Pastry Chef Job Description: Is This Career Right For Me?

Do you have a bit of a sweet tooth? Maybe you have always enjoyed baking cookies, whipping up cakes, and tinkering with frostings until you find just the right flavor and consistency. Whatever the reason is, if you enjoy the dessert side of food you may be a perfect candidate to become a pastry chef.

While a traditional chef may work across all spectrum (depending on the restaurant they work in) a pastry chef works specifically with desserts. Before you decide to move forward with your pastry chef education though, make sure you fully understand what it is and what you'll be doing in your eventual career.

What Does a Pastry Chef Do?

It is a specialized focus, which allows you to spend your time working solely on sweets and post-dinner meals. These are often the last bit of food restaurant goers eat, so having a quality pastry chef is vital to the success of a restaurant. It is necessary to leave the patron hungry for more, so as the last part of a dinner, it needs to stand out.

A pastry chef doesn't always need to work in a restaurant. They can run their own shop making anything from cookies, cakes, pies or nearly anything else someone might classify as a dessert. Whatever the location, they focus on creating desserts for their customers. Sometimes, custom creations for celebrations, including birthdays or weddings.

What Skills and Qualities do You Need in Order to do Well in the Field?

Realistically, the most important quality for becoming a pastry chef is a passion for sweets and desserts. After all, you will be trying the food as you go (especially as you learn), so having a bit of a sweet tooth and a love for pastries is helpful.

In order to do well in the field, you need to be both dedicated to your craft and willing to put in long, sometimes odd hours. While working in a restaurant you may need to come in during the night to prepare desserts for the following day. If you make the desserts from scratch for every order, you'll often end up standing around, not knowing if someone is going to order a dessert or not, so having patience is necessary. If you work for a standalone pastry shop, you'll often need to put in odd hours creating orders for parties and other gatherings. Even if there is a "set schedule," it can evolve and change based on the current needs of clients.

How Does Education Help You Gain These Skills and Qualities?

A good amount of baking is required when working with pastries. Understanding cooking temperatures is very important here. It often can be the difference in obtaining the perfect consistency and sweetness and overcooking, drying out, or undercooking a desert.

Many of the ingredients you use while working with pastries are heat sensitive, so you don't have much room for error. Practice and patience can help you with this. While education will help, you understand why certain foods require different amounts of time. You'll learn about preparing certain dishes, pairing with sweets and a host of other helpful information you likely would never learn on your own, simply because the opportunity most likely would never present itself.

Additionally, measurements are vital in pastries. While this is true to an extent when it comes to a regular chef, baking and working with dairy and sugar on a continual basis is not just an art form but also a science. Having too much or too little of one ingredient can cause the entire recipe to fail and taste off. You likely won't even know the recipe is off until you've completely finished it. With the help of a pastry chef education, you'll gain these valuable skills and qualities, all of which will help you land a pastry chef job.

Do you have a passion for pastries? Are you excited about working in the culinary field? If you want to earn a Diploma in Baking and Pastry Arts, ECPI University’s Culinary Institute of Virginia offers this course at an accelerated rate. For more information about earning your diploma, connect with a friendly admissions counselor 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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