Ken Hause likes to start the tour of the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts in the pantry.
“It’s virtually all organic,” he says of the staples that line the pantry shelves. “Where we have to ability, we buy local. If not local, Colorado.”
Depending on the time of the year, he estimates that the school sources from 25 to 50 percent of its food locally and from the state.
It’s a practice begun at the school when it was still Culinary School of the Rockies, after founder Joan Brett read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and decided to change the curriculum to a farm to table model that included stints for the students on farms in Boulder County and the Western Slope, as well as “externships” in local restaurants. When the school was sold to Triumph Education in 2010, the group kept the model and expanded the school, as well as adopting a farm to table program for its school in Austin, Texas.
With its expansion complete, the school now has three commercial kitchens, rather than one, and about 100 students at a given time, with classes starting almost monthly, rather than two classes of 15 to 30 students twice a year. Individual cooking classes remain small, however, capped at about 15.
The school has something else, an affiliation with the Auguste Escoffier Foundation & Museum of Culinary Arts, located near Nice, France. Auguste Escoffier’s great-grandson, Michel, was in Boulder last week to meet with students and see how the expansion has progressed.
His great-grandfather died before he was born, but after a career in business, Michel Escoffier has turned to sharing knowledge about the pioneering efforts of his ancestor. Auguste Escoffier created the cooking systems by which modern restaurants run with various chefs each assigned to part of the job of making a dish. Before that, every chef made each dish from start to finish. He also wrote “Le Guide Culinaire,” first published in 1903, a cookbook with 5,000 recipes that updated and standardized French cuisine.
Michel Escoffier says his great-grandfather was a tireless innovator, experimenting with canning techniques to preserve food for soldiers in the Franco-Prussian War and making a ketchup-like tomato sauce which he preserved in champagne bottles.
He adds that his great-grandfather would be at home in a school where working with farmers and seasonal produce was the norm. For example, he set up a relationship with asparagus farmers in France to raise the green asparagus Londoners preferred when he ran the kitchen at the Savoy Hotel.
Michel Escoffier says he didn’t realize the power of Auguste’s legacy until he traveled as a businessman to different countries.
Often, the executive chef or the manager of the hotel would buy him a drink or send him a bottle of Champagne. The intense interest so many years after the 1935 death of Auguste made him realize he wanted to be involved in preserving his great-grandfather’s legacy.
Hause says the affiliation works for the school, because it reinforces its emphasis on classic French techniques, as well as bringing recognition.
“It exposes us to a broader audience,” he says, adding that the school was previously known regionally, but now would be able to gain a more national reputation.
Says Michel Escoffier: “It enables (the school) to attract from all over the country.”
As he toured the school last week, Escoffier saw the principle at work. Ellen Postolowski, a student from New Jersey, brought him a sample of chocolates the students had been working on.
She became interested in Boulder when she saw Bon Appetit’s article naming it the foodiest town in America.
“I saved the article and (when) I started looking at (cooking schools and) farm to table, it led me here.”
