Steps in Becoming a Baker

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Try This at Home

Although baking may be considered part of the great cooking experience, the knowledge base and skills required are somewhat different. While all cooking skills rely on measuring and mixing ingredients in the right order, when you bake, you are working with dough or batter. Once the ingredients are in, there is no sniffing the pot to add a bit more thyme or a dash of cayenne. Your knowledge is in the right consistency, in sifting, beating, cutting and folding the dough, in separating eggs, stiffening egg whites and in knowing the exact measurements for that perfect cake, pie or soufflé. If you would like to know how to become a baker, you should try a few recipes at home first. It’s a special skill that takes a lot of practice. Even, if you follow a recipe exactly, if you don’t know the techniques for adding ingredients, and the correct texture and thickness, you can still have rock-hard bread, flat biscuits and a collapsed cake.

Work for a Bakery

There are many opportunities for those who would like to learn how to become a baker in the baking industry. Restaurants, bakeries and grocery stores often hire assistants to work in their bakery shops. The requirements are minimal, as most will accept applicants with a high school diploma or its equivalent and no prior experience. Nor, is the pay scale very high for the novice baker. Beginning wages average around ten dollars an hour, although this can vary greatly with the type of industry and degree of experience.

Be Selective

In the baking industry, the question isn’t so much how to become a baker as in how far you wish to go with your baking skills. In large industries that deliver supplies of baked goods for grocers, prepackage food outlets and restaurants that do not prepare their own baked foods, your knowledge and skills may be largely devoted to the operation of machinery. Your company may use pre-mixed ingredients and the baked goods will probably be an assembly line production. Your future will depend on learning all the stations of the industry and acquiring management skills to work your way up to head baker.

Attend a Culinary Arts School

The best pay scale is for bakers with special abilities, who work in five star restaurants delivering mouth-watering cream puffs, cakes and pies, bakers who run their own shops and for bakers who cater to weddings, conventions and special events. Specialized skills include learning how to make exquisite toppings for your baked delicacy, a variety of frostings and fillings, and cake decorating. These skills may be learned as a baker’s assistant, but in many restaurants, catering services and in localized bakeries, the tendency is leaning more and more to hiring an assistant baker who already has learned many of the skills in presenting eye-appealing baked items.

Follow Your Dream

Good bakers are always in demand. Baking entails a lot of dedication to the craft of magically making dough rise and to correct treatment that goes into creating a mouth-watering dessert. Bakers rise very early in the morning. They follow a set schedule for producing the items that goes on display daily. The work requires a great deal of manual labor, whether you are working with heavy machines, hand kneading breads or preparing a simmering cherry topping for your freshly baked cheesecake. Experiment to see if baking is your true desire, then follow up by choosing the type of industry that will best help you develop the skills you wish to apply to your baking knowledge.