Hundreds of culinary arts instructors from the western United States were able to see demonstrations of the Sous Chef™ at the Vocational Education Conference in Las Vegas this summer.  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 teachers attending visited our booth and had very positive comments about our material,” said Chef Dominic O’Neill, author of the Sous Chef™. The annual conference offers an opportunity for vocational and technical secondary educators to meet and network while exchanging information and teaching strategies.

          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 O’Neill.   “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.