Essentials of Food Presentation
Course Outline

Course Fee: $15
ACF Approved CEH: 2 Hours
Subject Area: Fundamentals of Professional Cooking Series
Course Approved by: The American Culinary Federation
Instructor: Amber Johnson

This course has been developed and optimized for online delivery using the licensed title Professional Cooking, 8th edition, published by Wiley and Sons, Inc. and authored by Wayne Gisslen. The fee for this course includes access to all online course materials and an official certificate of completion from chefcertification.com. Once your course is completed, your course completion will be authenticated, and a certificate of completion will be generated. This official certificate of completion will be uploaded to your account, and will be available through the course dashboard for this course.

Introduction/Course Description:

Our work isn’t done until the food we have prepared is arranged on plates or platters and ready to be presented to the diner. In traditional classical cuisine, until well after the middle of the twentieth century, the normal practice in fine dining establishments was to send the food on platters and in casseroles and other serving dishes to the dining room, where it would be transferred to dinner plates by the serving staff, sometimes after carving or portioning. The chefs who developed nouvelle cuisine, however, wanted to control the appearance of the food down to the last detail and so began to arrange food on dinner plates in the kitchen. Since that time, many styles of plating have come and gone, as chefs have devoted much attention to the appearance and arrangement of food on dinner plates.

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Course Objectives/Program Outline

Module One - Hot Food Presentation

Learning Objectives:

• Explain why attractive food presentation is important.
• Understand what is meant by balance when applied to plate arrangements.
• Identify guidelines that should be observed when plating food or planning plate arrangements.

Quiz: Multiple-choice questions that pertain to objectives above.

Module Two - Cold Food Presentation and Buffet Service

Learning Objectives:

• Illustrate the importance of serving food that is attractively arranged on the plate or platter, with proper balance of color, shape, and texture.
• Explore ways to plan and arrange attractive food platters for buffets.
• Understand guidelines that should be observed when planning a cold buffet platter.

Quiz: Multiple-choice questions that pertain to objectives above.

Final Exam

Multiple choice questions taken from each module

Final Learning Statement

Learning statements should be in a narrative format – as opposed to an outline format. Depending on individual writing styles Learning statements should be around 1 page. The learning statement can vary according to individual style. Your learning statement should answer the broad question of "what did you learn?". To help get you thinking, here are some suggested questions:

• What are the major concepts of the course that you have learned?
• What new professional language have you acquired relating to the topic?
• What new resources did you find in the study of the content?
• Are there any ideas that presented themselves as enlightening and useful?

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Requirements for Course Certificate of Completion

The following are the general course requirements for issuing a certificate of completion for this course:

• Student must receive 80% or better on each module quiz as well as the final exam
• Student must complete a Final Learning Statement at the end of this course