If you love to cook and feel like you have a knack for it, you might consider becoming a professional chef. Attending culinary school will hone your cooking skills and open up a range of employment opportunities. Unfortunately, most culinary schools emphasize meals that are heavy on animal products. Happily, a number of cooking schools take the opposite approach. Some offer plenty of plant-based dishes while quite a few more focus solely on vegan cooking.
Vegans who want certification as a professional chef should avoid culinary schools that primarily emphasize the preparation of non-vegan foods. An aspiring vegan chef shouldn’t waste time and money learning how to roast meats or prepare egg-based desserts. Paying for an expensive program that mainly teaches cooking techniques you’ll never use is a terrible idea.
Don’t Overpay for Your Instruction
This page previously offered a list of vegan cooking schools. Sadly, some of these places are outrageously priced or are run by people who strike me as having questionable motives. The job of keeping the sketchy ones off this page is prohibitively big, subjective, and thankless so I deleted the list featured on this page.
You’ll be able to find quite a few vegan culinary schools with a quick Google search. I implore you to research whichever schools you find to assess if they’re being run with their students’ best interests at heart. Look up tuition costs, and weigh them against whatever added income you can realistically expect to receive from having undergone this training.
There are also numerous inexpensive, informal, yet excellent options that don’t confer certification. If all you’re looking for is an introductory vegan cooking class, your local junior college may offer this sort of thing at low cost. Alternately, if you’re abroad on vacation, some vegan restaurants offer tourists one or two day classes teaching the essentials of their cuisine.
Finally, if you don’t yet have any experience cooking vegan foods, my vegan cooking and vegan baking guides will offer you exactly what you need. One of the best ways to develop your vegan cooking skills is to explore classic dishes from various cuisines. Also check out our vegan cookbooks page for titles that cater to your particular cooking or baking interests.