If you want to improve your vegan cooking skills, don’t start by enrolling in classes. Instead, just do some introductory reading. My vegan cooking and baking guides will teach you all the basics. Once you know your way around the kitchen, you can focus on learning key recipes from one or more vegan-friendly cuisines. See my vegan cookbooks page for titles that cater to your particular cooking interests.
As your skills progress, if you discover you have a passion for cooking, you might consider becoming a professional chef. Attending culinary school will hone your abilities and open up a range of employment opportunities. Unfortunately, most culinary schools emphasize meals that are heavy on animal products. An aspiring vegan chef shouldn’t waste time learning how to roast meats or prepare egg-based desserts. Paying for an expensive program that focuses on cooking techniques you’ll never use is a terrible idea.
Happily, there are several vegan cooking schools, and many offer certifications that can help you land a job.
Choosing a Cooking School
This page previously offered a list of vegan cooking schools. Unfortunately, some of these places were outrageously priced or run by people who struck me as having questionable motives. The job of deciding which schools were worthy of being featured here struck me as particularly subjective and thankless, so I deleted my list of schools from this page.
A quick Internet search will turn up numerous schools offering a vegan cooking curriculum. I’m consistently surprised at how much these schools tend to charge for tuition. The decision about which school to attend, or whether to attend a school at all, should not be taken lightly.
Think carefully about the schools you find to assess if they’re being run with their students’ best interests at heart. Weigh the cost of tuition, as well as any required travel and housing expenses, against whatever added income you can realistically expect to earn as a result of graduating from these programs.
I would personally never enroll in a cooking school without first running my intentions past at least one vegan chef living near me, and asking them to share their thoughts and advice. It’s possible, for instance, that taking a low-paying job as a chef’s assistant might offer a superior and far more cost-effective way to gain the skills you need.
In your research you may encounter inexpensive classes that don’t confer certification. If all you’re looking for is to become an intermediate vegan cook, your local junior college may offer these sorts of classes at low cost. Alternatively, if you’re abroad on vacation, some vegan restaurants offer classes teaching the essentials of their cuisine.
Working in a restaurant is one of the hardest ways to make a living. So if you think a food service career is for you, it’s imperative that you carefully research the schools you are contemplating attending, and make sure you don’t overpay on tuition.
