Students cooking up some dough
Posted on Monday, October 20, 2008
FAYETTEVILLE — Leslie Taylor chopped one-pound blocks of frozen butter Friday, preparing to make fluffy sheets of puff pastry.
Standing in the cramped commercial kitchen of the Regional Technology Center, the culinary arts student’s elbows clashed with her colleagues’ as they worked, their knives making blunt rhythmic noises as they smacked a plastic cutting board.
Across the counter, students twisted braided loaves of Challah bread and brushed them with coats of melted butter.
“It can get sort of crowded,” Taylor said.
The 24-year-old, who’s always loved cooking, had never sold a product she made until she started in the Northwest Arkansas Community College culinary arts program.
The students spend their Saturday mornings selling the bread at farmers markets in Bentonville, Fayetteville and Rogers.
Baking and selling bread teaches students the chemistry of baking, but it also offers a real-life insight into the most difficult part of operating a restaurant — being mindful of the bottom line, said Chef Lou Rice, their instructor.
By making dough for customers, they make “dough” for the college, generating funds that will be used for the expansion of the culinary arts program.
“What better way for them to see how financing works,” Rice said. “Students come into schools and they don’t realize what it costs for supplies and equipment. They just expect it to be there.”
And the profits also provide a chance to free up some space in that crowded kitchen.
The program, started in 2006, provides a culinary arts technical certificate to students interested in careers in food preparation, event planning and restaurant management.
The college hopes to expand its culinary arts department to include an associate’s degree program. The college’s Facilities and Land Use Committee will consider relocating the program from its Fayetteville space to a new regional nonprofit center under construction in the former campus of St. Mary’s Hospital in Rogers.
With the move, the program will quadruple its kitchen size and allow students to open a fully operational restaurant, learning through generating a product and a profit to support the school.
Money earned from a growing student enterprise will help cover the cost of new equipment related to the move. Commercial mixers used in the program cost $ 3, 000 to $ 5, 000, and a deck oven costs more than $ 12, 000.
After a season of growing success at farmers markets, the students have negotiated arrangements with several local restaurants, which will serve the bread to their customers, including Bordino’s in Fayetteville and Crabby’s in Rogers.
The students started this year, perfecting recipes and discovering what sells best to Saturdaymorning shoppers.
In Fayetteville, shoppers snap up French baguettes. In Bentonville, sweet cinnamon rolls are the first thing to go.
The program sells four to six varieties of bread for $ 3 to $ 5 a loaf.
With every product, students aim to generate a profit of 65 to 70 percent of purchase price. This requires a careful balance of ingredients’ costs with an awareness of customers’ price threshold — one of the most essential skills in the food industry, Rice said.
“Of all of the programs that I run into, I think ours is the toughest from a financial standpoint,” he said. “They have to understand what it takes to make a dollar in this financial environment. Restaurants don’t fail because they have bad food. They fail because people don’t understand how to make it work financially.”
A study published by Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly showed that 26. 16 percent of independent restaurants fail within the first year of operation, many for financial reasons.
The quest to hit a bottom line forces students to experiment with marketing, not just recipes.
When shoppers passed on muffins, uninterested in the product, students turned to the booth next to them at the farmers market, incorporating locally grown pumpkin and blueberries in the pastries.
“People went crazy for them,” Rice said. After finding a successful strategy for baked goods, Rice hopes to explore starting a retail product line in the next few years. At the beginning of the class, students learn chopping techniques by mincing pounds of carrots and celery into delicate pieces, which typically end up in the trash. Rice wants to dehydrate the vegetable product to make soup and dry spice mixes. Through a restaurant launched in the cafeteria of the former Rogers’ hospital, students will expand the practical element of their education even further, he said. “Nothing gets a student interested in a product like seeing people purchase it and enjoy it,” Rice said. “Having that classroom practice only gets them so far.”
To contact this reporter: eblad@arkansasonline. com
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