1. Chapter 4
Kitchen Essentials:
Part 1—
Professionalism
© Copyright 2011 by the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation (NRAEF)
and published by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

2. What Does It Mean To Be a
Culinary Professional?
To be professional is to be courteous, honest, and responsible in your
dealings with customers and coworkers.
 A ____________ is one who has studied and continues to study the
art of cooking. The attributes of a culinary professional include:
 _____________: A professional culinary program provides the culinary
student with a basic knowledge of foods, food styles, and the methods
used to prepare foods.
 _____________: Culinary schooling alone cannot make a culinary
professional. Practice and hands-on experience provide the skills
necessary to produce quality foods or organize, train, motivate, and
supervise a staff.
 _____________: Culinary professionals must produce foods that taste
great, or the customer will not return.
 Judgment: Culinary professionals must use discretion and appropriate
behavior with coworkers, supervisors, and employees.
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3. What Does It Mean To Be a
Culinary Professional? (cont.)
 ___________: Becoming a culinary professional is hard work.
 ___________: It is important to have a sense of pride about a
job well done. Pride extends to personal appearance and
behavior in and around the kitchen.
 ____________: Respect is having consideration for oneself
and others. In order to respect others, a person must first
respect himself or herself.
 ____________: Personal responsibility means that a person
is responsible for the choices he or she makes. Personal
responsibility means that a person accepts accountability and
is in control.
 Education and the culinary professional: Employers value
a formal culinary education.
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Chapter 4 | Kitchen Essentials: Part 1—Professionalism
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4. Workstations
A __________________ is a work area in the kitchen dedicated to a
particular task.
 Workstations using the same or similar equipment for related
tasks are grouped together into a work section.
 Good kitchen design maximizes the flow of goods and staff from
one area to the next and within each area itself.
 A _______________________ is a method for staffing a kitchen
so that each worker is assigned a set of specific tasks.
 A ____________________ is led by the dining room manager
(maître d) who generally trains all service personnel, oversees
wine selections, works with the chef to develop the menu,
organizes the seating chart, and seats the guests.
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5. Section 4.1 Summary
 Professionalism means being courteous, honest, and
responsible in one’s dealings with customers and coworkers. It
also indicates that a person is maintaining standards for his or
her work and behavior.
 Professional culinarians have knowledge, skill, taste, judgment,
dedication, pride, respect, and a sense of personal responsibility.
 A kitchen brigade is a system of staffing a kitchen so that each
worker is assigned a set of specific tasks.
 A traditional dining-room brigade is led by the dining room
manager (maître d’) who generally trains all service personnel,
oversees wine selections, works with the chef to develop the
menu, organizes the seating chart, and seats the guests.
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6. Business Math
Math influences every decision that a manager makes in an operation.
It is the foundation of the kitchen and the back office.
 Math skills are extremely important in foodservice settings.
Managers are expected to have a basic understanding of
math and know how to apply mathematical principles to
business situations.
 Chefs and managers need to know how to determine
recipe yields, convert recipes from customary to metric
measure, and change the yields of recipes.
 Culinary professionals need to understand the concepts of
fraction, decimals, and percentages. They need to know
how to use and apply these math functions in the kitchen.
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7. U.S. and Metric
Measurement Systems
 The most commonly used system of measurement in the
United States is based on customary units.
 Cooking and baking require exact weighing and measuring of
ingredients to ensure consistent quality and minimal waste.
 The metric system is the standard system used in many other
parts of the world. Metric units are based on multiples of 10
and include milliliters, liters, milligrams, grams, and kilograms.
 When a recipe is written using metric units, use metric
measuring tools.
 Thermometers measure degrees of temperature in either
Fahrenheit (°F), which is the customary measure, or Celsius
(°C), which is the metric measure.
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8. Standardized Recipes
A recipe is a written record of the ingredients and preparation steps
needed to make a particular dish.
 Recipes for institutional use, or___________________,
must follow a format that is clear to anyone who uses them.
 A standardized recipe lists the ingredients first, in the order
they are to be used, followed by assembly directions or the
method for putting the ingredients together.
 A standardized recipe includes:




4.2
Name of the recipe
Ingredients
Yield
Portion size
Chapter 4 | Kitchen Essentials: Part 1—Professionalism
 Temperature, time, and
equipment
 Step-by-step directions
 Nutrition information
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9. Converting Recipes
_______________ a recipe when the yield of the recipe (the amount it
provides) is not the same as the amount of product needed.
 The conversion of the recipe affects the cost of the
recipe, but not necessarily the cost of the portion.
 When properly converted and prepared, the quality of
the product produced from the recipe should not vary
from the original, no matter how many portions it yields.
 Sometimes you must change (or convert) a recipe if the
yield is not the amount you need.
 Using basic math skills, it’s easy to increase or decrease
many recipes.
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10. Measuring
_______________ refers to how much of something is being used in a
recipe.
 _____________ is the amount of space an ingredient takes up.
Volume measurement is best used for liquids.
 Dry ingredients are measured by leveling them off evenly at the
rim of the spoon or cup using a straightedge.
 A typical set of measuring cups includes 1/4 cup, 1/3 cup, 1/2
cup, and 1 cup measures.
 Liquid measuring cups are see-through and have measurement
markings on the side.
 Measuring spoons generally come in a set of four or five. Most
customary sets include these sizes: 1/4 tsp, 1/2 tsp, 1 tsp, and 1
tbsp.
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11. Measuring (cont.)
 ___________ is the measurement of an item’s resistance to


gravity. Weight is expressed in ounces and pounds.
A food scale is helpful for measuring ingredients by weight.
Fat can be measured in several ways.
 _____________: Used for fat that comes in 1/4-pound sticks, such as
butter or margarine. The wrapper is marked in tablespoons and in
fractions of a cup. Simply cut off the amount needed.
 _________________________: Pack the fat down into the cup. Level
off the top. When adding to the recipe, use a rubber scraper to empty as
much of the fat as possible from the cup.
 _________________________: This method involves combining fat
with water in a liquid measuring cup.
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12. EP/AP Amounts
 To determine how much of an item is needed to yield an AP
(amount, simply divide the edible portion amount needed by the
yield percentage.
 To determine the AP quantity needed to result in a given quantity, it
is also important to know the cooking loss for the item.
 A _________________ is a list of food items showing the expected,
or average, shrinkage from AP amount to EP amount.
 A butcher test is used to measure the amount of shrinkage that occurs during the
trimming of a meat product.
 A cooking loss test is a way to measure the amount of product shrinkage during
the cooking or roasting process.
 Products today can frequently be purchased in an “as edible
portion.” This is something that is purchased trimmed and cut.
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13. Costing Recipes
Costing recipes can be complicated, but the profitability of a restaurant
or foodservice operation depends on balancing costs and prices.
 Standard recipe cost and cost per serving, or standard
portion cost, are key success factors in quantity food
production operations.
 To find the total cost of a standard recipe, a manager
must know both the ingredient amounts needed and the
market price of each one.
 Many operations price out all recipes and then check
them every six months to see if they are still accurate,
while others compare standard recipe costs to the
national price index twice a year.
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14. Section 4.2 Summary
 A standardized recipe includes details such as the list and amounts
of ingredients, yield, equipment, and cooking time and temperature.
 Customary units include ounces, teaspoons, tablespoons, cups,
pints, and gallons. Metric units are based on multiples of 10 and
include milligrams, grams, kilograms, milliliters, and liters.
 To measure temperature, use a thermometer; to measure fat, use
the stick, dry measuring cup, or water displacement method; and to
measure by weight, use a scale.
 To determine the as purchased or AP amount to yield an edible
portion (EP) amount, divide the EP amount needed by the yield
percentage. Get the yield percentage from a conversion table.
 To find the total cost of a standard recipe, you must know both the
ingredient amounts needed and the market price of each one. Then
multiply or divide the ingredient amounts by the prices.
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