Considering A Cooking Career?

Considering A Cooking Career?

Natural talent is an enormous asset when one decides to follow a career path which incorporates effortless ability or aptitude. However, it is possible to learn the skills required for a professional vocation in cooking for diners who are willing to pay for great cuisine. Making a professional career in creative cooking requires:

• A love of and passion for all things related to food.
• The desire for a professional cooking career, rather than just another job in someone’s kitchen – possibly without any planned professional growth and progression opportunities.
• Accepting and relishing challenges.
• Commitment, perseverance, and determination.
• An eye for detail.
• Being prepared to work the necessary hours.
• A thirst for learning.
• A drive and passion to achieve perfection.
• A willingness to accept guidance and constructive criticism.
• Most importantly, enrolling at one of South Africa’s top culinary schools to be taught by and learn from the best culinary training professionals who are each an expert in their own respective specialities in cuisine and professional cooking.

Top Culinary School

The Prue Leith Chefs Academy is widely recognised as the top culinary school in South Africa. If you have a career in professional cooking in mind and you possess the attributes which we have listed, particularly the passion for fine food, we highly recommend that you enrol at Prue Leith for your training. We are so well regarded throughout the hospitality industry that our graduates are normally given preference when applying for cooking positions and have almost unlimited future career prospects. Even so, there are numerous other factors making us your perfect point of departure on your career path to culinary success, locally and abroad:

• We are a City & Guilds-approved centre.
• We have recently become the first registered and accredited Chef Trade Test Centre in South Africa, another achievement of which we are immensely proud.
• We have invested some R10,5 million in upgrading and installing new state of the art kitchen and lecture facilities.
• There are three kitchens on site:
  • Training Kitchen T1, with 20 individual, fully equipped stations, where students train and work during their first commis semester;
  • Patisserie Kitchen T2, with 10 comprehensively equipped, specialised patisserie workstations and air-conditioning to ensure that conditions are ideal for temperature-sensitive pastry making; and
  • The Prue Leith Restaurant’s kitchen. This kitchen is divided into a hot kitchen, cold kitchen, and pastry kitchen, as befits a top restaurant, in order to produce and serve fine-dining cuisine.
• Two expansive 40-seater lecture rooms, equipped with all the modern lecture aids to ensure that students receive the theory lectures and audio-visual presentations that are part and parcel of the theoretical knowledge required to take those first steps in establishing a professional cooking career.
• Our facilities’ electricity supply is backed by a generator that is large enough to ensure that training and cooking continue seamlessly in the event of a power outage.

Our Prue Leith students’ library is packed with all the modern media to conduct research, enhance knowledge, read, inspire, enjoy, and indulge yourself in your favourite subjects that are integral to your future as a professional chef with an exciting cooking career ahead of you.