What does it mean and requirementes to become a pastry chef | CIB

The pastry career is in increasing demand. A pastry chef has a very specialized profile, since his way of working is very different from other chefs and his position is one of the most demanded. There are few professionals in the sector with a complete and specialized training to occupy positions of team leadership.

With the rise of avant-garde cuisine, sweet cuisine has gained prominence and the pastry chef can find very diverse job opportunities and specializations.

1. Meeting the Pastry Chef: the pastry chef of the 21st Century
2. What is a pastry chef?
3. What types of professional pastry chef are there on the market?
4. Functions of a pastry chef
5. Become a pastry chef: skills needed to have success
6. What to study to become a pastry chef

Meeting the Pastry Chef: the pastry chef of the 21st Century 

In the current global and changing context, the pastry chef has many opportunities and challenges to face. Artisan pastry is looking for a way to differentiate itself from the big brands in the food industry that use preservatives and colorants to produce products for quick consumption and long shelf life. Artisan confectionery offers product quality based on traditional processes and improving them with today's technology.

These leading pastry chefs build their audience by testing customer feedback and listening to their needs, seeking a balance between quality and practicality. Thus, pastry chefs are becoming more and more specialized, responding to specific food needs such as vegan or gluten-free pastries, taking into account that it is not always easy to combine different preparations in which there can be no cross-contamination and a very specific raw material is used.

What is a pastry chef?

A pastry chef is a chef who specializes in the production of desserts and baked goods. These chefs are highly skilled and knowledgeable in the production of breads, cakes, pastries, cookies, pies, cakes, tea cakes, candies and other sweet products. In addition to having advanced culinary skills, pastry chefs must also have great creativity and imagination to design attractive desserts and unique flavors.

A pastry chef's job includes planning and preparing menus, supervising a team of pastry chefs, purchasing ingredients and managing production. They may also be responsible for the decoration and presentation of desserts, and ensuring that quality and hygiene standards are met in the kitchen.

In short, a pastry chef is a chef who specializes in the production of baked goods and sweets, and plays an important role in creating a complete and satisfying culinary experience for customers.

What types of professional pastry chef are there on the market?

Today, the pastry and confectionery sector is a field with many opportunities for specialization. It is often a profession with a long career path and with opportunities for advancement. For those who are interested, it offers the possibility of professional advancement within the sector in 5 to 10 years with a complete professional training and experience.

This makes it possible to end up leading large specialized teams of bakeries or dessert departments in restaurants of different categories. In addition, there are many types of pastry chefs:

• Pastry chef in a pastry, dessert, bakery or pastry shop. You have to manage a team that works for the sale of the product on a daily basis or by order. To do this, you start the day very early in order to have the offer ready first thing in the morning.
• Dessert manager in a restaurant. Most restaurants have a dessert manager or a team of pastry professionals who are in charge of preparing the desserts for the menu and the à la carte menu. In this case, the work is essentially done during the service but also requires prior preparation for some elaborations.
• Master chocolatier who is in charge of designing and producing a wide variety of chocolate pieces such as bonbons, truffles, complex constructions for parties and celebrations or bars and beverages. They usually work for a firm that sells in stores or distributes to bakeries, restaurants and supermarkets.
• Ice cream maker, since the artisan ice cream industry is experiencing a moment of expansion based on the recovery of artisan processes combined with new technologies that achieve new textures and creaminess. A good ice cream maker always investigates new flavors, even combining sweet and salty elements.
• Undertake a personal project dedicated to the supply of a specific product. From cakes to ice cream or cookies. Take away and delivery make it easier than before to create your own business, always looking to differentiate yourself from others.

Therefore, the duties of a pastry chef in a restaurant will be very different from those in a pastry shop. In a restaurant, she or he will have to adapt more to the logistics of the menu, seeking harmony with the rest of the dishes and following set times. It should not be forgotten that dessert is the last memory that a diner's palate has of a gastronomic experience. In haute cuisine, desserts gain more weight and several desserts are usually included in the tasting menus as well as the figure of the pre-dessert, in which one must be skillful in achieving a good transition between the salty and sweet part of the menu.

Functions of a pastry chef

The world of pastry and chocolate making does not require a lot of manipulation of the product as in other culinary specialties, but it does require accuracy, weighing the product, being rigorous with the mixtures and, above all, knowing how to transform the product from these mixtures. The main functions of a pastry chef are:

• To elaborate the menu or the offer of a restaurant or pastry shop in that which is part of its specialty and to manage the orders of the necessary raw materials.
• Manage the raw materials warehouse. This involves being in charge of controlling the stock of each product, receiving them, inventorying them and knowing when new orders should be placed.
• It must also order and keep the products in optimal conditions and prevent them from being wasted or damaged, so you must know which products should go to the refrigerator, freezer or pantry and know the shelf life of each product or process.
• Control the cost and budget limits of each product or process and adapt the offer to these conditions.
• Knowing how to take advantage of the creative opportunities offered by the budget, the needs of the regular customer, the season or any special product availability such as a party or a homegrown product.
• Knowing how to use pastry machinery and professional utensils to get the most out of the product by achieving better textures or more homogeneous mixtures. 
• To prepare the necessary preliminary preparations (mise en place) for the restaurant service or the start of sale in the pastry shop.
• Evaluate the success of each preparation and propose changes accordingly if necessary.
• Work as part of a team when necessary and divide tasks efficiently. Know how to attract and keep regular collaborators and teammates.
• Research new trends in pastry and always have an open eye for innovation.

The profile of the pastry chef is that of someone who is very precise, as the ingredients are usually weighed scrupulously. The pastry chef's training must include knowing how to read the formulations and know how much room for modification they have and what they should be used for. The pastry chef needs to be proactive, let the doughs rest, freeze them or store them at room temperature until the moment of serving, or have the elaborations baking in the oven for hours. Often desserts are built in phases, hours or even days in advance of when they are presented and if working in a restaurant, finishing and plating before serving the desserts is usually the least time consuming but must be done with agility and safety.

Become a pastry chef: skills needed to have success.

The profession of pastry and chocolate making is an exciting one for those who want to get into it. It is a growing and changing profession, but it requires a very precise set of manual skills as well as a very complete knowledge of the product and techniques that make it a long career in which the resume of an experienced pastry chef is highly sought after. It requires commitment, patience, courage and the ability to work in a team and adapt to every context.

If we look at some examples of some of the best pastry chefs, we will see that many have followed a very personal path to become prominent in the industry. Many started in a small bakery, making traditional pastries, and sought their own style and their own elaborations. Others started working in a restaurant in another line, discovered that pastry was their passion and decided to specialize in order to take over the dessert line of that or another restaurant. But there are also other cases, such as Jordi Roca's, who, once they were already consolidated as responsible for the dessert department of a Michelin three-star restaurant, decided to start their own project in parallel, in his case an ice cream parlor.

Requirements to become a pastry chef: 

• Pastry chef work is essentially a craft. The most basic skills of the pastry chef or pastry chef are the ability to be precise and fast in order to maintain the quality of the preparations without detracting from the customer's experience.
• The pastry chef often works to order and must respond to the demands and needs of his customers. At the same time, he has to find his own way of doing things, his personal techniques, his usual products, his own professional ethics and know how to adapt all this to each project or order.
• Another important quality of a good pastry chef is to be open to innovation. Pastry depends a lot on the season, the use that will be given to each order and the trends of the moment. This requires the pastry professional to keep up to date and know how to innovate.
• Being creative is an important and complementary part of having technical ability. The pastry chef or chocolatier must have a very elastic thinking, able to find inspiration anywhere or in any life experience.

The schedule of a pastry chef: 

A pastry chef's schedule depends on the type of business he/she works in. Logically in a restaurant it will involve working on weekends and holidays and in many bakeries as well, but contrary to popular belief it does not always involve working long hours or from very early in the morning. It is true that some bakeries start working early, but that usually means that they finish early and have the afternoon free. Many bakeries have a rotation of employees in which some work in the morning and others join after noon and not always the one who makes the products is the same as the one who sells them.

From here, it is possible to start your own business in which the schedules are decided by you or work for firms in the world of chocolate and pastry in which the schedule can also be flexible as well as the tasks you will do in it. From designing products for the food industry, to publicly represent the brand or do training. Thus, the salary of a pastry chef can also be very variable, in a similar way as for cooks, the more you diversify and the more initiatives you have, the more possibilities you will have to grow professionally in the sector.

New trends in pastry

The pastry chef must be up to date with the latest trends in the sector to remain competitive. The new trend in pastry and chocolate is to give greater importance to the flavor of the products used and that means reducing the use of sweeteners such as sugar. These trends open the door to the use of higher quality, fresher and healthier products that make sweeteners less necessary and also the palate of the diner does not need so much sugar to enjoy a cake. These trends are often linked to healthy pastries or healthy desserts in which the aim is to enjoy a sweet as beneficial as possible for the body through the use of vegetables, wholemeal or gluten-free flours and quality natural sweeteners.

On the other hand, the current technological capacity also allows a greater variety of textures that increase the capacity of the bakery to surprise the diner with cakes that can have up to seven or eight different textures. Technological improvement also means that there is no need for as many preservatives as in the past, and the focus is on the naturalness and freshness of the products. The avant-garde cuisine has made molecular cuisine desserts more and more common, since they have many possibilities and it is where all the varieties of textures are worked.

What to study to become a pastry chef

There are two main paths to a career as a pastry chef. The first is to become a chef or study cooking to become a chef and then specialize in pastry and chocolate making. This option is especially suitable for people looking to become responsible for the dessert department of a restaurant. Many cooks want to improve their versatility or better understand all the items involved in a restaurant to improve the quality of their work and move up the career ladder.

The other possible path is that of someone who already works in the sector or has had a brief contact with it and wants to train to access positions of greater responsibility, improve the offer of their business or simply to start working in pastry in a more professional way. An example is that of people who perhaps only know how to make pastries and want to learn how to make desserts or work in a restaurant or simply master better the use of chocolate in their preparations.

In both cases, studying a course or a master in pastry is the best option to make an intensive learning of techniques, technology, culinary trends and products needed to be competent in the current sweet sector. These courses are not usually very extensive, only several months are needed, but they require an effort of autonomous and constant work, which is what will make the pastry professional master the skills of the sector.