Have your cake & eat it too

Gauri Chhabra

Do popular TV shows like Master Chef excite you? Do you crave for a rich palate experience?Do you wish to unveil the mystery behind the simple ingredients like flour, water, yeast, salt, sugar and their transformation into the magic of bread or cake? Do you wish to know how to make popular Latino desserts, like Alfajores or Churros? Even if your answer to all these questions is a ‘maybe’, you need to consider something more than your wish to make it a reality.

Consider a career in food service industry and reveal the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of bakery and confectionery. You can engage in it as a beginner, enthusiast and culinary professional. Broadly, there are two career paths for aspiring cooks: culinary arts or baking and pastry arts. Culinary arts is about preparing main dishes. Pastry and baking arts is more about desserts. 

Bakers and pastry chefs create complex presentation desserts, wedding cakes, artisan breads, cupcakes, candies and more.

Bakers are food workers who create breads and other baked goods, such as cookies, cakes, pies and pastries. You’ll be responsible for preparing and measuring ingredients, properly cooking or baking foods, and decorating sweet baked goods. 

In this field, work experience typically is more important than a standard general education. The work experience hones one’s skills. However, one can also beef these skills up with degree courses in hotel management and food production, or specialised certificate/ diploma courses in bakery and pastry.

Getting in

For attaining formal education in this field, one can join three-year degree courses after Plus II. A few colleges offer diploma courses of 12-24 months in culinary arts. As a latest trend, a handful of schools have also included the subject in Class XI and XII.

However, to classify, culinary and baking courses are available in three formats:

Degree courses

If you have passed Plus II from any stream — Science/Commerce/Arts, you are eligible to pursue this course. Minimum aggregate marks criteria may apply in case of some institutes which is generally around 50 per cent marks. You have the following options:

BA in Culinary Arts is a three-year undergraduate programme. It focuses on cooking, food sampling, sensory evaluation, serving and tasting. It means that the programme revolves closely around cooking and its related aspects only. It is a ‘pure’ course, focusing mostly on the art of cooking.

BCT & CA stands for Bachelor of Catering Technology and Culinary Arts. It is a three-year undergraduate programme that focuses on subjects like food production, catering, baking, culinary arts, food and beverage matching and material management.

BSc Catering and Culinary Arts is a three-year UG programme. Like the above mentioned programmes, this one also is not a generalised course. It focuses on cooking — food production, tasting, catering, baking, food and beverage matching, material management etc.

Diplomas

Diploma and PG Diploma in Culinary Arts: It is a diploma focusing on the field of culinary arts. Course duration could be 1 year (Basic) or two years (Advanced).

Diplomas in Baking and Pastry Arts: Similarly there are diplomas in Bakery and Confectionery (DBC), Diploma in Bakery Technology and Management, Post Graduate Diploma in Bakery Science and Management and Post Graduate Diploma in Bakery Science and Technology.

Certificate Programmes

When it comes to certificate courses, the course duration is one year. Though shorter duration courses exist too, like six-month programmes. Eligibility criteria may vary from one institute to another. Plus II as well as Class X pass students are accepted for these courses. Some of the well-known certificate programmes are:

Chef Certification course

Certificate in Culinary Arts

Certificate  in Food Production

Certificate  in Catering Technology

Certificate course in Food and Beverages

Career Scape

As a baker, you may work in factories, restaurants, retail stores and small bakeries. You’re likely to work with ovens, mixers and dough cutters that could cause injury. Bakers sometimes work part time, and your schedule could range from early morning to late evening. Weekend or holiday work might also be required.

Various career options are available nowadays and one is no longer limited to consider restaurants as the only place to send one’s resume. You can actually take your culinary arts degree all over the world and indulge in interesting professions like:

Entrepreneurship: This is a great career for those with an entrepreneurial bent of mind. You may run your own bakery or pastry shop. Between birthdays, weddings, and other special events, the market for specialty-baked goods is actually quite large — especially when compared to the number of shops currently in operation.

You can also get into bread and breakfast industry where you typically have two choices: to work for another proprietor or to start your own. Some of the larger and higher-end B&Bs hire chefs and cooks to handle the culinary side of things from menu planning to actual preparation; however, smaller businesses may do the cooking themselves.

Caterer: Being a caterer is as close to restaurant cooking as you can get without actually working in a kitchen. Many of the techniques and skills are the same; however, you are typically cooking for large quantities of people and making food that will hold up either on a buffet line or during longer serving times. Professionals in the baking and pastry arts field prepare and bake bread, muffins, pies, cakes and other foods based on a recipe. They may also specialise in a specific type of baked goods such as wedding cakes or artisan breads.

Personal chef: As a personal chef you typically work for either a single client or several clients, preparing meals and small catered events according to their preferences and dietary needs. Being a personal chef is one of the most financially-rewarding culinary careers - especially if you find a niche serving higher-end clientele. 

Instructor: If you have a flair for teaching, you may opt for teaching and mentoring. Jobs with more prestigious educational facilities typically require at least a bachelor’s degree and two years of industry experience. Jobs can typically found in private and public educational facilities.

In a nut shell, if you have a flair for good food, an eye for detail and are willing to work for hours at a stretch, a career in baking and patisserie can be an ideal choice for you.

Institute Watch

Culinary Academy of India, Hyderabad, offering the three-year BCT & CA 

Institute of Hotel Management, Pusa, New Delhi, offering BSc and MSc in in Hospitality & Hotel Administration along with many relevant diplomas.

Merit Swiss Asian School of Hotel Management, Ooty,offering various courses for students after Class X and XII

International Institute of Culinary Arts, New Delhi, Diploma in Bakery & Patisserie

Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai offering one year Craftsmanship in Bakery and Patisserie

First person

It is a promising career as it is quite popular worldwide and the best part is it is not only theory but a skill. We learn every day about new products and ingredients and the way these should be used and yet, there is so much to discover. The scope of research is huge in this field. — Chef, Naman Arora,Chandigarh Institute of Hotel Management 

Student Speak

One can start earning right away by opening a home bakery with a small investment. Bakery and confectionery business can never go out of demand because bread is the staple food in many countries, while biscuits and other confectionery products are consumed by people on a daily basis. It’s a skill which if honed will not only make you earn a fortune, but can also take you at the top of the fame game. — Megha Gupta, student, BSc at IHM, Shimla

Baking and patisserie is an art as well as a science. Baking includes the real ‘meat’ of the baking and pastry arts. It involves the creation of: breads, dough, cookies, scones, pies, tarts and rolls whereas pastry-making is really the fancy stuff. It requires the hands and vision of an artist. But, more than anything else, it takes passion along with skill to make an impact in this profession. — Shubham Kapoor, student of Diploma in Baking and Confectionery at Chandigarh Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology, (CIHM)

— The writer is a Punjab-based career consultant