Or-m,
I recently took Ecole Chocolat's Professional Chocolatier program, and I echo what Andrea already offered. I don't have the professional culinary background that you have, yet there is one other thing that I found very helpful that you might like, too: you would be taking this course with other students from many different locales. Worldwide, in fact. While I live in Texas, my "cohort" group consisted of folks as far away as Germany, England, Kuwait, Ecuador, and southeast Asia. Obviously, there were folks from all across the USA as well as Canada, too. Each of us was invited to submit information/results of our various exercises as we progressed through the curriculum. The exercises are monitored and graded by professional chocolatiers who are on staff at Ecole Chocolat (and they are quite good in that capacity, too). While each individual assignment is submitted in private for official grading, we were encouraged to share our results and questions within an open forum. This was particularly helpful to me as we could converse online and share our successes as well as our troubles and challenges. I personally fell behind on a few things (temperature control in south Texas is a bit of challenge during much of the year!), but the EC staff are graciously allowing me to catch up this spring. Yes, the actual work and assignments are done all on your own, but you are potentially building a network of "cohorts" who you might someday want to contact and bounce ideas back and forth with. To me, it's worth it.
Cotton
