Culinary School | Imamother

Amarante

Wed, May 02 2018, 4:01 am

If you just want to take classes, many of them are demonstration classes and/or wouldn't require you to eat the food necessarily. You can learn quite a lot from observation - I learned a lot from Alton Brown and America's Test Kitchen and other real cooking shows. Culinary school would be different but I'm not sure why a really determined person couldn't take real cooking classes although they wouldn't be able to eat the end product - I think there was a frum woman who won a British cooking show even though she couldn't actually taste what she was making :-)

amother

Lemon

Wed, May 02 2018, 8:41 am

thanks for the reply. yes, I watch the cooking shows but would prefer something that caters specifically to our lifestyle. I host a lot for shabbos and yt, and although I bh have no issues cooking I feel like I would like to improve my skills.
the link provided sounds great but I'm in lakewood. anything closer?

Amarante

Wed, May 02 2018, 9:35 am

I don't understand why techniques are specific to frum recipes. Cooking techniques are universal - knife skills, baking skills and whether food is kosher or not doesn't change plating aesthetics or how to achieve it.

Recipes aren't frum either as many cookbooks contain great recipes that are kosher or can easily be adapted to being kosher. For kosher foodies, one must realistically learn to cook ethnic recipes or newest interpretations of recipes at home because there simply isn't a good kosher restaurant serving that cuisine - There is no good Chinese kosher restaurant in Los Angeles and only one Thai restaurant for example. If one learns how to cook good Chinese food or good Thai recipes, one can replicate them at home.

amother

Pumpkin

Wed, May 02 2018, 10:56 am

Amarante wrote:

ITA

I am amother because many people know that I took classes at the Culinary Institute of America.

cbsp

Wed, May 02 2018, 4:38 pm

Amarante wrote:

There are huge shaylos involved with cooking milk and meat. Additionally a good chef has to learn how to taste her food - hard to do (or accidentally not do) when cooking treif. And then there are all the very inherently non kosher ingredients (shellfish, non kosher animals, wines, etc).

It's not impossible, it's been done before, but guidance of a Rov is a must.

As far as frum recipes go, there are many cuts of meat that are unavailable to the Kosher consumer. There are also food combinations like fish and meat that are prohibited (and fish and dairy for sefardim). Etc. A kosher culinary school will teach recipes and build menus with all of these regulations in mind.

amother

Pumpkin

Wed, May 02 2018, 4:50 pm

cbsp wrote:

A good chef can learn when food is done by the smell. It is easy to not taste food. I can't imagine how one accidentally tastes treif. Please explain.

It is simple if you take classes to not select recipes that use shell fish or pigs.

I wish most of the kosher chefs could cook as well as I do. I wish they were properly trained. DH hired a top local chef to cook for us on one occasion. The chef was well supervised. At that point I realized that there was much better quality to cooking than we were experiencing.

As far as kosher menus, a frum person knows what is acceptable. Perhaps if you were training a non-frum person to cook for a kosher person, then you would have to teach menus.

Amarante

Wed, May 02 2018, 4:56 pm

cbsp wrote:

I can't believe any frum Jew doesn't know what is treyf and what isn't - why in the world would someone be confused by reading recipes and not instinctively knowing they couldn't use butter to baste the chicken :-) or that they should not make the crab cakes.

I thought you were inquiring as someone who knew dietary rules and not someone who was teaching elementary frum home economics - ie. I thought you were an experienced cook who wanted to hone her cooking skills and possibly learn interesting new recipes and presentations.