Chefs
What we offerComing Soon...
If you want further information about the Chefs in Schools programme, whether you are a chef or a school, please visit their website here.
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If you want to enquire about vocational chef training, please…
Vocational CHEF TRAINING
Chefs in Schools believe that the best way to improve school food is to invest in training. A well-trained school chef won’t just make good food that children love to eat, they will save your school money. This truly is an investment that pays you back many times over.
We are the experts when it comes to transforming school food. We teach school chefs how to get the most out of their ingredients in terms of flavour and value for money.
If you’re a chef who wants to retrain to work in a school or a school that wants to train their kitchen team, please get in touch with any queries. Our charity also offers onsite audits, intensive training and ongoing support. Contact us for more information.
Here are some of the courses we run at Hackney School of Food.
Bread Training (3 Hours)
- Italian Focaccia
- Soda Bread
- Indian Flatbread & Naan
- Scaling Up
In this three hour class, we will teach you to make the perfect loaf, how to scale it up to feed large volumes and a few interesting styles of bread that will have you confident in your baking.
Starting with a delicious Italian focaccia, you will learn the absolute essentials of how to mix, stretch, fold and shape your doughs and the importance of proving and resting before the bake. Moving on to an easy Soda Bread for a yeast-free recipe, we talk about the nutritional benefits of wholemeal flour and how to use other types of flour and inclusions in the doughs. Finally, we show you how to bake without using an oven, with our Indian style flatbreads and naans cooked in a hot frying pan.
Once you’ve mastered these simple but effective techniques, you’ll be confident to scale up your baking skills to feed large volumes.
Sourdough Pizza Training (1 Day)
- How to make a starter
- Fermenting dough in the fridge
- Ease of production
In this day-long class, we start with the basics of a sourdough – making a starter culture from scratch and working through the step by step process of bringing it to life and caring for it. Then, using the School of Food’s very own starter, we will create our own pizza dough, talking through the techniques needed to build structure and getting the best out of you your doughs by leaving them in the fridge to slowly ferment.
Once we have our doughs ready to go, we’ll walk through stretching and shaping the dough into a base that’s ready to bake. No pizza is complete without its toppings, and we will demonstrate a nutritious, delicious tomato sauce with which we will top our bases, along with some classic finishing touches.
Once you know the basic recipe and technique for these pizzas, it’s a simple step up to bulking out the batches. Finally, we will show you how to bake them to perfection using both our conventional ovens and our outdoor wood-fired oven, as long as the weather is kind to us!
Pasta Training
- Different Pastas – cooking techniques
- Bakes – Lasagna, Mac & Cheese, Miso tomato
- Keeping pasta well sauced
- Cooking pasta through service
- Pasta sauces
With our pasta training class, you’ll find out why there are so many shapes of pasta, how they each have a certain way of being cooked and understand how to get that perfect al dente bite.
Of course, pasta isn’t served by itself, so we shall show you a few key sauces to serve with your perfectly cooked pasta, and how to keep your dishes from drying out to make sure the pasta is served at its best when service comes around. Pasta is best served fresh, so we’ll also talk about techniques to help in cooking and keeping it fresh during high volume service.
Pasta is great in traybakes as well. We’ll demonstrate how to make a classic lasagne, macaroni cheese and some twists to keep things healthy.
How to Write a Menu ( 1 Day)
- The School Food Plan
- Children’s Nutrition – a basic guide
- A Healthy Plate
- Week Cycles, budgeting and costing
Writing a menu for a school is a big task but with the right knowhow, it’s easy! With this course, we aim to break things down into an easy guide, giving you the confidence to create wholesome, nutritious, delicious food on a large scale and to a budget.
The School Food Plan is at the heart of the work Chefs In Schools is undertaking, and revisiting its aims is key to working towards our ultimate goal. In conjunction with understanding portion sizes, healthy plates and balanced meals, we will provide a basic course in the nutritional requirements of children.
Accurately costing these menus is essential to the budget of schools, understanding how a term-time weekly cycle operates, how to minimise food waste and how to estimate ordering costs will be covered to give you the knowledge in running your own kitchen.
Bread Training (3 Hours)
- Italian Focaccia
- Soda Bread
- Indian Flatbread & Naan
- Scaling Up
In this three hour class, we will teach you to make the perfect loaf, how to scale it up to feed large volumes and a few interesting styles of bread that will have you confident in your baking.
Starting with a delicious Italian focaccia, you will learn the absolute essentials of how to mix, stretch, fold and shape your doughs and the importance of proving and resting before the bake. Moving on to an easy Soda Bread for a yeast-free recipe, we talk about the nutritional benefits of wholemeal flour and how to use other types of flour and inclusions in the doughs. Finally, we show you how to bake without using an oven, with our Indian style flatbreads and naans cooked in a hot frying pan.
Once you’ve mastered these simple but effective techniques, you’ll be confident to scale up your baking skills to feed large volumes.
Sourdough Pizza Training (1 Day)
- How to make a starter
- Fermenting dough in the fridge
- Ease of production
In this day-long class, we start with the basics of a sourdough – making a starter culture from scratch and working through the step by step process of bringing it to life and caring for it. Then, using the School of Food’s very own starter, we will create our own pizza dough, talking through the techniques needed to build structure and getting the best out of you your doughs by leaving them in the fridge to slowly ferment.
Once we have our doughs ready to go, we’ll walk through stretching and shaping the dough into a base that’s ready to bake. No pizza is complete without its toppings, and we will demonstrate a nutritious, delicious tomato sauce with which we will top our bases, along with some classic finishing touches.
Once you know the basic recipe and technique for these pizzas, it’s a simple step up to bulking out the batches. Finally, we will show you how to bake them to perfection using both our conventional ovens and our outdoor wood-fired oven, as long as the weather is kind to us!
Pasta Training
- Different Pastas – cooking techniques
- Bakes – Lasagna, Mac & Cheese, Miso tomato
- Keeping pasta well sauced
- Cooking pasta through service
- Pasta sauces
With our pasta training class, you’ll find out why there are so many shapes of pasta, how they each have a certain way of being cooked and understand how to get that perfect al dente bite.
Of course, pasta isn’t served by itself, so we shall show you a few key sauces to serve with your perfectly cooked pasta, and how to keep your dishes from drying out to make sure the pasta is served at its best when service comes around. Pasta is best served fresh, so we’ll also talk about techniques to help in cooking and keeping it fresh during high volume service.
Pasta is great in traybakes as well. We’ll demonstrate how to make a classic lasagne, macaroni cheese and some twists to keep things healthy.
How to Write a Menu ( 1 Day)
- The School Food Plan
- Children’s Nutrition – a basic guide
- A Healthy Plate
- Week Cycles, budgeting and costing
Writing a menu for a school is a big task but with the right knowhow, it’s easy! With this course, we aim to break things down into an easy guide, giving you the confidence to create wholesome, nutritious, delicious food on a large scale and to a budget.
The School Food Plan is at the heart of the work Chefs In Schools is undertaking, and revisiting its aims is key to working towards our ultimate goal. In conjunction with understanding portion sizes, healthy plates and balanced meals, we will provide a basic course in the nutritional requirements of children.
Accurately costing these menus is essential to the budget of schools, understanding how a term-time weekly cycle operates, how to minimise food waste and how to estimate ordering costs will be covered to give you the knowledge in running your own kitchen.
