The Final Exam at Alain Ducasse
What happens during the final exams at one of the world's best cooking schools in France.
Back to School: Alain Ducasse Education
This past September, I moved back to Paris with my knives, my favourite stationery, and little else to study at Alain Ducasse Education in Argenteuil, a suburb on the outskirts of Paris. This is a result of a culinary scholarship, my fourth, granted by the James Beard Foundation. The course is a Diploma in Superior […]
All You Need To Know About Culinary School – Le Cordon Bleu, Paris
In an earlier post, I had written about how to win a scholarship to study at Le Cordon Bleu, like I did (thrice). This left me inundated with lots of emails from culinary aspirants wanting to know more. In this post, I’m going to attempt to answer some questions that were unanswered. I’m going to […]
WEEK 7-10: Life As A Culinary Student
The moment of truth - chef tasting the final result. Mine's the one in his left. I wrote a diligent report of my weeks at Le Cordon Bleu until Week 6, and then I stopped. I really wanted to continue, but committing to something or getting into a rhythm doesn’t come very easily to me […]
Week 6: Life As A Culinary Student
The regions we covered at Cordon Bleu this week were Champagne, Auvergne and Côte d’Azur. Or, to be more precise, we just touched upon these regions, because for most of them, we study only a traditional three course menu, which is not doing justice to them. So, it would be ideal is to supplement the […]
Week 5: Life As A Culinary Student
I absolutely hate having a practical class that involves cooking fish on a Monday. Why so? That’s because the market is closed on Monday, so the fish is typically ordered in over the weekend and is sitting in the walk-in refrigerator in its own liquid until Monday morning. A restaurant would scale the fish, clean […]
Week 4: Life As A Culinary Student
Week 4 of Le Cordon Bleu was fun with staggered classes and loads of events city-wide leading up to Bastille Day on Sunday. One of the things I was really excited about cooking was lobster. This was the first time I made lobster the size of a chopping board. As soon as we got to […]
How To Go To Le Cordon Bleu On A Scholarship
Dear Aspiring Culinary Student(s), I’ve been getting a bunch of emails about cooking school and culinary scholarships lately so I’m going to try my best to answer all your queries about going to culinary school, and even better, going to culinary school on scholarship. Should you have more questions, please leave them in the comments […]
Week 3: Life As A Culinary Student
First thing on Monday morning, we had our class photo. I was really excited for this, but it was quite disheartening to see that most of the class didn’t show up. We are a batch of 38 students at the Intermediate level, but you can see just 17 of us in there. Oh well. ** […]
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