Reality Check about Recreational Cooking Class

Last night, I taught a cooking class in pie making focusing on two methods for crust. The location felt making a quiche and a double crust pie was not enough for a cooking class, so they added veggie and cheese tart to the description. Pie making classes are hard. Lots of work. Lots of technique.

Teachers for Community Education locations are often only paid for their hours in-class and maybe one extra hour or hour and a half for set up and clean up. Cooking class instructors are not paid for recipe creation, testing, food shopping, preparation or use of personal supplies. The hourly rates are good if all hours of work paid the rate offered for in-class time. Heck, any pay at all for hours spent outside of class would be an improvement. They are not so good that then spread across the actual effort it makes for good pay. This is a problem with so many teaching gigs like adjunct professors, college lecturers and even public school teachers.

The low pay for cooking class and recreational instructors is not universal, but it is my experience with community programs and some locations that hire cooking class contractors.

Going independent and teaching cooking classes out of my own location may pay me better. I once considered it and created business plans. However, the large capital investment in equipment to basically build a commercial kitchen, permitting required depending on the city where I locate, leasing a storefront, marketing, hiring assistants (if I go that route) and operation are steep capital investments. Most community education cooking classes locations minimize these costs by using free resources in the city (e.g. high school classrooms and kitchens) because communities want these services for their citizens.

Not to mention, opening my own cooking class location would put me directly competing against community educations classes who can charge less because they have some freely available resources. Additionally, some of their programs, say a popular speaker, will sell enough tickets to subsidize other programs that have higher overhead and few students, such as cooking classes. An independent cooking school doesn’t have that advantage. So, yes, I could do it on my own, but the equation is more complex.

I use Amazon Fresh to reduce my time input for shopping, but I pay an annual fee and tip the driver. I create these beautiful booklets for cooking classes with tons of information. They are always in color and they always have photos.

For this class, I pre-caramelized 5 lbs of onions for tarts. I pre-cubed 4 sticks of butter for each student and froze them. That was don’t before 9am for a 6 pm class. I lugged my own food processor and 3 heavy bags of ingredients to the school at 5:15pm. The school was locked and I had to walk to multiple entrances before calling a contact.

I then lost 15 minutes of my preparation time. I hand carried all his down a flight of stairs. Last night, I opted to use a pre-made, purchased puff pastry for the tarts and pre-sliced frozen strawberries because there was just too much to make in 3 hours. Strawberries are also not in season and fresh cost 3x.

I know recreational classes are fun classes and instructors often teach becauce they enjoy sharing their knowledge. Not many try to do enough classes in a week to make some noticable money. No one is doing this to make a living wage. Even on a week where I do a class 5 days of the week, I do not make enough money to pay the rent I paid in grad school when I lived with two roommates.

Yes, I decide to leave that high paying tech job for this. I knew I would make much less. Unfortunately, how much less makes it unenjoyable for me to share my knowledge. The measely pay makes it feel burdensome.

All my prep takes 5-8 hours per cooking class before I set foot in the classroom. Remember, I am only getting paid for the 4 hours I am on site (4 hours IF all goes smoothly, students help clean, I have a helper and I hustle to clean).

I can certainly reduce my outside cooking class burden. I can do less preparation at home. This often results in having to stay in the classroom extra hours because the cooking class runs over and the cleaning is excessive. I would rather put in that time in my home during the day than at 10pm in a high school kitchen.

I can do other people’s recipes. I do often do that when I simply don’t have the time to create one. The result is I am teaching a recipe I might not have made yet and I don’t know the outcome.

I could use more pre-prepped ingredients. Sure, but before class even started last night, one person complained that we were not making blueberry pie and the strawberries were frozen. It is freaking MAY. None of these are in season and those that are fresh are under ripe and really expensive. We only have so much budget for ingredients too.

Another student asked why we aren’t making puff pastry from scratch. There are places that do puff pastry classes. It takes days to make by hand. The instructor for that class makes several pastries in advance at various stages to compress time. He also trashes any pastries not made by him after class. That is a lot of outside work! Worse, it is a lot of FOOD WASTE. And again, we only have so much money to spend on ingredients.

Later, someone suggested I could make the class better if I did just what this other instructor does – brought pie crusts completed at various stages to swap out after each step for “magic of TV moments”. Yes, I can make 5 pie crusts ready to roll and trashed all their crusts after step 1. Trashed 5 lbs of flour and 10 sticks of butter and replaced them with ready-to-roll crusts made by hand in my ‘off hours’. I could then make another set of pre-formed pies that are ready to fill. I could store these in my freezer taking up several shelves, but always ready for class.

Absolutely, I could do all that. But, I don’t want to spend 10-20 hours to get paid for four before I even start the 3 hour class. And, being as I am not getting paid much, I don’t exactly have the cash available to go over my allowed reimbursement for ingredients. Besides, I need a day job to pay for my ‘teaching cooking classes’ hobby, so there really isn’t 10-20 hours to do all that stuff.

What is my point in this rant today? Well, I guess it is mostly a rant. But it is a rant about the shitty pay in participating in the food industry. I keep hearing about the world moving from spending money on things to spending money on experiences.

Well, this is one of those experience type things. People want to pay little for them, but they want to have a polished, as-seen-on-TV experience that includes high quality lessons, a gracious, charming, well-rehearsed host all delivered while they are having loads of fun and eating delicious instagrammable foods.

I recently approached by someone saying they want to create the ‘paint night’ of cooking classes. That sounds horrible, but I am sure it makes for a great gram. Unfortunately, I just don’t see how the math adds up without someone in the chain getting screwed.

With that, happy cooking. . . In a class with a well paid instructor, I hope.