Читать книгу Start & Run a Catering Business - George Erdosh - Страница 14

Cooking classes may or may not be a good idea for you. Nearly all of them are geared to home cooks, and although they may be fun, professionals will learn little. Try a few classes offered in your area. If the instructor is good, observe his or her techniques — that’s where the lessons may pay off. Videotapes and television cooking programs can help in the same way. Most cooking programs on the Food Network are geared to entertaining home cooks, but you can learn kitchen techniques from the hosts. Don’t pay much attention to the recipes themselves; rather, watch how chefs work.

There are seminars and cooking camps for experienced chefs, too, on both cooking and presentation. They don’t come cheap: expect to pay several hundred dollars for a two- or three-day cooking seminar, plus accommodation and related expenses. Catersource has regular one- and two-day seminars in various major cities in the US (see www.catersource.com). Their seminars are excellent, geared to caterers, expensive, and usually worth the fees. During the breaks you can network with other caterers and make valuable contacts. You go home enthusiastic and totally jazzed up.

There are a truly awesome number of food- and cooking-related websites on the Internet, but only a very small fraction of these are useful to a professional.

No matter how you choose to do it, total immersion in cooking and cooking techniques for an extended period is what you want. Keep on reading books on food and cooking, even simple cookbooks. No matter how poor a cookbook is, it will likely contain some useful information.

Learn to cook an entire cross section of dishes, but emphasize the ones you want to prepare in your catering business. Sounds like a formidable task, but it really isn’t. Once you get into the rhythm of preparing new and unusual food with unaccustomed kitchen techniques, trying other new items becomes easier and easier.

Mark each of your recipes with significant information you’ve discovered in preparation — anything you might need to know for future preparation of the dish. Ingredients should be slightly adjusted to your own taste as well as to current trends. Older recipes use fewer spices and herbs than today’s more sophisticated palates demand. Sugar tended to be used more generously, too, producing the over-sweetened desserts that are not much in favor today. Oils and cooking fats were used more liberally than our present awareness about good nutrition tolerates. So adjust the recipe accordingly and make sure to note the adaptation and results.

You will need a substantial collection of recipe books for yourself as well as reference books on cooking and food. Your choices will be dictated somewhat by the kind of catering you want to do. Of the enormous selection of cookbooks available, most will be useless to you. There are very few books with original recipes, but those are the ones you need, both for their ideas of new things to try and for your own reference.

You will also need several good reference books on cookery, basic food chemistry and physics, and nutritional information. These books should be read and reread, studied and re-studied. It is very important to understand the basics of food and cooking and to know where to look up the information when you need it. As Samuel Johnson famously said, “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” When it comes to cooking, there is no single source as comprehensive as Joy of Cooking.

A classic since its original publication in 1931, Joy of Cooking is the best and most comprehensive cookbook ever written in English. In its revised form, it is still America’s most loved cooking companion and it should definitely be on your bookshelf. The amount of information and research that went into Joy of Cooking is simply incredible, and the information is useful and up to date on most subjects.