K-Rock of the pop rebellion (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} k_rock) wrote,@ 2003-09-16 17:11:00 |
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A visit to the CCA
I’ve been toying with becoming a cook full time for quite a while now, but given my prior commitments (just a small thing called a PhD program), I’ve sort of put the whole idea on hold. I do some catering on and off for a smallish company based in the town that I live in, and I couldn’t really ask for better bosses or a better company to work for, other than the limited number of hours that I/they have for me to work. If I did quit graduate school to cook, I would definitely have to find a more permanent place of employment, which is part of what has stopped me from quitting graduate school to pursue a cooking career.
But then I realized: I could quit graduate school and go to cooking school! This would be brilliant! I could still think of myself as a student and thus not out in the real world, I could continue to be content work-wise with my limited number of engagements with the catering company, and yet I would be working toward a goal that I actually want to achieve: a career in the culinary arts.
With this brilliant idea in mind, I went to various websites to look for information on cooking schools so I could figure out how feasible this plan was and what kind of timeline I’d be looking at. One school in particular that I looked at was the California Culinary Academy. For those of you who may be wondering, there are a variety of reasons that I am not particularly interested in the Culinary Institute of America (aka the best culinary school in the world). For instance, it’s in New York, and I’m not, nor would it be easy for me to move there given my husband’s current obligations. Also, they have a four year program, and that’s a lot of time, and in the end you get a bachelor’s degree, and I have one of those already (albeit not in culinary arts, of course). These two problems with the CIA are completely solved with the CCA: it’s in San Francisco, a mere 30 miles from my home, and their program lasts one year. Meanwhile, it’s still considered a top school for chefs.
So, I went to their website and after much looking for information like how much this whole thing was going to cost me, I filled out a little form saying that I wanted more information and when would be a good time to reach me. Within 24 hours, Ben Miller (not his real name) had called me, and set up an appointment for that same week to take a look at the place and see if the CCA would be a good match for my needs. Once more, I tried to ascertain how much culinary school would cost me and was told that I had to wait until I saw the place before I could be told that information as with "just a number, [I] wouldn’t see real value". In other words: damned expensive, but let’s see if we can talk you into this place first.
That Friday, my friend Kerry (yeah, not her real name either) and I drove on up to the school to have a look-see. Kerry is someone that also caters with me, and we have expressed mutual interest in opening a gourmet grocery store/deli together, so I thought it would be nice if she saw the school as well. She thought it would be cool to see as well, so off we went.
When we arrived, Ben took us back to his cubicle to ask me a few questions, as the tour is also a chance for an interview. Many of the questions like "Why do you think our school is right for you?" were sort of unanswerable given that their website has little to no information, but I gamely did the best I could to give him some answers, and then we got down to business and he showed us the place. Oh, I should also mention that it was 95 degrees outside, which is rather unusual for San Fran, so the school was quite warm during our tour, you know, what with all the cooking going on.
First stop: Foods of the Americas, wherein each day the class "visits" a different country in the Americas and cooks a full meal while listening to music from that country. The best part of this class for me was definitely the fact that we showed up right at the tail end and got to try all of the food. The country for the day was Peru, and darned if Peruvian potatoes aren’t just a lovely thing to eat. The food was really quite good, but the presentation lacked a little, considering the students are supposedly graded on presentation daily. How is serving your chicken in one big heap on a plate any sort of presentation? Even HoJos would put a sprig of parsley on the side or something. This was my first sign that my boss at the catering company might be right: I might actually know more about the food industry than your average cooking school student, something I wasn’t at all convinced of before we went and visited the school.
Let me stop for a second and explain how this school works. Every three weeks, a new group of incoming chefs-to-be starts their program. The first set of classes lasts 3 weeks and is completely lecture-based. The classes are about nutrition, kitchen and food safety, and sort of vocabulary of cooking. Each of the rest of the classes is either 3 or 6 weeks, and you generally take 3 at a time in a five hour block. There are three different 5 hour blocks per day, and each incoming group is about 32 students per time block. Remember all of this when I tell you how much this school costs. Other courses include things like butchery, baking and pastry, and running the school’s cafeteria. After you are done with your coursework, you go off to do an "externship" where you work in a professional kitchen and learn more from that experience.
Our next stop was a basic kitchen skills class, one of the first classes students take after finishing the initial lecture-based classes. We watched a girl peel a carrot and both Kerry and I wanted to rip the carrot out of her hands and show her how to do it properly. Then she started cutting it, and I just had to stop looking. I guess this is why these students need a basic kitchen skills class, but geez, shouldn’t you have learned how to peel a carrot somewhere else in life? Of course, the fact that this student was peeling a carrot led to a very important question for me: Will I be able to get by in culinary school given that I have a severe allergy to carrots. We talked to one of the teachers and he looked a bit surprised, and seemed to intimate that he had never had a student with a food allergy before, which I find hard to believe, but said that we could definitely work around it.
After a few more classrooms, like the Asian cooking room and the software skills lab, we stopped at the library. This school has the. Best. Library. Ever. It’s like how I view every other library – a place to find lots of magazines and books about foods, but without all the stupid other books getting in the way. Plus, they had so many different things! It’s like a mecca for someone like me, who loves to read cookbooks and food magazines and really anything food-related. Of course, I’m only allowed to go in there if I am affiliated with the school. But then, for how much the school costs, I could probably build my own library of food stuff. Don’t worry, I’ll get to how much it costs, but I have to keep you in suspense as well.
We stopped at every single classroom and took a look around, and I won’t bore you further with all the details except to say this: I really expected more exciting product from cooking school students. We stopped at some rooms, and I thought "Are they really going to serve this food on their buffet, which, by the way, they charge people $21 to come to?" Okay, maybe that wasn’t my exact thought, but that’s the gist. On the other hand, the classes looked like a lot more fun than any class I’ve taken, ever. It was like a normal school, but ten times more fun!
Finally, we got back to Ben’s cube and we sat down and he asked me some more interview questions and then we got to the point. The cost. For one year, including all materials and utensils (which you get to keep): $42,000. Wow. That’s a lot of money. Meanwhile, they want me to make a commitment by one week from now. A commitment to spend $42,000 in a week? Who do they think I am? Paris Hilton? Also, they won’t let me talk to a financial aid counselor until I’ve committed to coming to the school But how can I commit to the school when I don’t know if I can afford it? One more thing: it costs $315 to commit to the school. It’s like some sort of get-rich-quick scheme! While I really wish I could go to this school, because it looks a good time, even after seeing it, it’s hard to see the value. I could get a job in the industry and learn as much if not more than these students learn in a year and get paid to do it. That’s a more than $42,000 difference in expenditures. This of course, would leave me free to spend the $42,000 I don’t have on that library I was telling you about.
Postscript: After hearing that monumental price tag, Kerry and I went to Zuni Café for lunch. Yum. But that’s another story entirely.
I’ve been toying with becoming a cook full time for quite a while now, but given my prior commitments (just a small thing called a PhD program), I’ve sort of put the whole idea on hold. I do some catering on and off for a smallish company based in the town that I live in, and I couldn’t really ask for better bosses or a better company to work for, other than the limited number of hours that I/they have for me to work. If I did quit graduate school to cook, I would definitely have to find a more permanent place of employment, which is part of what has stopped me from quitting graduate school to pursue a cooking career.
But then I realized: I could quit graduate school and go to cooking school! This would be brilliant! I could still think of myself as a student and thus not out in the real world, I could continue to be content work-wise with my limited number of engagements with the catering company, and yet I would be working toward a goal that I actually want to achieve: a career in the culinary arts.
With this brilliant idea in mind, I went to various websites to look for information on cooking schools so I could figure out how feasible this plan was and what kind of timeline I’d be looking at. One school in particular that I looked at was the California Culinary Academy. For those of you who may be wondering, there are a variety of reasons that I am not particularly interested in the Culinary Institute of America (aka the best culinary school in the world). For instance, it’s in New York, and I’m not, nor would it be easy for me to move there given my husband’s current obligations. Also, they have a four year program, and that’s a lot of time, and in the end you get a bachelor’s degree, and I have one of those already (albeit not in culinary arts, of course). These two problems with the CIA are completely solved with the CCA: it’s in San Francisco, a mere 30 miles from my home, and their program lasts one year. Meanwhile, it’s still considered a top school for chefs.
So, I went to their website and after much looking for information like how much this whole thing was going to cost me, I filled out a little form saying that I wanted more information and when would be a good time to reach me. Within 24 hours, Ben Miller (not his real name) had called me, and set up an appointment for that same week to take a look at the place and see if the CCA would be a good match for my needs. Once more, I tried to ascertain how much culinary school would cost me and was told that I had to wait until I saw the place before I could be told that information as with "just a number, [I] wouldn’t see real value". In other words: damned expensive, but let’s see if we can talk you into this place first.
That Friday, my friend Kerry (yeah, not her real name either) and I drove on up to the school to have a look-see. Kerry is someone that also caters with me, and we have expressed mutual interest in opening a gourmet grocery store/deli together, so I thought it would be nice if she saw the school as well. She thought it would be cool to see as well, so off we went.
When we arrived, Ben took us back to his cubicle to ask me a few questions, as the tour is also a chance for an interview. Many of the questions like "Why do you think our school is right for you?" were sort of unanswerable given that their website has little to no information, but I gamely did the best I could to give him some answers, and then we got down to business and he showed us the place. Oh, I should also mention that it was 95 degrees outside, which is rather unusual for San Fran, so the school was quite warm during our tour, you know, what with all the cooking going on.
First stop: Foods of the Americas, wherein each day the class "visits" a different country in the Americas and cooks a full meal while listening to music from that country. The best part of this class for me was definitely the fact that we showed up right at the tail end and got to try all of the food. The country for the day was Peru, and darned if Peruvian potatoes aren’t just a lovely thing to eat. The food was really quite good, but the presentation lacked a little, considering the students are supposedly graded on presentation daily. How is serving your chicken in one big heap on a plate any sort of presentation? Even HoJos would put a sprig of parsley on the side or something. This was my first sign that my boss at the catering company might be right: I might actually know more about the food industry than your average cooking school student, something I wasn’t at all convinced of before we went and visited the school.
Let me stop for a second and explain how this school works. Every three weeks, a new group of incoming chefs-to-be starts their program. The first set of classes lasts 3 weeks and is completely lecture-based. The classes are about nutrition, kitchen and food safety, and sort of vocabulary of cooking. Each of the rest of the classes is either 3 or 6 weeks, and you generally take 3 at a time in a five hour block. There are three different 5 hour blocks per day, and each incoming group is about 32 students per time block. Remember all of this when I tell you how much this school costs. Other courses include things like butchery, baking and pastry, and running the school’s cafeteria. After you are done with your coursework, you go off to do an "externship" where you work in a professional kitchen and learn more from that experience.
Our next stop was a basic kitchen skills class, one of the first classes students take after finishing the initial lecture-based classes. We watched a girl peel a carrot and both Kerry and I wanted to rip the carrot out of her hands and show her how to do it properly. Then she started cutting it, and I just had to stop looking. I guess this is why these students need a basic kitchen skills class, but geez, shouldn’t you have learned how to peel a carrot somewhere else in life? Of course, the fact that this student was peeling a carrot led to a very important question for me: Will I be able to get by in culinary school given that I have a severe allergy to carrots. We talked to one of the teachers and he looked a bit surprised, and seemed to intimate that he had never had a student with a food allergy before, which I find hard to believe, but said that we could definitely work around it.
After a few more classrooms, like the Asian cooking room and the software skills lab, we stopped at the library. This school has the. Best. Library. Ever. It’s like how I view every other library – a place to find lots of magazines and books about foods, but without all the stupid other books getting in the way. Plus, they had so many different things! It’s like a mecca for someone like me, who loves to read cookbooks and food magazines and really anything food-related. Of course, I’m only allowed to go in there if I am affiliated with the school. But then, for how much the school costs, I could probably build my own library of food stuff. Don’t worry, I’ll get to how much it costs, but I have to keep you in suspense as well.
We stopped at every single classroom and took a look around, and I won’t bore you further with all the details except to say this: I really expected more exciting product from cooking school students. We stopped at some rooms, and I thought "Are they really going to serve this food on their buffet, which, by the way, they charge people $21 to come to?" Okay, maybe that wasn’t my exact thought, but that’s the gist. On the other hand, the classes looked like a lot more fun than any class I’ve taken, ever. It was like a normal school, but ten times more fun!
Finally, we got back to Ben’s cube and we sat down and he asked me some more interview questions and then we got to the point. The cost. For one year, including all materials and utensils (which you get to keep): $42,000. Wow. That’s a lot of money. Meanwhile, they want me to make a commitment by one week from now. A commitment to spend $42,000 in a week? Who do they think I am? Paris Hilton? Also, they won’t let me talk to a financial aid counselor until I’ve committed to coming to the school But how can I commit to the school when I don’t know if I can afford it? One more thing: it costs $315 to commit to the school. It’s like some sort of get-rich-quick scheme! While I really wish I could go to this school, because it looks a good time, even after seeing it, it’s hard to see the value. I could get a job in the industry and learn as much if not more than these students learn in a year and get paid to do it. That’s a more than $42,000 difference in expenditures. This of course, would leave me free to spend the $42,000 I don’t have on that library I was telling you about.
Postscript: After hearing that monumental price tag, Kerry and I went to Zuni Café for lunch. Yum. But that’s another story entirely.
