Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Cooking Courses
Cooking schools that offer courses for enthusiastic amateur chefs include the following
(though this list is by no means exhaustive):
Chopping Block Cooking School
(
www.thechoppingblock.net
)
Master knife skills or
learn to make deep-dish pizza in Chicago.
International Culinary Center
(
www.internationalculinarycenter.com
)
Hosts the French
Culinary Institute and Italian Culinary Academy in New York City.
Kitchen Window
(
www.kitchenwindow.com
)
Hosts market tours and restaurant crawls,
plus classes on baking, outdoor grilling and world cuisine in Minneapolis.
Natural Gourmet Cookery School
(
www.naturalgourmetschool.com
) Focuses on veget-
arian and healthy 'flexitarian' cooking in NYC.
Zingerman's Bakehouse
(
Click here
) Offers popular 'bake-cations,' making bread or
pastries in Ann Arbor.
Drinks
Beer
After founding the American beer industry in Milwaukee, 19th-century German immig-
rants developed ways to make beer in vast quantities and then deliver it all over America.
Today about 80% of domestic beer still comes from the Midwest.
Despite their ubiquity, popular brands of American beer have long been the subject of
ridicule abroad due to their low alcohol content and 'light' taste. Regardless of what crit-
ics say, sales indicate that American beer is more popular than ever - and now, with the
meteoric rise of microbreweries and craft beer, even beer snobs admit that American beer
has reinvented itself.
Today there are more than 2500 craft breweries in the USA, up from 1500 breweries in
2009. As of 2013, new breweries were coming online at a pace of roughly one per day. It
has become possible to 'drink local' all over the region as microbreweries pop up in urb-
an centers and unexpected small towns. Some restaurants now have beer 'sommeliers,'
while others host beer dinners, where you can experience how small-batch brews pair
with different foods.
