What Makes you a Chef (You Might be Surprised to Find Out)?

You might have a love for cooking, but just because you've managed to learn a few recipes or have had some cooking skills and know-how passed down to you from family members does not make you a chef. In such a case, you're still just a cook. If you want to pursue a career as a chef, then you're going to need to learn to do a lot more than just learn how to cook!

What is a Chef?

A chef is a cook who has professional education or experience and is generally in charge of others, like a supervisor or manager would be. Meanwhile, a cook is someone who just cooks at home or has just started working at the bottom of the ladder at a small restaurant. Essentially, anyone can be a cook, but not everyone is a chef. Besides having professional training and experience, chefs also have responsibilities that include supervising others in the kitchen, kitchen management, and creating and implementing menus into restaurant settings.

Although cooks prepare dishes, they also perform other kitchen duties, such as cleaning and washing the kitchen. They are also preparing dishes based on someone else's menu, which means that they aren't serving their own dishes quite yet.

How to Become a Chef

If you love cooking and want to dedicate your life to it, you'll find that becoming a chef is a solid career choice. There's always a demand for food in many different industries besides just the restaurant industry, which means that there will always be a demand for chefs -- especially those that are professionally trained. In fact, the profession is expected to grow by as much as ten percent by 2026 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So how exactly can you become a professional chef? You can take two routes. You can get a job at a local restaurant, where you will work from the bottom to the top, learning everything you know from the people that work above you.

For example, you may have to start as a dishwasher. But once you've put your time in, you may be able to get a job as a prep cook, which would require you to do all of the unglamorous parts of cooking such as peeling potatoes or chopping onions. From there, you can become a junior member of the staff, to a line chef and on up.

The other way to become a chef is to go to culinary school. At a culinary school, you'll not only learn different styles and methods of cooking by a variety of professional instructors, you'll also learn the ins and outs of kitchen management. Once you graduate, you should be able to obtain a job as a chef right out of the gate instead of working your way up.

The Benefits of Pursuing a Culinary Arts Education

While the idea of working your way up in a local restaurant might seem romantic, it's much more beneficial for your career to enroll in a culinary program instead. The following are some of the advantages to seeking out a culinary degree in order to become a chef:

• Benefit from multiple instructors - Instead of only learning from a one or two chefs (depending on how long they remain at the restaurant you work at), working your way up limits your knowledge and experience. At a culinary arts program, you'll learn from many different chefs, all with different levels of experience and different styles of cooking.
• Become a chef faster - You can earn a degree within a few months if you go to a culinary school with an accelerated learning schedule, whereas there's no guarantee you'll ever move up to the position of head chef at a restaurant if the current chef never leaves. In fact, simply moving up the ladder requires that the people directly above you leave and those in charge of hiring are willing to give you a chance.
• Expand your career potential - Becoming a chef at a restaurant where you started from the bottom can be a very fulfilling experience. However, you'll be limited to working at restaurants that are similar to the one you're working at. With a degree, you could work as a chef at all kinds of restaurants, at hotels, on cruise ships, at schools, at catering companies, as a personal chef, and more.
• Get a more complete education - Besides learning different styles of cooking, a culinary arts program will teach you about baking and pastry arts, recipe and menu development, plating and presentation techniques, kitchen safety and organization, and much more. You might not learn this at a restaurant unless someone purposely sits down with you and shows you how to do it.

Are you interested in becoming a chef instead of a cook? If you want to earn an Associate of Applied Science in Culinary Arts, ECPI University's Culinary Institute of Virginia offers this degree program at an accelerated rate. For more information on how to sign up today, connect with one of our friendly admissions counselors.

It could be the Best Decision You Ever Make!

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