UT and Pellissippi State Technical Community College recently teamed up in a field brimming with extreme academic and artistic integrity, complete with a side of flavor and elegance: the culinary arts.
UT’s Culinary Institute has been in full operation now for three years, but its recent partnership with PSTCC started this semester. The students in this program will graduate with an Associate of Applied Science degree in business and a minor in culinary arts.
The director and a founding member of the Culinary Institute, John Antun, is also an associate professor in the Department of Retail, Hospitality and Tourism Management. His hard work in the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences, has proved to be beneficial in creating and improving the Culinary Institute and the partnership with PSTCC.
The instructors for this program all range in various occupations within the culinary field.
“We currently have 12 instructors in the program, 9 of which are working chefs,” Antun said. “The instructors work all over, anywhere from catering to hospitals.”
The Culinary Institute focuses on professionalism and aims to produce chefs who reflect this trait.
“All culinary schools cover the basics, because those are the skill standards set by the Department of Labor for one to call a chef, but we place a great deal of emphasis on pro- fessional development,” Antun said. “Other programs develop home cooks, hobby chefs, personal chefs, bakers, food stylists, etc., but we develop professional chefs.”
The Culinary Institute also considers the changing trends associated with food and the world. With a relatively young program, it is possible to start fresh and continue to grow in conjunction with the surroundings.
The agreement between UT and PSTCC aids the Culinary Institute in its drive for progression.
“We are working on being the greenest program in the country,” said Antun. “We have a forager whose job it is to go out to local farms and purchase the vegetables, meat, etc., and we use that for the classes. We could not afford that if we didn’t have the Pellissippi contract.”
With a forward-thinking program in session, the PSTCC students are exposed to a variety of old and new techniques.
“Teaching culinary arts is much like teaching any other art form, and art is a highly subjective field,” Antun said. ” … After the students need to get to the basics, then they can enhance, enlarge, expand and improve. With the PSTCC group, we will go beyond the basics and into breaking food down to its component parts, a popular culinary mechanism known as molecular gastronomy.”
As Antun confirms the avant-garde nature of the actual instruction, Bob Rider, dean and professor in the College of Education, Health and Human Sciences, provides some of the ideas backing the success of the Culinary Institute.
“This type of partnership between a state school system school, namely UT, and a Tennessee Board of Regents school, namely PSTCC, is the first of its kind,” Rider said.
The mixture between the classroom and lab provides the knowledge and experience one needs to perform well in the culinary field.
“The course work is predominately completed at PSTCC, but we provide the practical lab experiences for the students,” Rider said. “This program is very much an academic-oriented program with a lot of hands on training, and the students are evaluated and graded on a multitude of different components.”
The benefits of this program span from university to student and producer to consumer.
“From the business perspective, we have a contract with PSTCC that generates tuition and revenue for the university, which rtesy UT Culinary Institute helps support other faculty and the culinary program on campus, in addition to the university as a whole,” Rider said. “Over (the) next four years this program will generate nearly $4 million during economic hardships.”
This program clearly helps the university and PSTCC.
“It benefits the community and helps students acquire marketable skills that will help them gain self determination as well as an income,” Rider said.
As the program continues, it is projected that Knoxville’s culinary scene will improve. This in turn will stimulate the economy and the image of Knoxville’s restaurants as a whole.
The Culinary Institute provides a great deal of services for a relatively low cost, and this agreement with PSTCC makes it available to more people.
“Professor Antun has maintained a 100 percent placement rate in the workplace, so if people are looking for jobs in the culinary field, UT is a very great place to be,” Rider said.
Not only are the rates for gainful employment high, but “our program is significantly less expensive,” Rider said. “Our students will pay about one tenth of the price when compared to Johnson and Wales or the Culinary Institute of America.”
