Cool Courses

Presto Change-o!

Your challenge in Advanced Baking Principles class? Transform traditional recipes for breads, muffins, desserts, and other baked goods into new versions that accommodate special diets such as vegan, gluten-free, no-sugar-added, and dairy-free—and are just as delicious as the original!

If You Bake It, They Will Come

Put everything you’ve learned about baking and pastry and back-of-the-house operations into practice in the college’s super-popular Apple Pie Bakery Café. In Café Operations class, you’ll create delicious breads, pastries, and savory items for hungry, appreciative customers.

The Art and Craft of Cakes

Let your creativity run wild! In Confectionery Art and Special Occasion Cakes class, you’ll design, bake, and decorate three-tiered wedding cakes; learn to work with ganache, gum paste, and pastillage; and pour, blow, and pull sugar (kinda like blowing glass—very cool!).

Turn Up the Volume

Here’s where the action gets fast and furious! Prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner at The Egg for large numbers of hungry CIA students in Non-Commercial Foodservice and High-Volume Production. Many of the dishes you create will focus on sustainable, plant-forward principles (how about waffles made with spent grains from The Brewery at the CIA?).

What’s on the Menu? That’s Up to You!

Design and create an actual menu that you would offer a guest in your hypothetical restaurant. You’ll consider factors like demographics, your restaurant’s concept, the local economy, cost control, and pricing, then present your menu and analysis results to the class. It all happens in Principles of Menus and Managing Profitability in Foodservice Operations.

Fish Out of Water

Freshwater and saltwater fish, shellfish, crustaceans…you’ll learn how to choose, store, and prep them all in Seafood Identification and Fabrication. Even better? Knowing that 95% of the proteins you’ll be working with meet Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch guidelines for being sustainably sourced.

Get Your Hands Dirty!

Dig in at the teaching garden, wield a hammer tapping maple trees, and discover the relationship between humans and nature. In Food Ecology you’ll explore questions related to our food supply like how and where food is grown, and what is involved in processing and transporting that food.

A Blast from the Past

History is so cool, especially when you see what an important part food played in it! In Food History, you’ll get the chance to curate an on-campus food-focused museum exhibit, recreate and reinterpret recipes from a 14th century cookbook, and discover how food opens a window into understanding societies, cultures, and the world.

What’s the Buzz?

Build, maintain, and harvest honey from an on-campus apiary. Create a seed library to preserve and propagate heirloom varieties of produce. Build a Student Garden at a local elementary school. All of these are experiential research projects developed in the Project in Applied Food Studies class. Got a great idea? Make it so!

The Next Big Idea is Yours

In Culinary Research and Development, you’ll work in teams to create and develop a product to present to the faculty and industry guests. Recent Cul Sci students designed meal kits (think: Blue Apron), bringing them from concept, product development, and consumer testing to packaging, marketing, and distribution.

Power Up Your Cooking

Fun with hydrocolloids (xanthan gum, gellan gum, and other food substances that form gels) and more! That’s what awaits you in the Ingredient Functionality class. Through cool experiments—like making a popping mango gel with sodium alginate and calcium lactate in a fruit purée—you’ll begin to understand the power of your ingredients.

Equipped for Success

Ready for a (food development) challenge? The Modern and Industrial Tools, Techniques, and Ingredients course has lots of them! Learn to think outside the box as you bring your food R&D knowledge and cooking skills together in hands-on projects like taking a classic Escoffier recipe and modernizing it for mass production.

Discover What It Takes to Lead and Succeed

Develop your leadership skills to help grow your career with the Food Business Leadership course. Learn to lead from your strengths by assessing your personal style. You’ll study major theories and models of leadership, then put them into practice by applying your own methods in a case study format.

Learn How to Keep Things Running Smoothly

How do you maximize profits and ensure guest satisfaction? Find out in Advanced Food Service Operations, where you’ll examine how to consistently achieve these through a deep understanding of menu development, staffing, production flow and timing, purchasing, and controlling costs for profitability.

Get Real with an Actual Food Company

In the capstone course Project in Food Business Leadership, you’ll conduct extensive research and analysis of an existing business—from company culture and internal systems to business strategies and competitors—then develop recommendations and a plan to address problems or opportunities within that organization.

Crafting Your Future

Here’s your chance to learn about the ingredients, equipment, and techniques of making craft brews in our own on-campus brewery. The beers you’ll make in Art and Science of Brewing will be served in the CIA’s public restaurants. Two of our student-made brews even earned gold medals in the New York State Craft Beer Competition, and our brewery was named the 2019 Brewery of the Year!

The Big Event

Put everything you’ve learned at the CIA into designing and executing a themed dining event that benefits scholarships and community organizations. You and your Foodservice Management classmates will divide up into marketing, finance, culinary, baking and pastry, and service teams to deliver an amazing customer experience.

Sell Your Restaurant Concept

Market research, segmentation, consumer behavior...the principles you’ll learn in Marketing and Promoting Food come together as you create a restaurant concept. From menu and pricing to interior design and marketing (and a simulated budget of $10K), you’ll sell your vision to your class and choose a winner.

Trends: Are You Ready for the Future?

What’s just a fad and what’s a trend with staying power? Together in Contemporary Topics in Food and Beverage, we’ll examine issues like sustainability, food sourcing, molecular gastronomy, food allergies, nutrition, and culinary science. And we’ll talk about each one’s importance to the many different segments of the hospitality industry.

This is What it Takes to Be a Leader

Equality, liberty, integrity...what do these concepts have to do with leadership in the hospitality world? Everything. In Justice, Ethics, and Leadership, you’ll discover how principles as varied as empathy and justice will inform and shape your ability to be an ethical decision-maker and effective people manager.

Tech-Savvy Hospitality

Technology is just as vital to the hospitality business as it is to your everyday life. In Managing Technology in the Hospitality Industry, you’ll learn how to choose, implement, and manage tech solutions for a variety of settings. And you’ll hear about up-and-coming technologies and evaluate their potential for hospitality.

If You Build It, They Will Come

You’ll bring your food concept to life in Concept Building, Proving, and Prototyping! From the first prototype to a fully formulated and scalable business, you’ll have the chance to take a deep dive into your concept and evaluate it with your peers.

Think Fast!

Have fun, be creative, and get results in Design Thinking for Food. Working in teams, you’ll develop prototypes, use a process of rapid iteration to modify concepts, engage in customer interviews, and gain practice in pitching concepts to a team of peers.

To Market, To Market!

Learn what it takes to get your concept out into the marketplace and reach your customers. From packaging, marketing, and sales to developing a solid distribution strategy, Sales, Marketing, and Distribution gives you actionable tools for success.

Distilling It Down

Explore historical and current distillation techniques as well as professional mixology methods through extensive tastings and demonstrations in Distilled Spirits and Introduction to Mixology.

Bottoms Up

Learn what it takes to create, prepare, and serve beer, sake, cider, perry, tea, coffee, juice, mineral water, and more in Fermented and Non-Alcoholic Beverages. Class lectures and demos, field trips, and in-depth tastings bring the beverage world to life.

Sun and Soil

Learn about the forces of nature that affect the growing, cultivation, and production of wine in Viniculture and Viticulture. During sensory analyses and in-class tastings, you’ll discover the difference between classic wine varieties, hybrids, and crosses.

You Can Play with Food!

Think of Contemporary Topics in Culinary Arts as your culinary sandbox. Through an experimental kitchen approach, you’ll explore taste and flavor; plant- and protein-based diets; food and wine pairing; healthy cooking techniques; and the flavors of the global kitchen.

Olives, Wheat, Garlic, and Wine

California cuisine is known for its Mediterranean influence, so it makes perfect sense to dive deep into the ingredients and cooking methods of Spain, France, Italy, Morocco, Tunisia, Greece, and Egypt. In Cuisines and Cultures of the Mediterranean, you’ll discover how each country’s food is shaped by geography, history, and culture.

Get Fired Up

“Order, fire, pickup!” In Introduction to à la Carte Cooking, you’ll experience the energy of the production kitchen as you prepare multi-course menus for fellow students. And you’ll do it all using the techniques you learned in Culinary Fundamentals and by practicing batch cooking and à la carte-style service.