When you think of a career in baking, you likely imagine cupcakes with buttercream frosting, decadent cakes with sky-high layers, or artisan bread with a scent that makes your mouth water. But a baking and pastry chef job description involves much more than creating such delicacies. These culinary professionals must have skills and take on various tasks that have absolutely nothing to do with kneading dough or decorating cakes.
Here’s a look at some of the skills needed for baking and pastry arts careers that may not immediately come to mind.
Baker Skills Involve Numbers
Your mom may have taught you how to make her family-famous tiramisu by adding a bit of this and a dash of that. But professional baking is unforgiving, and mathematical precision means the difference between a moist, fluffy cake that sells or an inedible lump. So, numerical skills are essential in the food industry. Some of the required knowledge includes weight and volume conversions between the imperial and metric systems, yield percentage, recipe costing, and kitchen ratios.
While accountants will tell you that their jobs don’t involve “that much math,” they do work with basic arithmetic, percentages, and some algebraic concepts to complete their professional duties proficiently. Bakers don’t need to be accounting whizzes, but they do need some foundational comprehension, such as basic accounting principles and an understanding of the accounting cycle and financial statements.
The Business of Baking and Pastry Arts Careers
It may be delicious, but the world of cakes and cupcakes is still a business. So, anyone who wants to work in the hotel, resort, and restaurant industries or within large-scale commercial baking companies must possess the relevant business aptitude.
In addition to pastry arts abilities, today’s food industry requires culinary professionals to hire, train, and develop teams whose goals contribute to meeting the organization’s financial and operational aims. To carry out such tasks, you will need to know how to manage a kitchen, which includes completing various administrative tasks and human resource processes.
Management competencies also extend to predetermining the food, beverage, and labour costs involved in restaurant operations at numerous phases, such as purchasing, receiving, storing, and production. So, a familiarity with factors affecting labour cost and performance standards is indispensable.
Safety: A Key Part of a Baking and Pastry Chef Job Description
Hygienic and sanitation principles and practices are significant in any food service operation and role. Obtaining the appropriate certifications will help you to meet employers’ expectations and prepare you to maintain a safe and healthy working environment. The first certification that anyone interested in a baking career needs is TrainCan Basic Food Safety Training, which provides the tools to serve safe food. Another is Smart Serve, which teaches the fundamentals of safe alcohol service. Finally, culinary professionals must know emergency first aid and CPR, which they can gain by earning the Canadian Red Cross Emergency First Aid/CPR C certificate.
An Education That Teaches In-Demand Baker Skills
Did you know you can learn all of these skills in one reputable program? Centennial College’s Baking and Pastry Arts Management offering has courses that cover technical, business, math, and safety skills to stand out. For example, you will gain technical skills while learning about bake sensory exploration, foodways and their practices in different cultures, menu planning, artisan breadmaking, chocolate confections, and cake and fondant fundamentals.
The college also provides multiple pathways into the industry. The traditional program takes two years to complete, but you can graduate sooner by taking it over 16 consecutive months in a compressed format. If you need more foundational knowledge, you also have the opportunity to first take the one-year Baking Skills program. Once you successfully complete this Ontario College Certificate program, you can enter directly in the third semester of Baking and Pastry Arts Management and earn a diploma in one additional year. If you ask me, that’s a pretty sweet deal.
By: Izabela Shubair