Baking and Pastry Chef: Can you See Yourself in this Job?
Bakers and pastry chefs seem to have the fun jobs. They're the ones you see decorating cakes, making glossy chocolate roses, and creating ethereal spun-sugar garnishes. People who have spent any appreciable time in a kitchen know that baking day after day after day for large crowds of customers is a lot different than the glitzy world of reality TV food programs show. If you really like baking and creating breads, pastries, and more, a career as a pastry chef or baker may seem appealing.
What You'd Do as a Baking or Pastry Chef
Put simply, you'd spend your time baking and creating related dishes, supervising other bakers and kitchen employees, and, depending on how far up the food chain you'd gotten, deal with budgeting and ordering supplies, as well as working to soothe complaining customers. In more detail, you'd learn established recipes, possible create new ones, make the pastries and other baked goods daily, clean the equipment and the kitchen when the baking was over, take orders, supervise and participate in catering (if your company offers that), adjust recipes for special diets, and cover for employees who missed work.
As a beginning baking employee, even one who has formal education, you'd pretty much spend your days on the front line, baking and cleaning. As you rise up through the ranks, you might become more involved in actually running the bakery or restaurant. Some bakers and pastry chefs branch out further, becoming specialists in one type of pastry or one aspect of the business, such as cake decorating or recipe testing.
What the Working Conditions Would Be Like
The exact working conditions will vary widely depending on what you do and where you go. Your day might start very early in the morning so that you can have an array of pastries ready for the breakfast crowd, or you might start in the afternoon and finish late as you serve the dinner crowd at a restaurant. You could work for a very long time without a traditional lunch break until you've gotten a certain amount of work done.
Kitchens are hot, even those dedicated to baking. You will likely be moving constantly and have to pick up heavy equipment, such as the large bowls for industrial stand mixers (which can be huge).
At the same time, you could find good camaraderie among the staff in the kitchen, learn how to effectively work in a team, and find that customers really appreciate your skills. You could have the opportunity to play around with materials like fondant and sugar to create some wild designs. Or you could find that the routine of the daily work makes you feel like your life is more stable.
Which Skills You'd Need
You definitely need some strength to work in a kitchen, though many people gain this directly through work. You do need a lot of patience and the ability to methodically repeat the same work each day. Recipe developers need very good creative skills and a solid understanding of how recipes and ingredients work, as do those who need to adjust recipes for food allergies and special diets.
Pastry chefs who rise up in the world may need good business skills to run their own restaurants. Math and budgeting skills, as well as the ability to not waste ingredients (or at least to waste as little as possible, because those ingredients are money), are crucial.
Is Formal Education a Good Idea?
Of course formal education is a good idea if you want to become a baker or pastry chef. Much has been made of how you could get a job at the entry level in a restaurant and work your way up, learning on the job all the while. But with formal education, you get a thorough grounding in everything that goes into working with food.
You are exposed to areas of the industry that you didn't know existed and wouldn't know about had you gone straight to work in a kitchen instead. Plus, you get the learning out of the way so that, when you do get a job, you can concentrate on the job itself rather than trying to figure out basics while orders are piling up.
Are you interested in a career as a baking and pastry chef? If you want to earn a Diploma in Baking and Pastry Arts, ECPI University’s Culinary Institute of Virginia offers this program at an accelerated rate. For more information, connect with a knowledgeable admissions advisor today.
It could be the Best Decision You Ever Make!
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Gainful Employment Information – Baking & Pastry Arts - Diploma
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