Lincoln Land’s new Culinary Institute has facilities and faculty to rival the best

FOOD | Julianne Glatz

They’ve built it, and people are coming.

Walking into Lincoln Land Community College’s new Culinary Institute for the first time is an awesome, even jaw-dropping experience, especially for anyone in the food business. Located in LLCC’s spanking-new Workforce Careers Center, it’s a food professional’s dream. There’s a small dining room that’s sleekly modern yet warmly welcoming with wood accents and picture windows with campus views outside. Above the back row of banquettes, windows also showcase the kitchen behind it.

While the Lincoln Land Culinary Institute’s new facility may seem like an almost impossible dream-come-true to culinary professionals, for director Jay Kitterman it’s a dream he’s had for years, and one he’s worked tirelessly to bring to fruition.

Kitterman’s background is in hospitality management, which is concerned with the service aspects of hotels and restaurants, as well as specific business-related practices. From the time he joined LLCC’s faculty 17 years ago, he has not only shaped LLCC’s hospitality man agement courses, but also instituted classes geared to students wanting to pursue professional culinary careers and cooking classes for the general public. In the years before the Workforce Careers Center made its way from concept to reality, it wasn’t easy. There were classes that provided food industry workers with the essentials of food sanitation that led to state certification, as well as classes dealing with the business aspects of restaurants. But the only on-campus kitchen suitable for cooking classes, professional or otherwise, was the cafeteria kitchen in Menard Hall, not least because it could only be used for classes in evenings after it shut down its day-to-day operation.

Kitterman credits the foresight of the LLCC board of trustees and LLCC president Charlotte Warren as instrumental to the creation of the Workforce Career Center and especially its Culinary Institute. But Dr. Warren returns the favor: It fell to Kitterman, as the person in charge of hospitality courses, to meet and greet potential LLCC presidential candidates; Warren says that within minutes after their initial meeting, Kitterman began pitching his concept to her of an expanded culinary program and the facility that would be needed to realize it.

That was six years ago. While Kitterman’s passion helped fuel the impetus to finance and create the Culinary Institute as part of LLCC’s Workforce Careers Center, other factors were crucial. Community colleges have long been providing education not just for high school graduates, but also training and education for local folks of all ages who want to learn new skills and trades that will prepare them for jobs that can’t be downsized through mechanization or moved offshore because of cheap labor. The current economic and unemployment crisis heightened the need for such training, and also put community colleges such as LLCC in the vanguard of the training/retraining that’s become critical for so many Americans.

State of the art That kitchen just behind the dining room is used for dinners and events. It’s the smallest of the three kitchens in the Culinary Institute, but still spacious and astonishingly well equipped compared to most restaurant kitchens, especially in relation to the size of the dining room. There are stations for grilling, sautéing, frying, etc., as well as a workspace known as the pass-through – a table-length surface with (usually) at least one shelf running above it – from which the line cooks pass their completed dishes through to servers.

Behind it is the food production teaching kitchen, more than double the size of the line kitchen. There’s a central island for the instructor/chef that includes an induction burner stovetop, a sink, and a lowboy (a refrigerated unit located underneath the counter).

The gleaming stainless steel counters surrounding the instructor’s island on three sides are for the students. They’re equipped with induction burners, which heat cooking vessels directly rather than transferring the heat from the gas flames or electric heat of traditional stoves. Induction burners are energy efficient, not least because only the cooking pots (which must be specially made for induction heating) and their contents get hot; the cook top surface stays cool But they’re not the only cooking option for the LLCC culinary students: the walls behind the students’ prep counters are lined with commercial stoves with ovens, sinks, and salamanders (high-powered commercial broilers). As with the line kitchen, there’s an adjacent area for dishwashing. Grills and fryers are located in the adjacent area as well, as is storage for small appliances such as mixers and food processors. There’s plenty of space between the instructor’s workspace and the student prep counters, making it possible for students to leave their stations in order to get a close look at the instructor’s demonstrations. But wide-screen monitors above the prep counters provide an even closer view.