karossii

Honestly, the best school for you would depend on what aspect of cooking you wish to focus on, what you want to do with the knowledge you gain, and your own personal style of learning. If you're looking to be a star chef with your own TV show, or own your own restaurant, or anything like that, the school itself doesn't matter nearly as much as your personality, your drive, and your resources. If you just love cooking... well I wouldn't recommend trying to be a chef, honestly. That is what drove me to work in food services at first, my love of cooking; and I almost came to hate it because of the day in and day out grinding of being a chef. So I moved to other fields, which were more suited for me to make money at, and have come to love cooking again - for myself and my friends. It is often said to make a living with something you enjoy and you'll never hate your job - but that is only true if the job lets you do what you love to do... how you love to do it. Anyway, to answer your question a bit more directly, the top schools I am aware of here in America are the Culinary Institute, the New England Culinary Institute, and of course the world famous Cordon Bleu. For now, some of the best instruction I could point you at would be a series of you tube videos which teaches more about the methods of cooking than any specific recipes or whatnot - I haven't watched his stuff in a long time and am not sure if he's still going at it, but I have an old link saved... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Oz87LxvKV0 Feel free to ask me anything more you might want to - I can't promise I will know the right answers, but I don't mind trying to help!

Scholarships are certainly available to most if not all culinary schools... for many various reasons. And so are Grants... which are just as good if not better. I'd advise you to start looking at www.fastweb.com and start applying for as many scholarships and grants as you can... by the time you're ready to actually start school you could possibly have it all paid for! Having a specific workplace in mind (and the Broadmoor is a wonderful place too! I've been there several times...) will be a huge help. Call them or visit them and let them know of your ambition - while I'd not say it is super likely, they may offer an apprenticeship or internship program for you until you are ready to go to school... and even if they don't, they'd certainly give you any preferences they have for your schooling. As to catering, that's still a bit of a broad subject; you could be focusing more on baked goods, sandwiches, party trays, banquets, box-lunches, bbq, etc., or try and diversify and cover all of the above. In general, my best advice for you if you do plan to be a caterer or start your own restaurant or roach-coach, etc., would be to start with a bachelors in business management, and THEN go into culinary school. By doing that, you'd have a lot more business choices to work your way through school once you have that bachelors (assuming you don't get it all paid for through grants and scholarships), you'd have the degree to fall back on and enter the 'business world' if you change your mind or your business fails (it sounds harsh, but somewhere between 60 and 80% of all startup businesses fail...), and most importantly, you would be a step or three ahead of all of your competition - most new restaurants, bakeries, catering businesses, etc. are all opened by potential chefs who can cook well but have no business sense, and that is why they fail!

How did I do that?