Vegetables, Pulses & Fruit
With a global focus on plant based foods, it has become crucial for chefs to understand vegetables and their preparation.
Vegetables are an essential part of daily wellness. As such, knowing how to make preparations such as the classic ratatouille, that is as visually appealing as it is delicious, is part of the skill set a chef requires.
This module will delve into the best way to prepare vegetables to showcase their colours, textures and flavours. You will also learn how to prepare classic preparations with and without lashings of cream, trendy plant based dishes and how to work with the wide variety of vegetable proteins available today.
This Module should be studied hand-in-hand with Module KM 11 Basic Ingredients.
Cooking Methods
Manipulating heat to produce specific results is an art, and one of the most valuable skills a chef needs to master.
The recent Modernist Cuisine trend has placed a great emphasis on the
science of cooking and made chefs realise that they can achieve far greater
results if they study their cooking methods more closely.
This module will discuss moist cooking, dry cooking as well as other thermal and non-thermal cooking methods.
Environmental Awareness
Environmental Awareness is the introductory subject to sustainability. In this module you will be introduced to the impact of food production and the hospitality industry on the environment. This ranges from the packaging we use and the ingredients we choose to the dishes we wash, and the table cloths we launder.
Environmental Sustainability
The term 'sustainability' is relevant to almost every business, but in this course we focus on sustainability in terms of the raising, growing and harvesting food to ensure that the land or sea can support both the grower and crop or animal into the future.
It is farming in such a way that ensures continued natural food production for the future generations.
Food History
The difference between good and great chefs is often their knowledge of ingredients. The history of food forms the foundation of ingredient knowledge as it gives the chef the insight into an ingredient - its origins, movement around the globe and the cultures that eat it.
This module will be an introduction to food history, but also include the history of restaurants and the most significant chefs that have shaped the career that you have embarked on.
Food Safety
Scientists have found that food can be a conduit for more than 250 diseases. It is therefore crucial that chefs have a good knowledge of the science and biology behind food borne illnesses in order to prevent them. Beautiful and delicious plates of food are insignificant if they harm customers.
Not only can people suffer and die from food poisoning, but it can do serious damage to a restaurant's reputation and business.In this module you will learn how to ensure that your creative creations, are also safe for consumption.
Taste and Flavour
As members of an advanced civilisation, that learned to cook not only for nourishment but also for pleasure, chefs cook to provide diners with delicious food that they will enjoy. To do so, chefs must understand how they, as the ones preparing food, and their customers who eat it, taste, or rather perceive flavour.
This module will discuss the way humans process and perceive flavour, and how chefs can use this knowledge to their advantage. The difference between taste and flavour will also be discussed as well as why ingredients have different flavours and how to pair them.
Scientific Principles of Cooking
We established in the introduction to gastronomy, that cooking is both an art and science.
In this module we explore the science of food and you will study some of the most significant scientific reactions and learn how they impact on the taste and texture of different ingredients.
Basic Ingredients
Ingredient knowledge is one of the most important building blocks of a chef’s culinary foundation, as it is the medium used to practice the art of cooking. The better a chef understands their ingredients, the better their food will be.
In this module discover how to differentiate between asparagus and artichokes, a fungi and a fungus, thickeners and stabilizer to name a few. We’ll be delving into the origins of ingredients, their flavour profiles and how to store them correctly.
Most importantly we’ll be looking at how to tell if they are ripe, edible and perfect for us to use. Storage principles and maintaining the quality of our produce is vital to a chefs final product.
The exploration of ingredients is a lifelong passion for most chefs, constantly searching for new flavours, textures and combinations to excite the palate is the foundation of gastronomy.