Sharp things, hot things.

01

What is actually in the room

Every in-person class runs in one kitchen at 931 Garst St, Cabool, MO 65689. Eight stations, eight people, one instructor. You are never watching from a chair at the back, which is the whole point and also the reason this page exists.

Here is what is switched on around you:

• —Eight working stations, 1.2 m of bench each, side by side.
• —An induction hob and a gas ring at every station. Two live heat sources per person, one of them with a flame.
• —Two deck ovens and a convection oven, hot long before you arrive and still hot when you leave.
• —A wood-fired oven, plus coals and open flame for the fire class.
• —Carbon-steel knives — a gyuto, a paring knife and a bread knife at each station. They are sharp, because blunt knives are what cut people.
• —Boiling water, hot oil, cast iron heavy enough to hurt if it lands on a foot, and a pressure canner in the preserving class.

Read that list once more and picture eight people moving between it. That is the room. It is a good room and we are careful in it, and it is still a room full of heat and blades.

02

What we do about it

Eight seats is a safety number before it is a marketing one. One instructor can watch eight pairs of hands. Twelve is a different job.

• —Every technique is demonstrated at the front bench before you do it, and demonstrated again if anybody wants it again.
• —The instructor walks the room the whole time. Nobody is left alone with a technique they have not been shown.
• —The first few minutes of every class are the safety brief: where the first aid kit is kept, where the exit is, which surfaces are hot, and how to say stop.
• —Knives get carried tip down and put down on the board, never in the sink and never on the edge of a bench.
• —Fire work happens at the fire, with the instructor there. It does not migrate to the benches.
• —If something is going wrong — a pan too hot, a grip that is about to slip, two people reaching for the same thing — we stop the class. We would rather interrupt you than treat you.
• —For anything past a bandage, cold water and a sit down, we call 911. We would rather make that call and be wrong about it.

What we do not do is claim more than that. We are a small cooking school, not a hospital, and the honest limit of what we can offer is a careful instructor, a well-set room and a phone.

03

What we need from you

None of this is fussy. Every line of it exists because of something that can go wrong in a kitchen with eight people in it.

• —Closed-toe shoes. Not sandals, not canvas slip-ons with an open back. Something you would be glad of if a knife or a pan of hot fat went over the edge of the bench.
• —Long hair tied back, properly, off your face. There is open flame in this room.
• —Sleeves rolled or short. No loose cuffs, no scarves, no long necklaces, no dangling bracelets. Rings and watches come off before you touch food.
• —Arrive sober and stay that way while you are at the equipment.
• —Do the thing the instructor says, when they say it. If you disagree, say so — but do it first and argue after, because most of these instructions are about the next ten seconds.
• —Bags, coats and phones get stowed where the instructor shows you at the start. Not on the floor by your feet, not on the bench. Nobody is checking a message with a hot pan in the other hand.
• —Tell us immediately about a cut or a burn. Immediately, and however small it looks. That is not us being dramatic — a cut that gets covered and gloved in the first thirty seconds is over, and one that gets hidden until the end of class is a different problem for you and for everyone eating.
• —Hands washed at the start, after raw meat, after the bin, after your phone, after anything. There is a hand-wash sink at every second station.
• —Do not touch another person’s pan, board or knife. Ask them to move it.

The kitchen is also not a place for anyone who is not in the class. Please do not bring babies, toddlers, or a friend who is going to wait for you at the end of the bench.

A support worker or a companion you need with you is a different thing entirely, and they are welcome at no charge. So is a service animal. Tell us when you ask for a quote so we can set the room up, and read Accessibility, which is the page that owns both of those rules.

04

The hazards, class by class

Some classes carry more than others, and you should know which one you are booking before you book it.

Knives

Knife Skills I is a whole class of it, and every other class uses them. Carbon-steel knives are properly sharp. You will be shown the grip, the guiding hand and the claw, and you will be slower than you want to be for the first half hour. That is correct. Speed is what cuts people.

Fire, coals and cast iron

Cast Iron & Live Fire is exactly what it says. Open flame, live coals, and iron that stays dangerous long after it stops looking it. Everything at the fire is treated as hot, including the handles, including the things that were taken off the heat ten minutes ago. Synthetic fabric near flame is a bad idea — cotton, wool or an apron over the top.

Steam, hot oil and hot liquid

Braising, pasta water, stock and rendering fat all scald, and steam scalds worse than water does. Lids come off away from your face. Full pots do not get carried across a busy room.

The pressure canner

Ozark Preserving uses a pressure canner as well as a boiling-water bath. A pressure canner is a sealed vessel of superheated water and it is opened by the instructor, not by you. See Home canning below — that one has consequences that follow you home.

05

The part we cannot design away

We can lay the room out well, keep the knives sharp, brief you properly and stand next to you. We cannot make a kitchen with knives and fire in it into a kitchen without risk, because the risk is the thing you came to learn to handle.

So, plainly: coming to a class means you understand there is a real chance of getting hurt, and you accept it. Cuts, burns, blisters, scalds, smoke, slips on a wet floor, a heavy pan on a foot, a reaction to something you ate — and the ordinary chance that the person at the next bench makes a mistake near you.

We are not going to dress that up as a legal release printed on a web page. Missouri limits what any business can ask you to sign away, and we are not out looking for the edge of those limits. What we ask instead is that you read this page before you come, and that you come only if you are content with what is on it. The agreement between us is set out in Terms.

06

Being asked to stop, or to leave

We can refuse entry to anyone, and we can ask anyone to put the knife down and step away from the bench, and we can ask anyone to leave. We would rather never do it. The alternative is seven other people standing next to a problem.

The reasons are short:

• —Being drunk, or drinking during the class.
• —Ignoring a safety instruction after being asked once.
• —Horseplay, or waving anything sharp or hot around to be funny.
• —Being aggressive or abusive to the instructor or to anyone else in the room.
• —Being visibly unwell in a way that puts the food or the other people at risk.

If you are asked to leave for one of those, the seat still counts as taken and the full price for it is due, exactly as it is for a no-show. You can still take away what you have cooked, and we will box it for you. Cancellations & refunds owns the money side of this and sets it out in full.

07

Allergens, in a kitchen that is shared

This is one room. One set of benches, boards, pans, ovens and towels, used by eight people at once and by another eight the night before. Flour goes into the air on pasta and lamination days and settles on everything. There is no separate allergen-free bench, and no honest way to make one here.

Federal law recognises nine major food allergens. We do not treat any of them as absent from this building, and neither should you:

• —Milk
• —Eggs
• —Fish
• —Crustacean shellfish
• —Tree nuts
• —Peanuts
• —Wheat
• —Soybeans
• —Sesame

If your allergy is severe, call us as well

Put it in the “anything we should know” box on the quote request by all means — that is what the box is for. But a line of free text is not a conversation, and on its own it is not enough for us to plan around. Ring +1 (417) 962-8474 before you commit to anything and we will go through the actual dish, the actual ingredients and the actual room with you.

Sometimes the answer is yes and we swap an ingredient. Sometimes it is that a different class suits you far better — the braise rather than the lamination, say. We would rather move you to a class that works than sell you a seat at one where you spend three hours worried. And if you carry an epinephrine auto-injector, bring it, and tell the instructor where it is at the start of the class.

Gluten is not the same question

Wheat is the allergen. Coeliac disease is something else, and it needs a different answer. Pasta and croissant days put wheat flour into the air of this room, so if you avoid gluten for medical reasons, that is worth the same phone call before you book rather than a discovery on the night.

When you tell us about an allergy in a quote request, we treat it as health information and keep it to the people who will be cooking with you. Privacy says how, and Your data & choices is how you get it deleted.

08

Raw poultry, raw flour, raw eggs

Whole Bird, Six Ways is amateur butchery. Eight people who mostly have not done it before, taking raw chickens apart at eight benches, and then everyone sits down at one table and eats. That works because of the boring rules, so the boring rules are not optional in that class.

• —Raw poultry stays on its own board, with its own knife, at your own station. It does not travel.
• —Hands get washed after every single contact with the raw bird — not rinsed, washed, with soap and warm water for twenty seconds. Not on your apron, not on the towel.
• —Boards, knives and the bench get cleaned and sanitised before anything cooked or ready-to-eat touches them.
• —We do not wash raw chicken. Rinsing it sprays bacteria a metre in every direction, which is why the guidance says not to.
• —Poultry is cooked to 165°F / 74°C in the thickest part and checked with a probe. Not by colour, not by the juices, not by feel. Temperature is the only check that tells you the truth.

Raw flour and raw eggs are the other two. Raw wheat flour has been linked to E. coli and Salmonella outbreaks in the US — it is a raw agricultural product, not a safe snack — so nobody tastes raw dough or raw batter in this kitchen, in the croissant class, the sourdough class, the pasta class or anywhere else. Fresh pasta made with egg is cooked before it is eaten.

If you would rather not handle raw poultry at all, that is a completely reasonable thing to want. Tell us before you book and we will point you at one of the other seven classes.

09

The food that leaves with you

Several classes send you home with something: a container of stock, trays of raw croissant dough, a live sourdough starter, two sealed jars, and the leftovers from the meal. It is one of the best parts of the day, and it is the part nobody thinks about at 9pm in a parking lot.

Everything you take home was made by you, with your own hands, in a teaching kitchen. We do not inspect it, weigh it, test it or certify it, and none of it is made for sale. Once it is in your car, how it is stored is out of our sight — so here is exactly what to do with it.

Two general rules that cover everything above. Nothing you take home from a class is safe to sell or to give away as a gift — it has no label, no batch, no inspection, and the person eating it did not choose to take that on. And when you are not sure, you are not sure: throw it out. A jar of stock is not worth a week of illness.

10

Home canning, and why we are blunt about it

Ozark Preserving teaches both methods, because they are for different foods and the difference is not a preference. This is the one part of the whole school where getting it wrong can kill somebody, so we are going to say it flatly.

The two methods are not interchangeable

A boiling-water bath cannot get above 212°F / 100°C. That is hot enough for high-acid foods — pH 4.6 or below, meaning most fruit, pickles, jams and properly acidified tomatoes. It is not hot enough to destroy Clostridium botulinum spores.

Low-acid foods — vegetables, beans, meat, poultry, fish, most soups and stocks — must be pressure canned, which reaches 240°F to 250°F. There is no water-bath recipe for green beans that works. A jar of low-acid food processed in a water bath is a jar of anaerobic, low-acid, sealed food, which is the exact condition botulinum toxin needs.

Throw a jar away if

• —The lid flexes, clicks or has popped up — the seal is gone.
• —It is bulging, leaking, weeping, or the contents spurt out when it is opened.
• —It is cloudy, mouldy, fizzing, or the liquid has gone unexpectedly dark.
• —It smells wrong, in any way, at any strength.
• —You cannot remember what is in it, what method processed it, or when it was made.
• —It was stored somewhere warm, damp or in direct sun.

Do not taste it to check. Do not feed it to the dog. Do not put it in an open bin. Bag it, seal the bag, and put it in the trash where nothing and nobody can get at it — and wash your hands and anything the contents touched.

What we teach from, and what we do not do

We teach from the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning and the guidance published by the National Center for Home Food Preservation: tested processing times, tested headspace, tested acidity, for the specific food and the specific jar size. Follow those and you do not have to trust anybody’s grandmother, including ours.

Your two jars are filled and processed by you. We do not pH-test them, we do not verify the seals after you leave, we do not inspect or approve them, and they are not for sale or for gifting. Label them before you go with what is in them, the date, and which method processed them — if a jar is unlabelled in six months, it goes in the bin, and that is a rule worth keeping for the rest of your life.

11

Under-18s

Classes are open from age 14. Anyone under 18 must be with an adult who is enrolled in the same class, at the same bench, for the whole session — not dropped off, not waiting in the car, not sitting at the side reading.

That adult must be a parent or legal guardian, or an adult the guardian has authorised in writing. What they are taking on is specific:

• —They stay in the room for the entire class and take part in it.
• —They are responsible for the young person throughout — where they are, what they are holding, and whether they are following the instructor.
• —They have read this page and accept the risks in it on the young person’s behalf as far as the law allows. There are limits on what an adult can give up for a child, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
• —One adult can be responsible for at most two under-18s. Three teenagers and one adult is not supervision.

Two things are adults-only regardless. Under-18s do not operate the pressure canner in Ozark Preserving, and at the fire in Cast Iron & Live Fire they work alongside their adult, at the instructor’s direction, or not at all.

The quote request has no age field, so tell us in the “anything we should know” box that someone under 18 is coming and how old they are. We would much rather know a week early than find out at the door.

12

Alcohol

Some people bring a bottle to share at the table. The safety half of that is not complicated, so it goes here plainly. This room has open flame, gas, coals, hot oil and a sharp knife at every station, and a drink changes how well anybody handles all five.

• —Nobody under 21 drinks here, and nobody may hand a drink to someone under 21 in this building — including the adult they came with, and including at the table at the end.
• —Nothing gets opened until the cooking is done and the knives, hobs and fire are finished with.
• —If you have been drinking before you arrive, or during the class, we may ask you to step back from the knives, the hobs and the fire for the rest of the session — or to leave.
• —That judgement is the instructor’s and it is not a negotiation on the night. It is not personal, and it is not about how you feel; it is about a room where seven other people are holding hot things.

Nobody will ask you to justify a decision not to drink. There is water on the bench and something soft to drink with the meal.

13

Photographs

We sometimes take photographs in class for the website and for social media. The rules we hold ourselves to:

• —We ask first, every time, before a camera comes out near you. Not afterwards, and not by way of a sign on the wall.
• —No is a complete answer. You do not have to give a reason and nobody will ask you for one, and it will not be raised again later in the evening.
• —We do not publish names alongside faces unless you have said we can.
• —For anyone under 18, the accompanying adult decides in writing, and the default is no. If we have not been told yes, the answer is no.
• —Change your mind later and email us. We will take it down from the website and from our own posts.

The one thing we cannot do is pull back something that has already been shared onward by somebody else. That is not us being difficult — it is simply not within reach once it has left our hands, and we would rather tell you that now than promise it and fail.

Other students take photographs of their own food, which is a lovely thing and not something we police. If you would rather not be in the background of anyone’s picture, say so at the start and we will say it to the room for you.

14

If something goes wrong

During the class

Say so, straight away. A cut, a burn, a splash in the eye, feeling faint, feeling sick, a hand that has stopped working the way you expect. There is no such thing as interrupting for this. The whole class stops for it and the food waits, because the food does not matter.

Before the class, if you are unwell

Do not come to a class with vomiting, diarrhoea, a fever, or an open or infected cut on your hands. It is not a matter of toughing it out — you would be cooking food that seven other people are about to eat. Ring us instead. Cancellations & refunds covers what happens to the money when you cannot come, and nobody is going to interrogate you about why.

After the class

If you feel unwell afterwards and think it might be something you ate or made here, call us on +1 (417) 962-8474 or email hello@culinaryteaching.com, and do it the same day if you can. We are not going to be defensive about it. We keep a note of what was cooked in every class, so telling us early is how we find out quickly whether anyone else in that room has the same thing — and if you have a jar or a container left, keep it rather than throwing it out, because it may be the only way to know.

If it is severe — trouble breathing, swallowing or speaking, blurred or double vision, drooping eyelids, weakness spreading down from the face, or a swelling that is getting worse — call 911 or get to an emergency room first and tell us afterwards. Botulism symptoms in particular can take hours to days to appear and get worse over time. Tell the medical staff that home-canned food may be involved, because it changes what they look for.

15

Ask us before you book, not after

Everything on this page is easier as a conversation than as a discovery on the night. If any of it gives you pause — the allergy, the fire, the age, the standing, the jars — ring +1 (417) 962-8474 during office hours, Tuesday to Saturday, 10 to 5, or email hello@culinaryteaching.com any time.

There is no booking button on this site and no payment page. A quote request is a message to us, not a reservation, which means there is a person on the other end of it and time to ask anything before a seat is settled.

You will get a straight answer, including when the straight answer is that a class does not suit you. We would far rather lose the seat than have you in it and worried.

The rest of the set: Terms for the agreement, Cancellations & refunds for the money, Accessibility for the room, and Privacy for what happens to the allergy note you send us.