Can you learn to cook online ?
The Escoffier School thinks so.

Excerpts from an article on “GigaOM” :
By Kevin Fitchard

“The Escoffier School for Culinary Arts has one hell of a namesake to live up to. Auguste Escoffier is the closest thing the cooking world has to a deity. He established the brigade system that governs all modern day professional kitchens. His pivotal Le Guide Culinairecodified French cuisine’s five mother sauces — from which all other sauces derive. The Escoffier School’s owners believe they can now impart some of the grand master’s wisdom on a new generation of cooks through an intensive online course.

Triumph Higher Education, which licenses the school’s name from the Escoffier Foundation, already has two brick-and-mortar professional cooking schools in Austin, Texas, and Boulder. Co. But this week it launched its online curriculum, modeling it after the online degree programs such as those offered by the University of Phoenix. The course costs $5,000, and while half its new enrollment is comprised of enthusiasts looking to learn the basics of cooking, the school’s core objective is to train the professional cooks that make up the rank and file of every restaurant kitchen.

At this point I should mention that I worked as a prep and line cook for several years in college. I had no formal training, and I’m certainly no chef, but I make a decent vinaigrette, can debone a chicken and have developed an unhealthy indifference toward open flame. I also carry the same baggage anyone who has learned to cook in a restaurant accrues.

Sure, your grandma can teach you to cook, but to learn how to cook professionally, there is no substitute for a hairy man in sweat-drenched chef whites bellowing in your ear, demanding to know how you could f#@k up a carrot brunoise.

Auguste Escoffier

I expressed my skepticism to Jeffrey Larson, Triumph’s director of admissions marketing and Brian Sherrill, its vice president technology – and they said they get that a lot. Cooking is such a hands-on profession, an entirely online curriculum seems counter-intuitive, said Sherrill said.

But Sherrill said no one is going to graduate from school’s two-to-four-month program and open their own restaurant. The idea is to teach the rudiments of cooking along with a healthy dose of French culinary theory and kitchen science to students wanting to start out a restaurant career, Sherrill said. Triumph expects its Escoffier graduates will develop the basic knowledge needed to…………”

Read the whole story  HERE