List of Skills Needed as a Pastry Chef

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Being a pastry chef is definitely not that simple as many people might think. Making those delicious and perfect piecrusts can be quite difficult, if you don’t have the necessary skills and talent. After all, this job is both about science and art, so you do need some passion and talent to prepare top of the line cakes and desserts. Some of the most important pastry chef skills are a strong body, the scientific understanding of the baking art, a strong knowledge of nutrition, customer service, and administrative skills. Let’s explain them more in detail.

Administrative Skills

The pastry chefs are in charge of the kitchens and will be able to run their own business. As a result, they need to have administrative skills and they need to know how to make a budget and order the supplies. They should be very careful not to order too many perishables or to get short of ingredients. Since pastry chefs work in commercial kitchens, they have to be familiar with health department standards and the kitchen management.

Customer Service Skills

One of the pastry chef skills is being able to communicate with other people, including with his or her staff. Most of the time, they will have to manage other kitchen workers or chefs and must be able to motivate and stimulate them. At the same time, if you are a pastry chef and have your own business, you will have to serve customers or even deliver pastries to other stores. They must be able to get along well with others.

Culinary Creativity

Probably the most important of pastry chef skills is the ability to mix and prepare the ingredients, in order to obtain the perfect dough for the desserts. At the same time, a pastry chef needs creativity in order to come up with original recipes. He or she must have an artistic eye because the pastries must not only be delicious, but also beautiful. In the past few years, pastry chefs have also learned to make nutritional rich desserts by using alternative sweeteners instead of sugar and gluten-free flour.

Perfect Coordination

Snagajob.com list that pastry chef needs to have hand and eye coordination. So, this professional has to work with various tools and machines such as precision tools, icing bags or knives. Thus, he or she must know how to work with them and they must have precision when using them and preparing and cutting ingredients. Moreover, a pastry chef must know what multitasking means and must coordinate him or herself in order to accomplish more tasks at the same time.

Sense of Smell and Taste

It’s very important for pastries to smell good, look excellent and be delicious. The pastry chefs have to make sure that every piece of cake and pastry is tasty, artistic and safe to eat. Furthermore, the sense of smell and taste is extremely important when creating a new type of pastry because it has to blend the ingredients in an innovative way.