"cooking school" news and stories

Question: What do you get when you put nine of the most famous chefs from around the world in the same kitchen? Answer: A kind of culinary United Nations -- and they're cooking up more than just food.

The Basque Culinary Center, which is based in San Sebastián, Spain, and will open to students next year, is a cooking school with a lofty goal: to better the world, one meal at a time.The council members behind the center are "much more interested in shaping chefs into socially aware activists than in honing their knife skills," the Time article says. "We're talking about the role of the chef in the future," Dan Barber, the chef at New York's Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, told Time magazine. "And in that sense, it's not the revolution inside the kitchen that matters the most."

The Center (which its director, Joxe Mari Aizega, describes as "interdisciplinary," going beyond just cooking) intends to become the "world standard for higher education in cooking," according an article from GlobalPost, and will encourage students to look at food's big picture. Every meal, after all, has a back story, and the more socially, politically, and environmentally aware one is, the more one can appreciate it -- at least, that's how the school's advisory council is looking at it. Consider, for example, where you stand on genetically modified crops, or the hiring practices of cocoa and coffee growers, or even what climate change is doing to growing seasons. As Peruvian chef and advisory council member Gastón Arcurio told Time, "When chefs recognize that we can change the world, we convert cooking into a tool for justice."

Do you love to cook and want to learn more about it, but don't really have the time or inclination to go to culinary school? Maybe you just need to fill in some of the gaps in your self-taught education. There's a new online resource that could really be for you.

Called Rouxbe (pronounced roo be), this wesite offers cooking lessons, short video tips, and step by step video recipes. One aspect I really like about Rouxbe is that it focuses on technique but then supplies a recipe to go along with that technique. That is exactly like culinary school. There, you learn a technique and are then expected to be able to apply that to any recipe that you come accross. There's also a store and a community/forum section.

You have two basic membership options: free or premium, which is $99 for one year or $199 for a lifetime membership. The free membership level will get you access to text recipes and the drill-downs (videos featuring techniques and tips), and you get recipe previews and one free cooking lesson. To get full recipes and access to all cooking lessons you have to get the premium membership. Sure, it's no substitute for culinary school if you have career ambitions, but $99 is quite reasonable for an online culinary school if you really want to get cooking.

[Via Accidental Hedonist]

The New York Times Travel section has a list of twenty slightly offbeat, more interesting things to do for Spring Break, when most people pack up a bikini and sunscreen and head off to the beach. One of their suggestions is to learn a new cuisine by enrolling in a weekend cooking course that can go anywhere from spending the weekend in a bed and breakfast to the CIA. Their recommendations (all on the East Coast) are:

• Culinary Institute of America (CIA) offers day-long cooking classes every Saturday this spring in Hyde Park, NY
• New England Culinary Institute takes you to their Inn at Essex, VT, where you spend two hours helping to prepare your own meals
• You can learn to make your own maple syrup at The Manor on Golden Pond in Holderness, NH
• Also in Vermont, Deborah Krasner's Vermont Culinary Vacations offers weekend-long group cooking courses.