The Beloved Pastry Chef

Posted: March 8, 2010

There are various types of chefs you can become once you have finished culinary school. Pastry chefs and bakers have one of the most adored professions in the field. Their knowledge of sweets and dessert delicacies rival no other.

A passion for cooking is understandable as it can offer one of the most fulfilling and entertaining careers a food lover can take up. Chefs have the opportunity to create savory and sweet dishes for their patrons while experimenting with foreign ingredients and new culinary techniques. They can work in a variety of environments from bakeries and cafes to high-end restaurants or cruise ships and, if they possess the talent, can be nationally, or sometimes even internationally renowned.

The particular niches of bakery and pastry chefs have the fortune of being some of the most beloved kind of chefs in the business. Their productions of breads, pastries, and baked goods like cakes and cookies attract consumers from all ages with their fluent weavings of doughy goodness with delectably sweet flavors.

Often times, many of these chefs will construct their entire line of dishes from scratch, making and orchestrating the dough, icings, and fruity concoctions without any manufactured ingredients. If you ask which chef a customer will prefer when they at a restaurant, more than half the time they will choose the one who made their desert over the one who made their entrée. Basically, pastry chefs get all of the glory without as much of the hassle of the back kitchen. While head chefs, sioux chefs, runners, and waiters are clamoring around behind the scenes for some kind of coherency the pastry chef is off in the corner delicately applying the finishing touches to their artistic desserts.

One of their most interesting qualities is that they can choose to become specialized in a particular area of the dessert genre. Some can become wedding cake designers, making some of the most elegant creations in the culinary arts. Others who run bakeries can become bread artisans, learning how to make an array of dough and pastries from all around the world. Lastly, some will use their talents to become connoisseurs of the romantic side of cooking, by becoming chocolatiers. These bad boys (and girls) get to work in specialty food shops and high end restaurants creating cakes and confections using the most powerful aphrodisiacal ingredient: chocolate.

If it seems like dessert chefs get to have all of the fun, it’s probably because they do. When your work literally brings smiles to people’s faces, you have to boast your status as the best part of the cooking business. If you can whip up a batch of sprinkled donuts with jelly filling then you’re pretty much the master of your domain.