In ICE's Culinary Management program, students learn key aspects of the bar business, including how to prevent bar theft or how overly generous bartenders affect your bottom line. Yet many students have never actually worked behind the bar. Each year, the annual Calvados cocktail competition gives these enterprising students an opportunity to train in mixology and challenge their palates.

I find eating a plant-based diet extremely rewarding, but I’ll be the first to admit that it is especially challenging to do so during the colder months. Eating a raw crunchy salad never seems to sufficiently warm me up after a long commute through freezing puddles and heavy winds.

Fans of the documentary Kings of Pastry are likely well-acquainted with Philippe Rigollot, who heroically was named Meilleur Ouvrier de France despite the demise of his sugar showpiece during the final moments of the competition. Yet what fans may not know is that Philippe's wife and business partner, Elodie - a chocolatier by background - is an integral part of his work at the couple's local pastry shop in Annecy, France.

At ICE, we pride ourselves on the diversity of our community. In any given class, recent high school or college graduates learn knife skills along-side clinical nurses, marketing executives or former investment bankers. When it comes to career changers, we tell our students that all the skills they gained in previous careers will be of huge benefit to them when they enter the industry. As for finding a student who exemplifies that truth, there are few better examples than Culinary Arts graduate John Feingold.

While my first module as an ICE pastry student contained mostly lectures and cooking demonstrations, my second module ("Mod 2" as we students refer to it) was much faster paced and hands-on. Our mission? Bread baking—which requires some seriously vigorous work. It’s all about speed, efficiency and the ability to produce mass quantities of bread without sacrificing quality.

The world of wine can be very intimidating for culinary students. Wine experts, much like chefs, speak their own language. From "terroir" to "tannins", this language can be confusing and alienating to the uninitiated.

On March 27th, Allagash co-founder Rob Tod and ICE Dean of Students Andrew Gold co-hosted the 12th annual Cookin' with Allagash Recipe Contest at ICE. At this much-anticipated event, sponsored by Allagash Brewing Company, ICE students competed for scholarship money to apply towards their culinary school tuition.

As the Dean of ICE's School of Business & Management Studies, Steve Zagor oversees one of the most innovative culinary business programs in the country. He has mentored countless alumni—from Jim Nawn of Agricola Eatery to Jason Soloway of Wallflower, Mark Sy of Vien to Christina Ha of Macaron Parlour. In fact, those four students-turned-entrepreneurs hail from just one of Steve’s graduating classes. Multiply their success by his 10+ years as a teacher (not to mention his lengthy career as a restaurateur and consultant) and you’ll get a ballpark idea of Steve’s undeniable impact on today's culinary industry.

The first thing you learn in culinary school is that being a chef is far more complex than most people realize. From your white commis cap down to your stiff-toed shoes, everything is designed for safety, efficiency and cleanliness. In fact, sanitation is the first subject you'll tackle, learning how factors from temperature to humidity, pH to protein content affect the safety of everything we cook. That may sound boring, but once you've studied the many ways improperly handled food can lead to illness, it's pretty fascinating how rarely we all get sick!

Consider the scene in your average home kitchen. Could a successful restaurant survive with only one sink to clean veggies, peel shrimp, rinse raw chicken, wash hands and rinse pet bowls? Or a reach-in refrigerator filled with perishables that is often left open for too long? What about a dog running around while the staff is working, or an untrained cook who licks his fingers after tasting the sauce? The same warm dreamy set that is the foundation of so many fond childhood memories is also the cauldron of bacteria where you are most likely to get “stomach flu"—or as professionals call it, "food poisoning".