Culinary Arts
Culinary Arts Certificate Program
If you have a great passion for cooking and the drive to pursue your goal as a professional cook, food entrepreneur, and more, there is no better time to start a career in this thriving landscape. This program provides strong culinary foundations training.
Students can acquire intensive professional and practical experience with culinary preparations and operation of a professional kitchen. With a focus on foundational and fundamental skills development and reinforcement, universal and widely-adopted methods and techniques of cooking as well as recipes and activities, will reinforce the same principles taught in professional culinary schools around the world. This comprehensive course covers a full basic professional cooking school curriculum including, but not limited to kitchen and food safety, knife skills, moist- and dry-heat cooking methods, seasoning, culinary nutrition, basic breads and baking, salads and dressings, and pastry basics.
By partnering with CareerSource North Central Florida, we are able to offer a scholarship for this course to residents of Alachua and Bradford County. To see if you qualify contact Candice Blackford at cblackford@careersourcencfl.com or click the button below to submit an interest form.
What You’ll Learn
Understand basic food and kitchen safety and sanitation.
Select, handle and maintain a knife and demonstrate knife cuts.
Explain and demonstrate principles of egg cookery; salad production and vegetable cookery; stock, short stock.
Enter your email below to download the Culinary Syllabus:

Who Should Attend
First-time cooks seeking to start a career as a professional cook
Entrepreneurs wishing to accquire foundational cooking techniques to help launch a culinary business
Experienced cooks brushing up on their techniques
Home cooks looking to learn these advanced techniques and methods
Career Insight
You start out as a line cook and work your way up the ladder. View a career path of becoming a chef by downloading this pdf: Culinary Career Timeline
Occupational summary for chefs and head cooks:
134,749
Jobs
(2018)
12.2%
Projected Growth
(2018-2028)
$34K-62K
Annual Salary
Program Benefits
Small class size
Our program highlights a professional training kitchen. The facility enables students to gain familiarity with the fast-paced environment and diverse tools of a working kitchen.
Complete program quickly: 4 months part-time in the evening

See what our students are saying!
What did you enjoy most about the course?
“The challenging environment created by our instructor, the variety of recipes we used, and online content provided that allowed for individual remote learning.”
“I learned so much about the process of cooking and managing food cost, the knowledge gained is priceless.”
What’s Next?
You’ve taken our Culinary Arts course – now what?
Earn Your Certification
• Become a Certified Fundamentals Cook by taking the certifying exam through the American Culinary Federation.
• To maintain this certification, 80 Continuing Education Hours are required every 5 years. For more information, visit the ACF website.
Students do not have to earn their certification in order to work in a kitchen.