Pastry Chef Training Programs – A Short Guide To Career Possibilities

By Author: Bimol Bee
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In case you happen to be a cooking enthusiast it might be quite reasonable for you to seriously consider a professional career in cooking industry. Any person that is fond of preparing various dishes and trying out new recipes just for the sake of all that fun may discover a rewarding and self-fulfilling career as a chef at a decent restaurant or a hotel – the employment options to people with cooking school certificate are very wide, to say nothing about a degree in culinary arts.

If you like cooking then a job of a chef will never seem to you just a kind of dull work for the sake of getting living – it will be a creative process and lots of fun. Why don’t you consider, for instance, joining some prominent accredited baking and pastry school? There are a lot of success stories in this segment of culinary arts and many people with a pastry chef certificate ended with excellent and lucrative employment options at some top-notch restaurants around the country. In every decent restaurant there are several cooks on staff, which are responsible for different aspects of food preparation, presentation etc. The lowest position ...
... at the hierarchy ladder is occupied by so called short-order cook. A certificate or may be even an associate’s degree that you can obtain from a quality baking and pastry school will take you much further than that, and your financial incentive in other words, your paycheck) will increase correspondingly. In general, pastry and cake baking specialists are considered to be among the elite level of cooking arts industry, so a quality baking and pastry school can very well prepare you for a successful start up of a cooking industry career. Besides, many pastry chefs have established their own private businesses after they have gained considerable experience and skill through being employed at various prestigious positions in the culinary arts industry.

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One of the key factors of a successful pastry chef is the naturally born creative talent. Any professional pastry chef is always a kind of an artist; he combines its talent with professional skills and knowledge, gained at his pastry baking school as well as through practical experience – as the result the blending of ordinary ingredients leads to creation of a veritable masterpiece.

Professional pastry cooks have a very serious attitude towards their careers and you should be, in the first place, well-prepared to work hard, really hard - about 50 hours a week, including nights and weekends! If you are not prepared for such sacrifices you should better stay among pastry baking amateurs and hobbyists. The career path of a professional pastry chef is not your cup of tea!

Depending on you career inclinations you should chose your pastry baking program or school. In case you are ready to make certain sacrifices and withstand rigorous and challenging training and apprenticeship – as it happens for majority of professional pastry chefs, - than pastry chef career quite well may happen to be your true calling in life. This is the harsh truth of a professional pastry chef career path. Otherwise you should choose some much easier and less demanding school for cooking hobbyists. Such programs and courses are offered by specialized cooking schools and other facilities as well, for instance, community colleges and so on. Recently online pastry baking programs for amateurs began to enjoy immense popularity. In most cases such hobbyists programs are of very good quality since they are run by great professionals, real experienced pastry chefs of high repute in the industry, so you are going to benefit from such training for pastry baking enthusiasts in any case!

The second important thing upon making a serious decision of becoming a professional pastry chef would be looking for a suitable school to get your certificate of degree training. This is an important step, since your pastry chef training is going to become a long-time investment into your professional career, so it should better be right.

In the first place, the certification or a degree pastry chef training program must have a good reputation and it should be of accredited type. That is a critical condition. A certificate you get from an accredited school will always be well-accepted and respected by any employer all over the world when you begin looking for your first entry-level job of a pastry chef.

Secondly, try to find out about additional services a school has to offer, such as those available with the most excellent chefs' schools: amenities, trainers, cuisine service functions, job placement aids, diplomas and others. In addition, some schools provide grants and financial help for students with cash difficulties. You can get a student’s loan to be repaid later from your professional salary. As you see, it is of vital importance to choose a good reputable culinary arts school with accredited status – in this way your career prospects will look much more promising.

The TOP-10 culinary schools that offer pastry chef specialization (according to rating provided by such highly esteemed and respected agencies as U.S. News, World Report or Princeton Review) are as follows:

- The French Culinary Institute of New York City,
- The Culinary Institute of America,
- Ottawa Culinary Arts Institute,
- New England Culinary Institute,
- Johnson & Wales University,
- L'Academie de Cuisine,
- California Culinary Academy,
- George Brown Chef School,
- Tante Marie's Cooking School
- Kendall College.

If you made a wise and balanced choice of a culinary school or program to join and become a professional chef the rest will entirely depend on your devotion, discipline and self-motivation, since an actually good pastry chef training program will take care to train you in as perfect way as it is only possible, giving you an excellent chance to start up a successful professional career in culinary arts industry as a pastry chef.

baking and pastry colleges