Culinary educators from across North America were able to see demonstrations of the Sous Chef™ at the Seventh Annual FENI Summit 2005 in New Orleans this February.  The Sous Chef™, by KP Culinary Educational Systems, is a computer-based culinary arts education tool designed to enhance food service training for secondary, post secondary, and adult students.

         "Many of the attendees commented that the Sous Chef™ is unlike any other teaching resource available. There was a lot of interest," said Michael Murray, executive producer at KP. FENI, the Foodservice Educators Network International, is a group dedicated to supporting and improving all levels of culinary arts education.

          The Sous Chef™ is a complete system for teaching culinary skills. It contains more than 250 videos explaining and demonstrating all areas of cooking and food preparation.  It also has 850 text pages and over 1,000 photos/diagrams/illustrations.  All of this material can be viewed on classroom monitors or screen projectors, or it can be accessed by individual students.

           The Sous Chef™ was written and produced based on decades of classroom and teaching experience. It is designed to offer “in the classroom” support to instructors who have a broad spectrum of experience and culinary skills, said Murray.   “One of our users said, ‘You make chefs better teachers…and you make teachers better chefs.’”

           The Sous Chef™ can be of special help in working with both advanced students (by giving them access to culinary topics and techniques that might not be applicable for the entire class) and struggling students (by offering them repetitive material and demonstrations that might not continue to engage the entire classroom and by audiovisually reinforcing the material they have already been taught), he added.