On the first day of class at a new cooking school in Brooklyn, Erica Zimmerman, 22, carefully sliced raw potatoes into a stainless steel bowl.
Zimmerman, a student at New York University, said she’s always been interested in cooking, but as an observant Jew only wanted a kosher school. Why learn to cook food she’d never be able to eat? But that limited her options.
“The only kosher cooking school is in Israel, and I can’t take off a year to go,” she said. “Then I heard about this new school on Facebook, and I jumped at the opportunity.”
On July 7, the Center for Kosher Culinary Arts opened in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Flatbush.
The six-week, $4,500 intensive course is the only professional kosher cooking school in North America. It is run in cooperation with the continuing education department of Kingsborough Community College.
According to director Jesse Blondel and founder Elka Pinson, it is the only such school in the world besides the Jerusalem Culinary Institute in Israel.
Given the numbers of Jews who keep kosher and the growing popularity of upscale kosher restaurants, perhaps it’s surprising there aren’t more.
It’s a tough business, says Rabbi Chaim Fogelman, a rabbinic coordinator at the OK kosher certification agency in Crown Heights.
“I’ve seen many people try to get a kosher cooking school going, but this is the only one that’s gotten off the starting plate,” he said.
Pinson — whose husband runs a house-wares store on Coney Island Avenue, the main shopping street in the neighborhood — has been dreaming of establishing such a school for years.
Last year she took over the top floor of the shop and advertised for a chef/teacher on craigslist.
Blondel, 26, responded. The kitchen manager at the Culinary Center of New York, he was seeking a new position. Organizing and directing a new cooking school seemed just the ticket.
“I realized there isn’t any other kosher cooking school, I’m Jewish, and I grew up not far from here,” he said.
Pinson and Blondel opened negotiations with Kingsborough, and ironed out the details in May. That left little more than a month to set up the room, build the curriculum and advertise for students.
Thirteen people showed up for class. On the first day, they sat around a large steel table intently watching chef Mark D’Alessandro, the school’s main teacher, demonstrate the finer techniques of chopping vegetables.
All of the students keep kosher to one degree or another. The class is about evenly split by gender, and students range from a 16-year-old boy to a grandmother in her 60s.
Avi Roth runs a learning center for children with ADD and ADHD, and entertains often for his students’ parents. His center is closed in the summer, so Roth decided to hone his cooking skills. “Who knows where it will lead?” he said.
Sarah Belman, a recent graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, dreams of opening a kosher bakery in the San Francisco Bay area.
“I was thinking of going to the Culinary Institute of America or the Cordon Bleu, but there are a lot of halachic problems,” she said.
Itka Dalfen is arguably the most motivated student. She commutes by bus from Toronto every week, leaving behind her seven children and husband.
Dalfen recently took a job teaching kosher cooking at her local JCC, and although she “knows how to cook,” she wants “more precision, more skills.”
These are the people the school is targeting, Blondel and Pinson said. Some are looking for jobs as chefs, while others are considering food production, becoming personal chefs or just seeking personal enrichment.
Over the six weeks, the students will learn basic French culinary skills, from making sauces and soup stocks to cooking the perfect omelet.
They also will learn about applying kosher laws in a commercial kitchen, mainly through lectures by rabbis from the OK. Unlike other cooking schools, the students will be able to taste everything they prepare.
If you keep kosher, Pinson said, you might spend $40,000 or more to attend the Culinary Institute of America or another prestigious school, and never be able to taste what you’re learning to cook.
“Then you go home, buy the ingredients, and cook and taste it there, double the work,” she said.
Pinson says that’s the experience of many, if not most, of the chefs working in kosher restaurants in this country. The Center for Kosher Culinary Arts is the first step in changing that by providing professional training for the kosher cooking crowd.
The center’s six-week course can only cover the basics, but it’s a start.
“We’re on the crest of this new interest,” Pinson said.
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