Cookery Courses For Chalet Hosts
Cookery Courses To Help Chalet Hosts Land Ski Resort Jobs
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Cooking is a loosely defined term that can mean anything from creating a banquet to knocking up a few bacon sandwiches. Taking on a chalet job can mean doing the former with the budget of the latter.
Fortunately, that’s a skill that can be taught and a number of cookery schools in the UK run courses ideal for equipping promising potential chalet hosts for a hospitality role in ski resorts worldwide.
Courses should cover the essential skills and basic techniques for recipes and preparing soups, sauces, meat and fish, vegetables and vegetarian dishes, desserts and canapés. As your knowledge and confidence grow courses will introduce more techniques: jointing, filleting and boning, as well as yeast cookery, advanced pastries and sauces.
A good course addresses the reality of chalet cooking and understands that you will have to produce “super tasting, top class food under pressure, often coping in cramped and under-equipped conditions,” says Rosie Davies, who has prepared students for jobs on the slopes and on yachts for decades.
Essential topics should also include menu planning, catering for special diets, presentation and how to solve some of the commonest problems, with advice on advance preparation, rescue remedies and plenty of shortcuts.
Outside of the classroom, students will visit markets and go shopping for fresh meat, fish and vegetables.
In the same way that the typically imagined London barman would have an Australian accent, Surrey is the natural birthplace of chalet girls and consequently a popular area for cookery schools.
Nestled in the hills of that English county is The Abinger Cookery School, who aim to fire up your imagination with courses that are practical, inspiring and of course – fun! They utilise the best produce that Britain has to offer, sourcing ingredients from suppliers right on their doorstep. More details at www.abingercookeryschool.com.
Three schools with particularly good connections within the industry, and who may be able to help with your mountain job search, are Mountain Chefs, Fresh Tracks, and Orchards Cookery.
The Avenue Cookery School in south west London has a couple of courses for people looking to work in a chalet, villa, yacht or private households.
If you can’t wait until landing a job to get a feel for working in a ski resort, Chalet Pomet hosts the Season It cookery course for 16 to 19 years olds in Morillon, in the Haute-Savoie department of the French Alps.
Cookery courses can be expensive but within the intense competition for ski resort jobs, time spent in a classroom will show that you are serious about cooking for a living and can meet the high standards that chalet guests expect.
Image courtesy Alain Bachellier
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