4 Week Essential Skills

Our 4 week Essential Skills Course is one of the world's leading programmes at this level. Over 4 weeks students will learn a range of core skills across many areas of cookery. Graduates leave with solid foundations which will enable them to produce great food in any environment.

What level will I be when I graduate?

You only have to watch programmes like Professional Masterchef to realise how many cooks out there claim to be professionals, yet do not have the basic skills required to cook well. The core classics of basic cookery form the foundation of any great chef – skills such as making perfect Crème Anglaise and making pastry that melts in the mouth… These are, quite literally, the Essential Skills of cookery, which are covered on this course.

Tante Marie’s Essential Skills course differs from other short courses which run over a few days or weeks in that it does not just teach you how to cook a week’s worth of menus. Instead, it teaches core skills, with an emphasis on understanding how, and why things happen. This means that students can fully identify and understand what is happening to the food as they cook it, and can make adjustments as they go along.

The effect of this is that Tante Marie graduates are able not just to follow a recipe or copy a dish they have seen elsewhere, but have a complete ability to design their own menus, create their own dishes, and adapt their cooking skills to any environment.

Students who complete this course and want to go on an gain work whilst travelling are well placed to turn their hand to any area of a kitchen environment – be it pastry or cuisine. And, if you are interested in doing seasonal work on the back of this course, why limit yourself to only being able to cook a week’s worth of menus which you repeat time and time again, when Tante Marie will teach you how to design and structure your own menus!

Many of the students who complete this course, go on to do a ski season or other work whilst taking a year out – this provides an excellent way to utilise all the skills learned during the course and put them into practice in a real world professional environment. Our graduates are in high demand for their unsurpassed standards and professional discipline.

What will I learn?

Graduates from this course earn:

• Chartered Institute of Environmental Health Level 2 Award in Food Safety in Catering
• Tante Marie Cordon Bleu Essential Skills Certificate

The Tante Marie Cordon Bleu Essential Skills Certificate includes the following core subjects:

• Food hygiene
• Basic cakes, pastries and bakery
• Basic meat and poultry
• Basic fish preparation
• Vegetables
• Soups
• Sauces
• International cuisines
• Knife skills
• Canapés
• Classic skills and modern techniques

As with all of our courses, the focus is on time spent in the kitchen, 'learning by doing!' The course consists of an introduction to working in a kitchen environment, followed by a phase of skill development. This will incorporate knife skills, familiarity with produce, and students will be introduced to a number of basic professional skills such as elementary butchery, fish preparation and pastry work, to an acceptable level. Students will also be trained in menu planning and presentation skills. A typical course schedule may be similar to this:

Assessment on the 4 week Essential Skills Course is carried out through a process of continuous monitoring throughout the course.