Taking Baking to the Next Level: Are You Ready for a Baking and Pastry Arts Diploma?

Breaking into the baking business is a dream for many home bakers, but far too many assume that they could do so with their existing skill set. Baking and pastry school teaches much more than just how to make pretty cakes; it covers a multitude of oft-overlooked aspects of commercial baking that employers and clients rightly expect professional bakers to be familiar with.

If you're serious about taking a more active part in this industry, you'll need the boost that formal education provides. The following four attributes are some of the most critical competencies that separate baking hobbyists from professionals, and you'll work on all of them in the course of studying for a diploma in Baking and Pastry Arts.

A Broad Range of Abilities

When you're baking at home, you're mostly sticking to what you and your friends and family like to eat, so you might not even realize how many baking skills you have yet to pick up. Can you make properly tempered chocolate accents or pulled sugar pieces? How about a rich, smooth caramel filling that's neither too thick nor too runny? Are your yeast-based treats (sweet breads, doughnuts, etc.) as good as your conventional cakes and cookies?

For that matter, can you even make a simple loaf of bread? These are all skills a professional baker should have up their sleeve, even if they don't use them every day; having more options to work with allows you to execute more ambitious projects and ensures that you can offer a wide selection of profitable services to clients.

Kitchen Workplace Safety Knowledge

Working in a home kitchen is wildly different from working in a commercial kitchen, logistically speaking. You need to be able to safely handle large hot metal trays, operate massive ovens with unfamiliar controls, and work with all kinds of electric mixers, rollers, torches and other helpful devices. Baking school will teach you how to safely operate in this new environment so you don't become part of an unfortunate statistic of workers injured on the job.

Reliable Food Safety Compliance

If you want to monetize your baking talents in any way, you'll need to take food handling safety regulations into account. This is both a legal obligation (you could face consequences ranging from a letter of warning to criminal prosecution for violating FDA food codes) and a moral one (you could make someone very sick!). Baking and pastry school will teach you all about what laws exist and how you can abide by them when carrying out your work. This way, you'll avoid getting into any legal trouble and make sure that you aren't inadvertently harming any of your customers.

Excellent Time Management

When you're baking for fun, you can take your time and make your personal batch of goodies as perfect as you want. Professional bakers have quotas to fill and deadlines to meet, and unless they're self-employed, they don't get all day to do it either. You need to know how to make your processes as efficient as possible, as well as how to set things up so that you can manage multiple tasks simultaneously. Think about frosting cookies while waiting for another batch to chill and yet another to finish baking, all while periodically stirring a saucepan of fruit reduction you've started for another project - could you handle all that at once? If not, you have some work to do before you can work in a real bakery.

Here’s Why you Need Formal Education?

You may assume that you can figure these things out on the job, but that attitude puts your health and safety at risk. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, significant portions of workplace injuries in kitchens are related to a lack of proper ergonomic practices, meaning that it is important to know how to follow established processes as soon as you walk into the kitchen. A good baking program will teach you how to use the tools at your disposal in a way that not only gets the job done but also avoids putting unnecessary strain on your body.

Are you interested in becoming a professional baker or 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 helpful 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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