Michael Silver

Michael is a professional chef, baker, and food scientist, and he sits on the Board of Directors of the Washington State Chefs Association. He received his culinary training from the Culinary Institute of America and his baking and pastry training from Seattle Culinary Academy. He is a Certified Executive Pastry Chef (CEPC), and he is also a certified food safety instructor (ServSafe).

Michael co-owns and co-operates both a chocolate manufacturing company and also café/bakery, which was chosen by Yelp as one of the top 15 hot chocolate locations in the United States.

A published author, Michael started his career as a technology manager and architect at Apple Computer, and his own company has done major projects for Google (including building the YouTube studio), LucasFilm/Skywalker Sound, Hewlett-Packard, EA, and many other companies. He has consulted to and built technology for the founders and CEOs of many of the top companies in the world along with many famous directors, actors, musicians, and athletes.

Michael consulted for NASA for four years, including working on the space program and writing the code to send the first email from space. He also supported the astronauts during this mission from the Flight Control Room. For his work with NASA on this and other projects, Michael was made an honorary Air Force Captain.

With his background in molecular biology and organic chemistry, he did molecular biology research at Stanford University for two years.

Michael teaches food science, cooking and baking, chocolate-making (bean-to-bar), and other subjects at Seattle Central College. Michael also spends much of his time in the development of FoodScience.Org, a non-profit website that teaches the science behind food, cooking, baking, sustainability, and related areas.

Teaching Style and Approach

Michael has a passion for teaching and has taught and studied pedagogy throughout his life, starting when he taught mathematics at his local college while he was still in high school. He has taught music, emergency medicine, racing/high-performance driving, SCUBA, computer programming, and other fields. He also created one of the very first distance-learning platforms, and he consulted for Stanford University on distance learning in its early days.

Michael's classes use a combination of hands-on learning, lectures, and cooking and science demos, depending on the class. But always with a lot of tasting!

As someone who is always learning something new, he encourages students to be active learners and explains, "Class participation and interaction are very important to me and to the learning process."

His classes are filled with great information and technique, are fun and interactive, and include his own brand of humor.

Resources

• Learn about foodscience.org
• See Michael's full biography