We avoid daily potential hurricanes or tsunamis in our restaurants by being well prepared, living and thriving on the quality of our mise en place and ability to adapt. Teaching physical, intellectual and emotional mise en place will help students become organized for any possibility.
Becoming unique, contemporary and benchmark setting defines a brand. Here’s a checklist to determine if your program is forward thinking or merely churning out graduates. Start by asking yourself, “How is my program perceived in the marketplace?”
Learning to act sustainably requires a mindset change, and long-term thinking must replace short-term thinking. Teaching why sustainability is so important now and in the future will arm your graduates with the power to make sound ecological decisions.
A bakery entrepreneur leaves nursing behind to enroll in an online pastry-certificate program, and the result is sweet.
Kim Washington is the perfect example of someone who has never given up on her dreams. She recently retired early from a decades-long career in nursing to pursue her passion of starting a bakery. Now with Escoffier Online International Culinary Academy’s pastry certificate under her belt, she feels more ready than ever to tackle whatever obstacles may lie ahead.
Exploding Desserts LLC opened in May 2015 in South Holland, Ill. So Escoffier Online sat down with Washington to talk about what it takes to open a business, her favorite pastries to make and the No. 1 ingredient she makes sure to put in all of her creations.
Escoffier Online: You have quite a bit of culinary/pastry schooling. Why did you want to attend Escoffier Online?
Kim Washington: I was intrigued by the history of Escoffier. His name and works are mentioned in many of my cookbooks and he’s quoted and fashioned after numerous times in the culinary world. Then I sought out to learn more about the online culinary school and was excited about what it offered and the fact that I could study on my own time.
In the award program’s inaugural year, two secondary and two postsecondary educators earned recognition for distinction in training professional cooks of tomorrow at the 11th-annual CAFÉ Leadership Conference in June.
Sysco, the world’s leading foodservice distributor, recognized four foodservice educators in the 2015 CAFÉ/Sysco Corporation Educator of the Year Awards at the 11th-annual Leadership Conference of the Center for the Advancement of Foodservice Education (CAFÉ), June 18 in Niagara Falls, N.Y.
“In our first year of supporting this new annual award that acknowledges the tremendous industry contributions of foodservice instructors throughout the United States, we were introduced to many genuinely gifted teachers,” says Neil Doherty, CEC, Sysco’s senior director of culinary development.
“All of them submitted amazing endorsements from their administrators, program and industry colleagues and former and current students—making the selection of only two award recipients and two runners-up from both high-school and college-level training programs extremely difficult. In the end, thanks to their extraordinary career accomplishments, four individuals stood out.” They are: