Advancing Pastry Know-How
By Kim Rothrock

Michelle Tampakis is a Senior Pastry Instructor at The Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. She specializes in chocolate and has been a competitor in two of the Food Network’s Chocolate Challenges in July 2005 and October 2004

Chef Tampakis is the creator and Director of the Center for Advanced Pastry Studies (CAPS at ICE) program, which focuses on continuing education classes for pastry chefs. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, Michelle has been a member of the Chocolate Manufacturers of America symposium discussions on Trends in the Chocolate Industry.

I recently met up with Chef Tampakis at the New York Fancy Food show to find out how the Center for Advanced Pastry Studies program at the Institute of Culinary Education has developed since its inception two years ago.

What made you want to start the Center for Advanced Pastry Studies (CAPS) at the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE)?
There was no location in the NYC area for a professional pastry chef to take the kinds of classes offered in other cities by professional pastry schools. The metro New York area has some of the finest restaurants and chefs in the country—why should they have to travel to another state or country to increase their skills?

Were there any challenges in setting up the program?
Yes. The first was trying to convince working professionals to attend; the school’s reputation is for culinary and pastry career programs and vocational classes. Another challenge was getting the top teaching chefs for hands-on classes without a commitment to buy a particular manufacturer’s products.

The cost of the chef and their travel expenses, along with materials and promotion of the class is too high to be doable with a small class size. It’s impossible to offer an affordable class fee without vendor support. We’d love to use every vendor’s products at the school, but for a school our size that would mean organizational chaos, so we use the supporting vendor’s products in the CAPS classes, along with the chef instructor’s recommended products. CAPS attendees get to work with products and ingredients they might otherwise not know about or have access to.

What has been the program’s biggest success?
Hearing that well-known and internationally respected chefs say they've heard about our program and would be interested in coming to teach a class. Manufacturers of fine pastry and chocolate ingredients now call us for demo and class space. And the professional culinary and pastry community have begun to associate ICE with continuing education.

What has been the program’s biggest “not success”?
Early in the program, we had a few classes that we had to cancel due to low enrollment.

What impact does CAPS have on ICE?
CAPS brings working professionals back into ICE. They experience our commitment to professional excellence in these classes. This builds our credibility within the industry and increases opportunities and demand for our graduating career students.

What does the future hold for CAPS at ICE?
We’d like to expand the program to hold classes more often - once a month. We’d also love to create a forum of classes specifically for culinary school chef instructors. These classes would be super-advanced technique classes, probably done in a four or five day format. This kind of forum would help culinary instructors increase the types and levels of skills that they teach their students and give them an opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences.

ICE offers a 15% discount on CAPS classes to ICE alumni. Upcoming classes include: Viennoiseries with Cyril Hitz, Belgian Candy with Jean Pierre Wybauw, Experimental Cuisine with Will Goldfarb, Pastry Laboratory with Paul Edwards, and Plated Desserts with Joe Murphy. For more information, go to www.iceculinary.com.