PURSUING A CULINARY DEGREE

It used to be that if you wanted to impress someone at a party, you'd tell them about your Harvard MBA or your medical degree from Columbia. The last thing you'd brag about was your culinary degree. Not so any more. Men and women from all walks of life are vying for positions in culinary art schools. The popularity of this fascinating and satisfying career has never been higher, and culinary celebrities are on almost every channel, and their books are best sellers. Clearly, a culinary degree can open very attractive doors to an exciting future.





Where Are You Headed?
There are several different job types that a graduate with a culinary degree can think of taking and these include jobs in restaurants, hotels or resorts, catering and institutional, and becoming a personal chef, as well as other areas that open up newer possibilities for those having a culinary degree. The options open to culinary degree holders need not necessarily be confined to just cooking since people can combine their culinary education with other interests and take to writing food articles or photographing food items to publish them in books, magazines, and cookbooks.

Specialties Add Spice
Pursuing a culinary degree opens several options from which to specialize in, including technical, culinary, and organizational or managerial skills. Take the case of technical skills, the most fundamental learned by culinary graduates -- this includes knife skills, cooking methodology, timing, mise en pace, and learning the most important skill - that of cooking well even under pressure.

Culinary skills involve learning the nuances of taste and seasoning, combining flavors to form new ones, creating plates that are aesthetically appealing, and learning to make presentations of dishes, as well as the ins and outs of different cultures' cuisines. All this takes considerable effort to master, even though most chefs have good palates to begin with.





Mastering The Machinery
Students also learn how to organize. Take, for example, the need to know how to take care of more than one station, keep the kitchen functioning smoothly at all times, and doing business such as how to order, schedule, and price food items -- this is indeed a field of study that requires much in depth knowledge. Along with organizational skills, managerial skills are a complementary subject that requires learning how to handle staff and includes training people who will be working for you.

All in all, earning a culinary degree is certainly a first step in advancing one's career Each of these skills plays a major role in deciding what to study in your culinary degree course since there are different paths open to you depending on whether you want to learn techniques, develop the palate, or want to learn to manage things and people.