New Directions in School Meal Planning for Culinary Professionals
With greater emphasis being placed on fighting childhood obesity, it’s time to take a closer look at school lunches. This timely course explore the elements of creating a healthy school lunch program that will satisfy students, parents, teachers, and administrators alike.
Tasty Meals to Satisfy Everyone
School lunches aren’t what they used to be. Today, greater emphasis is placed on how food affects our children’s health, not to mention the sustainability of the environment. Along with these growing concerns, chefs and program directors must still contend with strict budgetary guidelines. For chefs, it’s no longer enough to develop a sound meal plan; they must also be able to articulate and communicate that plan to a school’s key decision makers, while also working with their staff to make great tasting food students will love.
Whether you’re a transitioning restaurant chef or a seasoned school chef, New Directions in School Meal Planning will teach you how to address these modern concerns, in a time when the role of the school chef has changed so much. Led by The International Culinary Center graduate Chef Bobo (aka Robert Surles), best known for developing the revolutionary lunch program at the Calhoun School in New York City (as featured in the New York Times), this new course aims to tackle timely and specialized issues, while giving attendees the information and understanding they need to succeed in this ever-evolving industry.
What You'll Learn
Over the course of 10 informative hours, you will learn how to:
- Analyze the differences between restaurant cooking and school cooking
- Create nutritionally balanced school meal programs for children and adults
- Learn how school food budgets are determined, and how to build meals within these limitations
- Apply formulas to scale recipes
- Properly portion meals for children and adults
- Meet staffing requirements: how many people, where to source, and how to hire and train
- Communicate meal plans and gain the confidence of parents, school administrators, and students
Course Instructor
Robert Surles, better known as Chef Bobo, is a graduate of The International Culinary Center and the executive chef and food service director for the Calhoun School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His passion lies in incorporating the freshest ingredients and proper seasoning to create school lunches that are both healthy and tasty. His lunch program at Calhoun, which has been called revolutionary, has drawn media attention from such outlets as the New Yorker and NPR. He is also the author of Chef Bobo’s Good Food Cookbook.