Culinary Program

Find culinary inspiration and helpful career information on topics such as cooking with chocolate, French and Greek cuisine, the life of a Chef, and what to expect in culinary school.

Does your sweet tooth lead you straight to your oven? Read how to avoid the pitfalls of cheese cake, bake creative cookies, use fresh fruits in baking, and more.

Catering and Restaurant Management

If you've ever prepared a Thanksgiving dinner, you know that cooking for a group takes planning and skill. Learn more about the art of catering and restaurant management, including specialized catering such as chocolates or high tea and how to prepare for a restaurant career.

Culinary Schools in the United States

With culinary schools in all 50 states and additional culinary education available online, you don't need to relocate unless you want to. Each state has its own special mixture of culture, cuisine, and locally grown agriculture that inspires the chefs and students who work and live there. If you're passionate about Maine lobster dishes, California cuisine, or any dish or state in between, you'll find a culinary school that is where you are or where you'd like to be.

Home | Culinary | Baking and Pastry | Your Daily Bread: Earn it with a Baking Career

Your Daily Bread: Earn it with a Baking Career

By Marianne Salina

Bread and water--many survived on it throughout history, and they made it themselves of whatever was available. But today, homemade bread has become a luxury where once it was a necessity

Sourdough Bread: Oven-baked Gold

The forty-niners of the western gold rush days never took cooking classes but they essentially invented sourdough bread, cooking for themselves in primitive conditions. In the morning they'd mix milk and flour into a dough and leave it behind the wood stove to warm throughout the day. By evening it would have risen, bubbly and sour, and be ready for them to add flour, leavening agents and some kind of shortening, then form it into biscuits to bake. In the San Francisco bay area, the starter--the flour and milk that soured and rose behind the stove all day--took on the distinctive taste of the salt air, making San Francisco sourdough a class unto itself.

Pioneer women on the trail coming West would keep their balls of bread dough going as another kind of starter, pulling off pieces to mix with more flour and water, creating bread dough that rose throughout the day while keeping their original starter going. When they'd stop for the night the bread would be risen and ready to bake for the evening meal.

Bread Making Around the World

Culinary classes can teach you the basics of making your own bread, filling the house with the smell of fresh baked bread, and how to create splendid gift breads, from holiday stollen (a traditional German Christmas bread, stuffed with fruits and nuts) to Italian ciabatta bread for dinner. After taking a cooking class you can answer the age old question: "What's for dinner?" With something new: "French cooking!" If you've taken a bread-making class, dinner might be accompanied by fresh baguettes.

So if you're looking for a career change, or simply following your passions, taking a cooking class can lead you to a new menu of answers to "What's for dinner?"

Source

Food Timeline: Bread

About the Author
Marianne Salina is a freelance writer in Spokane, Washington. She writes about pursuits in education and degree opportunities.

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