Says this educator, ratios trump recipes in helping students learn. The first of a two-part series on teaching culinary arts through ratios in practical culinary labs.

By John Reiss, CEC, CCE

Are we training students the right way or the wrong way? That’s a loaded question, and one that culinary educators can easily become quite defensive about. The knock in culinary education often comes from professional chefs who say we aren’t training students to be seasoned and productive when they graduate.

Having taught in the industry for more than 25 years, I have often pondered and debated with peers over best practices for preparing students to be job-ready when they finish their studies. I have come to the conclusion that maybe there is a better pedagogical approach, one that involves the use of culinary ratios.

We often teach students practical competencies through the aid of recipes. Why? It’s true that recipes are important to some extent in the kitchen, but most professional kitchen work relies on intuitive cooking, standardized techniques and procedures and proper mise en place, rather than recipes.

Foodservice educators across North America earn recognition for their creativity in the culinary classroom.

The Idaho Potato Commission (IPC) recognized three educators in the 2014 CAFÉ-Idaho Potato Commission Innovation Awards at the 10th-annual Leadership Conference of the Center for the Advancement of Foodservice Education (CAFÉ) in Salt Lake City this summer.

“Our involvement in encouraging innovation and creativity among culinary instructors and students is very rewarding to us as well as the recipients,” says Don Odiorne, IPC’s vice president of foodservice. “After all, one of the goals of our Idaho potato growers is to reach the next generation of farmers, too, and equip them with the skills to continue to learn, progress and succeed in a changing world.”

Ten years’ worth of surveys, interviews and roundtable discussions reveal the evolution of trends in the education segments.

Courtesy of Y-Pulse (ypulse.org), a division of Olson Communications 

Ten years ago Y-Pulse (www.ypulse.org) began tracking foodservice trends through the nation’s leading foodservice directors in the education segments, as well as their young customers, to give food marketers insight on what would shape the tastes of tomorrow’s consumers. This latest report identifies how young consumers’ tastes are setting the pace for tomorrow’s menus.

In K-12 schools, lunch has become a learning lab empowering young consumers with the knowledge they need to make mindful nutritious choices. Today’s school foodservice directors are serving up a lot more than breakfast and lunch; 96% consider teaching nutrition education to be an important part of their job. On college and university campuses, foodservice directors are on the cutting edge of experimentation with new foods, new concepts and new delivery systems for some of the most demanding consumers in America.

The first part in a three-part series discussing tried-and-true and novel assessment ideas, as well as common methods whose usefulness in your program might be dated. Plus, how to customize and apply lesser-known, but effective, assessment strategies to fit your program.

By Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT

Last month, we discussed maintaining a professional journal. This month as fall classes begin, we will talk about assessment since it is a critically important aspect of the work that we do. For the next two months, we will review various methods, and in two months, we will examine assessment criteria.

Purpose of Assessment
One of the gifts that we can give our students is to share our professional judgments of the quality of their work. Based on our best professional knowledge, the feedback that we can give our students helps them see their work more clearly, understand what they do well and learn what they need to improve. Providing those insights takes a commitment to be as objective and thorough as we can be in giving our students useful feedback.

Letter grades do not provide useful feedback. Comments in the margin of papers, corrected examination questions and detailed commentary on performance issues help students learn something. As faculty members, we need to think about which methods of assessment to use and which methods work best for which courses.

These very simple techniques are not taught more often in a 50-minute context because the blanched or parboiled product is generally not ready for service by the end of class. But, says Chef Weiner, they’re important to teach for their contributions to cooking. Here, he explains how to best teach the procedures, with applications that can fit perfectly into 50 minutes.

By Adam Weiner, CFSE

Over the last four years I have written a number of articles on how to teach different cooking principles in a 50-minute-classroom setting. These articles have included:

• “Braising,”September 2010
• “Teaching Baking in 50 Minutes,”July/August 2011
• “Sauté,” January 2012
• “Teaching Steaming,” March 2013
• “Teaching Grilling,” April 2013

It is now time to address one of the easiest cooking principles to teach in 50 minutes: blanching and the related technique of parboiling.

By definition, blanching and parboiling are each just a quick process: