how to become a professional chef for your family and friends by taking some online cooking classes.   An online cooking class can give you the opportunity to learn from the comfort of your home at a pace that you set.   The best course that I have seen is offered by Chef Todd Mohr at WebCookingClass.com .  Chef Todd has a comfortable presentation style and he will teach you how to cook with out needing to use a recipe by learning the basics of food chemistry and how to use herbs and spices to achieve the special ethnic flavor you may be looking for.

Check out the video below and then visit his website for a free CD

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Some Chef Lessons, 5 Keys to Making Your Foods More Appealing

Have you ever been to a Furr’s or Wyatt’s cafeteria?  As you went through the hot line were you intrigued with what you saw?  Did you ask for the grey spinach because your mother was with you?  Did you hold back on the enchiladas hoping they would bring a new pan so you would not have to scrape up the left overs? Which dessert did you pick out when you got to that place on the line?

I don’t mean to put them down but there is a reason why you are willing to go and pay good money to eat in a nice restaurant that specializes in not only taste but also in appearance.  We eat with our eyes as much as with our mouths.  The foods can be very tasty  but if they are poorly presented we tend to pass them by.

I took my nearly three year old daughter out to a very fancy restaurant some years back.  All during the meal the waiter passed us by on his way to other tables with a fantastic looking dessert cart.  Every time he went by, Aimee’s eyes would get very big with anticipation. I kept bribing her with the fact that he would bring it to us when she finished her dinner. When the meal finished he had the audacity to ask; “What would you like for dessert?” with out bringing the cart with him.  My reply was, “The dessert, the dessert, you know that cart you have been teasing us with all night, where is the cart?”  We had already eaten with our eyes.

The chef lessons from this are that presentation is the most important aspect of foods.  The chain restaurants are told that the foods pictured on their menu should look the same as the picture when it is delivered to the table.  In a fancy restaurant you are paying for the fact that the food will be presented a way that it is consumed with your eyes long before you actually taste it.

These are some things that a chef learns as he makes the journey through his career.  The distinguishing mark of a great chef is his ability to take those ordinary things that we eat every day presenting them in new and exciting way.  Here are some of the elements that he will use to transform visually dull foods to make us want them to jump off the plate into our mouths.

Texture, , , , Taste

The chef uses different textures in his presentations that will, blend or contrast with the other elements on the plate.  The word abrasive was used in a recent commentary, it is a great description of the use of texture. By painting a plate with Creme Anglaise, placing a slice of coarse Genoese cake and adding fresh berries in a random fashion the chef uses texture to add appeal. Blackened ahi tuna atop a gaufrette potato with pickled red ginger and a dollop of green wasabi mayonaise is another example.

Color

Color is also extremely important, we know what most foods look like in their natural state.  If a plate or platter changes that color to something we do not expect from our experience we will tend to be very cautious about trying it.  Working with different colors of the same genre like a fruit platter the chef can assemble contrasting or complimentary colors to please the eye.  Along with this the way that something is shaped or cut can add to the appeal.

Unique Combinations

Along with color, a chef can use unique combinations of types of foods. This is where creativity and knowledge come together.  Seemingly odd combinations of foods can be presented colorfully in a way that stops you with a “wow that is an odd combination,” type thought. Imagine the white orange of shrimp floating in a shallow pool of deep red lingonberry sauce with bits of roughly chopped basil leaf scattered randomly about.  It may be different from your previous experience, but not in an unpleasant way.

Assaulting the Senses

Sometimes the combinations will be totally at odds with what you would think should go together.  Like a seabass marinated in southern barbeque sauce or a glazed strawberry dessert on a puree of sno-peas (just saw the picture) We recently serve a black cod (sablefish) entree on a bed of coarse teriyaki flavored poblano and yellow beet slaw. So foods and food groups that might seem radically different can be combined with great visual effect.

Taste

Finally there is taste, where the rubber meets the road, does it taste as good as it looks.  Or sometimes does it taste any good at all, given the strange combination of ingredients.  All of the above need to be in place before we will even venture to try it out in our mouths.  The taste part is the culmination of the dining experience, not the beginning.  Here is the opportunity to prove that, in spite of the contradictions to the senses, the combination is actually quite good.  This is the quest of the chef, to find unique combinations, properly prepare them, present them in a distinctive manner, and prove to the tongue that the eyes did not lie.

Interested in learning ways to do this at home?  Take a look at these videos, Chef Todd has some great Ideas.

You can sign up for a free cd at his site

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Take two legs, two arms, a brain and a knife put them all together in a white uniform with a funny hat and you have a chef.  Well not quite, most chef’s spend several years of training either in school or the back of a hotel/restaurant honing the skills necessary to become masters of their craft. In both cases the road to becoming a chef is paved with several hundreds of pounds of cut vegetables, which in most cases means cut knuckles as well.

A school trained chef will receive hours of training on the chemistry of sauces.  Learning temperatures at which major changes occur in foods is crucial.  There will be classes on sanitation, food born illness with food handling techniques to prevent them.  He/She will be introduced to sauces, learning the properties of flour, oils, eggs, sugars and thickening slurries.  Moving from simple sauces to complex sauces they will learn to make and clarify stocks and glaces.  They will be introduced to the anatomy of animals and fish, learning how to bone certain cuts of meats, how to fillet fish. The list can go from here for a long time.  The bottom line is that the “chef in training,” is exposed to a tremendous amount of information. Does that make him a chef?

In a traditional establishment that has all the categories of chef types the executive chef will spend very little if any time in the kitchen. His job is more managerial in nature. His working chefs and secondary cooks do all of the physical work.  So why is he the chef?  Most of his time is spent scheduling, coordinating, organizing, tasting, and answering questions about the next step for his staff.

The biggest reason is that over time he has acquired the ability to take any assortment of vegetables and meats. Assemble them into a meal which will yield a great taste experience with an elegant presentation.  You can name the country, give him a box of ingredients and he will competently produce a meal resembling that cuisine.

Great chef’s become obsessed with learning all that they can about a specific types of cuisine, which is basically an understanding of the seasonings that are used, the starches of the culture, and the methods of preparation.  Once they are aware of these simple facts they simply apply their technical skills to create the meal.

So what is the recipe for becoming a chef? The last that I heard it cost $60,000 a year to attend the Culinary Institute of America.  A trip to France for “Cordon Bleu” school training is equally expensive.  Most of the Executive Chef’s that I have ever worked with are not graduates of either institution.  How did they do it?  They keep a pulse on current trends. They get close to other experienced chefs for specific “how to’s” of their cuisine. Most importantly, they learn by feel, they transform their science into an art.

If you are a “do it yourself” person the recipe for becoming a chef is simple. Learn the basics of food preparation, as in the temperatures at which things happen as you cook.  Develop some good knife skills so that you are able to make your preparations look and cook on a consistent basis.  Spend a winter making soups to practice your cutting skills.  Then bury yourself in cookbooks from other cultures to learn two things.

1. What are the dominant herbs/spices used in that culture?
2. Is there any special technique for preparation that you should know?

Another excellent suggestion would be to look at some of the online cooking classes that are available.  I have looked at this course and so far I am very impressed.  Chef Todd is willing to give away a free CD of his “5 Chef Secrets for Creating Amazing Meals at Home“ This includes a 14 day trial to his WebCookingClass

If you want to know more about Chef Todd, check out his free video where he reveals his   “5 Chef Secrets for Creating Amazing Meals at Home“

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