Culinary Arts Facilities: Cook in Your Dream Kitchen

Culinary schools do their best to keep up with the demands of contemporary cooking and baking. State-of-the-art facilities can prepare you for work at a variety of chef jobs in a range of kitchen settings. Here's what some culinary schools today are offering in terms of facilities and equipment.

Culinary arts facilities support learning

Culinary instructors and guest chefs use demonstration kitchens to show students particular techniques, and often contain a culinary work station, Internet access, audio/visual equipment and seating for large groups.

To practice new culinary skills, you'll find hot kitchens in a range of configurations such as parallel, open, American line, island, and u-shaped. Some schools even offer all-electric kitchens for learning to cook in tall buildings, cruise ships, and planes.

Programs that teach baking may provide individual work stations and ovens as well as temperature-controlled pastry, chocolate and sugar artistry labs. Some schools also have studios for refining and photographing finished work.

In addition to the usual tilt skillets, trunnions, salamanders, and convection ovens, the more advanced programs are offering specialty equipment such as dough sheeters and chilled marble counter tops for baking, and speed cookers and freeze blasters for cooking.

Resources for those in traditional and online culinary degree programs

Many schools now have computer labs with the latest hotel management, point of sale and reservation software as well as culinary libraries with access to reference books, magazines, periodicals, cookbooks and journals. These resources can be very useful especially if you're taking online culinary classes.

Additional culinary arts facilities

For those interested in food science, there are schools with food science labs specifically designed for researching, designing and testing new food products. You can also study in top notch brewing labs or oenology labs that sport correct lighting and white table tops for viewing wine.

Some culinary degree programs offer kitchens and equipment specifically designed to teach students a particular kind of cooking, such as brick-lined pizza ovens for Italian cuisine.

It's important to find out what kind of facilities and equipment culinary schools offer before making your choice so you can receive the best training for your career as a chef.