Guest Lectures

[cape chef]

I am starting a series of lectuers at the CT Center for Culinary Arts next Tuesday.

I will be discussing what it takes to be a successful chef,HACCP,motivatinal skills,what I look for in prespective employees.

I have written a lenghty paper on these areas and was curious what others (chefs or students) look for in these areas.

My second lecture will be a hands on cooking demo on fundimental cooking techniques.

Third will be food and wine chemistry.

[Suzanne]

Neat! How many lectures will you be giving? Is the first one covering ALL of "what it takes to be a successful chef,HACCP,motivatinal skills,what I look for in prespective employees."? Wow, that's a lot!

If it were anyone not from ChefTalk, I would offer my help. But seeing as how it's YOU, there's no need. (There are a few others here I'd say the same thing to.)

[cape chef]

Thank you very much Suzanne for your vote of confidence.

So far I have three lectuers scheduled as I noted in my first post.

I know it seems a lot for the students to digest, but for the HACCP part of my lecture i'm going to focus on it's importance and give the basic outline of the program without going into to many layers of the program as the students study HACCP in detail later in the school year.

I spent a couple hours at the school on Monday touring classes and observing the students work. I really enjoyed the sence of learning going on.

Tuesday the 9th is my first program and I will report back on how it went.

In the mean time, any thoughts on the subject matter?

[CAsweetthing]

I'm not sure how you are planning on organizing the talks, but I would either move HACCP to it's own discussion or tack it on the the end of the first lecture.

As a seasoned chef, your audience is going to want to see inside your brain. The more they can learn about what you think it takes to be a successful chef, the motivational skills you admire and what you look for in a prospective employee, the better.

Yes, HACCP is very important and isn't one of those things the public tends to be exposed to on the Food Network, so, absolutely, cover it.

The nice thing about having a demo is that it's very natural to incorporate Safety & Sanitation and Food Science basics into the demo (anything with eggs is wonderful and offers so many options! proteins and changing them, thickeners, custards, meringue, emulsions, overworking, burning the yolks....).

Lastly the food and wine chemistry sounds facinating. Again, it's only natural to add in the food science angle. Don't worry about your audience understanding all of it. They will remember some of the concepts from the second lecture and you can introduce some new ideas. IMHO, it takes people a little while to get over their intimidation of food science, but once they do, they really like it. I'd be prepared with a couple of good book/ website suggestions where you students can learn more on their own.

Good Luck!

[cape chef]

Originally Posted by CAsweetthing

Good Luck!

Thank you CAsweetthing