Cooking With Creativity at Pali Culinary Camp
Do yyou want to put the BAM! in your food? Do you aspire to be a top chef?
Summer cooking camp may be your best choice to get started. All culinary artists need equal parts of talent, inspiration and training. You bring your inspiration and our expert instructors can help you develop talent through training.
Read on for a peek into what you will experience at Pali’s culinary camp.
Try New Foods at Summer Cooking Camp
Many families have a number of tried-and-true meals that they make on a regular schedule, but often don’t try new recipes. It’s difficult to be experimental when you need to fit a family dinner into a schedule of jobs, school, and extracurricular activities. No one can waste time or money on a meal that no one likes.
At Pali, our summer cooking camp, has a food theme each day highlighting a particular culture or holiday. This gives you an opportunity to expand your palate and learn about foods from around the world that are new to them.
Go to Flavortown
Sure, you should be able follow a recipe, but every great chef knows how to take a recipe and make it their own. The only way to do this is to know the reasons for each step and then improvising along the same line. It’s like jazz music.
At culinary camp, we’ll introduce you to herbs, spices and other versatile ingredients. Once you discover how these flavors and ingredients taste and how they interact with each other, you can expand any recipe. With these tastes in mind, you can enhance any dish with a flavor that complements it.
You can even transform a simple dish like chicken soup from something blah to something exotic with just a few adjustments in spice!
Make a Menu
You should learn how to make a variety of individual dishes for everyday situations. But if you want to take it one step further, you need to know how to put all those dishes into a meal. Throughout your week at Pali culinary camp, you’ll gain experience with cooking appetizers, salads, entrees, and desserts.
More importantly, you will also learn more about crafting a cohesive menu that that flows.
You’ll also learn how to plan a menu based on the timing of each dish to ensure smooth preparation and plating.
Stir-Fry, Bake and Saute
How many ways can you cook food? From baking and boiling to stir-frying and grilling there are countless ways to prepare dishes. At Pali, you will get a thorough grounding in all of the most common techniques you might see in a recipe.
We’ll teach tips for mastering each technique and show how small changes like heat levels and types of oil can make a difference in the finished result. You will also discover the effect each technique creates.
In the future, when you modify a recipe or come up with your own creation, you can expertly choose the right technique.
Cut, Dice and Slice
One of the most important parts of preparing a recipe is often slicing, dicing or otherwise prepping the ingredients. Do you know the difference between a slice, julienne, chiffonade or spiral?
At Pali’s culinary camp, you will learn a wide variety of fancy cuts from batons to fine mince. julienne to spiraling. You’ll also learn about kitchen knives from a small paring knife to the workhorse chef knife. You’ll experience various types of knives found in a professional kitchen and when and how to use each one. Most importantly, you will learn to use a knife safely.
Safety First
As fun as cooking can be, there is a lot that can go wrong. Cuts, burns, food poisoning and an occasional collision make commercial kitchens dangerous. Our experienced staff at Pali will teach you everything you need to know about food and kitchen safety.
By the end of the week, you’ll know what internal temperatures are safe for various types of meats. You’ll know how to store foods to keep them fresh and avoid potential contamination.
In addition to food safety, your education includes other aspects of kitchen safety, such as fire prevention and how to extinguish a fire.
Use Real Equipment
We don’t play with toys at Pali. You will use professional grade equipment just like the best chefs in the world. We host campers in our full commercial kitchen, giving you an opportunity to get to know the appliances you can expect to see in a restaurant kitchen. Campers use the kitchen all week, so you will know exactly how a commercial appliance works
Finale Cooking Competition
No Pali experience is complete without an opportunity to show off a little. Our summer cooking camp ends with a showcase showdown for our campers to put their new skills to use.
At the end of their week with us, all of our chefs-in-training will compete in a creative cooking contest. Working in small groups, campers battle it out in an “Iron Chef”-style cooking challenge.
Who’s cuisine will reign supreme?
Every aspiring chef returns home as a winner. After all, you’ve spent a week learning your way around a kitchen. You can make great food and show some flair while doing it.
If you love of cooking or baking, you can make the summer tastier by joining us at the best summer cooking camp in California. To take the next step, contact Pali Adventures for more information.