Some people have a dream to be an executive chef at a five star restaurant. They want to be able to call the shots and create incredible signature dishes. Culinary students enter into a culinary arts training program with these high hopes and a few of them may make it all the way. The others will fall to mediocrity because they are either unwilling to do the hard work or cannot take the blows to the ego that the instructors can dish out. The instructors are not bad people nor are they deliberately unkind. Their job is to introduce exceptional culinary students to the world.

A formal culinary arts training program will teach you the basics and advanced skills that you will need, in order to work in a professional kitchen. But if you want to just learn the basics, then you can do so from the comfort of your own home thanks to the internet. You can learn such terms as: julienne, chiffonade, braise, coddle and saute. You do not need a culinary degree in order to learn something new to help your hobby come along nicely. You can take the time to educate yourself.

There are many resources in the culinary community to help you learn some of the most foreign terms. A simple web search of "culinary terms" yields great results; however, just in case you missed it, here are some definitions of the more obscure terms. Chiffonade literally means "made of rags" and is a technique used with a knife on flat, pliant vegetation, such as basil, lettuce or cabbage. Using basil as an example, you simply stack the pieces of basil on top of each other. You then roll the basil into a tight round tube. The next step is to run your knife down the length of the tube and cut into fine strips. You have now mastered the chiffonade technique.

Did you know that to "coddle" is to slowly cook a dish to just under the boiling point. This term mostly applies to eggs, such as in the poaching technique. There are hundreds of other terms tossed about frequently in the kitchen. No one is expecting you to be a culinary whiz and know them all right off the bat. Culinary students work continuously on learning these terms and techniques.

The next time you run across a culinary student who is attending a culinary arts training program or someone who has a culinary degree, perhaps you will know the difference between a chiffonade, a julienne and a chop. Not to mention that you now know what it means to coddle something. It is all a fantastic journey into learning and in time you will pick up more terms.

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