Do culinary grads know how to bake?

April 19, 2020 9:58 PM

Please help settle a discussion. Can one feasibly graduate culinary school and become an executive chef without knowing how to bake? That seems like being a mathematician but not knowing how to add. So since neither of us have been to culinary school, what gives?
posted by jojo and the benjamins to Food & Drink (17 answers total)

i have enjoyed reading various books regarding the culinary world (reach of a chef, kitchen confidential, etc. etc.). The protagonists, when mentioning that they have attended a culinary institution (CIA, JWU for example), have always talked about their semester(s) in baking and pastry. So perhaps not definitive, but it has been my impression that all the students in these books have been exposed to and have had to work with some degree of baking.
posted by alchemist at 1:30 AM on April 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

I think it massively depends on the program. I'm not an expert in this area but have been involved in work around our staff canteen and have spent a decent amount of time in the room with our head chef and various catering companies. Bread/dough and pastry seem to be considered a slightly separate skillset compared to making savoury main meals.

I had a brief look at some courses in the UK and they seem to vary a lot. For instance, my local college's diploma in professional cookery mentions baking in the context of a cooking technique alongside roasting and grilling, which I interpret as meaning "how to bake various foods in the oven" rather than "how to bake a cake or bread".

This apprenticeship/diploma covers pastry as part of the level 2 diploma, but you'd have to do the level 3 qualification to learn about bread and dough.

I don't know how relevant this is to your question but it's also worth considering that culinary school -> executive chef is only one pathway in the profession, and many people work their way up through a kitchen with a more basic culinary qualification, or without formal education/training in cooking. So I strongly suspect there are a good number of professional chefs out there who didn't receive formal education or training around baking, either because they didn't do this kind of training at all or because they did a lower-level or partial course that didn't cover baking.
posted by terretu at 1:35 AM on April 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

I think culinary school is a bit like art school in that you are exposed to semester-long classes in various disciplines, but you more-or-less major in a more specific field. That is to say, everyone has a basic pastry/baking class, but then one can make pastry their focus.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:28 AM on April 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I graduated from Johnson & Wales Culinary school in 1988. In school we had, if I remember correctly, one class on baking and one class on pastry.

I never worked as a baker or pastry chef in my 15 years in the kitchen, but I could bake things if I had a recipe for it. Even if I had never gone to culinary school I would have picked up some baking knowledge because in a lot of smaller places everybody does everything.

I think the analogy of being a mathematician without being able to add is fairly accurate. Not knowing how to bake, as in not being able to follow a bread recipe or a cake recipe, would have been kind of weird. I never needed to be at a baker or pastry chef level, but I needed to know the mechanics and be able to follow a recipe.
posted by ralan at 5:01 AM on April 20, 2020 [8 favorites]

"Knowing how to" is pretty broad, and someone who's a really good cook in some other domain might well hold themself to a very high standard. My partner "knows how to bake" because they can make a pie crust and no-knead bread. A professional chef might be way better at baking than my partner, but still say they "don't know how to bake" because they can't make a fancier bread or a really good croissant.
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:23 AM on April 20, 2020 [5 favorites]

Adding to what neulawindphone said, I'm ABD in English literature, but I think of myself as someone who doesn't know anything about poetry - even though I probably know more than 99.9999% of the US population. When you're an expert at one thing, you can be more aware of what you don't know in adjacent areas.
posted by FencingGal at 6:20 AM on April 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Pastry making & baking are considered their own specialties. It would be like asking a GP if they knew how to do a specialists job. Sure they could do the basic stuff no worries, know the theory but they don't have the extra training to say do the open heart surgery themselves or to feel confident saying they were a heart surgeon. In many large traditional kitchens bakers & pastry chefs are considered their own thing & often have their own separate kitchens they are in charge of and are ranked just below the Head & Sous Chefs. It is an area that most Chefs have a lot of respect for so saying they know how to bake, make pastries etc would feel disrespectful/dishonest.
posted by wwax at 7:29 AM on April 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Doctors might be a good analogy, e.g. "like being a doctor but not knowing how to deliver a baby." Every training doctor will do a rotation in OB/GYN and could handle a low-risk birth in a pinch, but that doesn't mean you want a dermatologist as your obstetrician.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 7:34 AM on April 20, 2020 [6 favorites]

Another vote for a professional cook not considering themselves to "know how to bake" at least.

I "don't know" chemistry, my last class in chemistry officially was in junior high, but over the course of getting an advanced degree in physics, I've picked up quite a bit. To anyone who's taking a class less advanced than college level organic chemistry, I "know" chemistry. I could do their homework with little study, tell them what's going on the broad level and do basic calculations with some degree of confidence. But I have the perspective to know just how much I don't know, so it doesn't feel right to claim any expertise.

I can certainly see a professional cook consider themselves to "not know how to bake" in the sense that they'd need to look up a recipe and couldn't guarantee the result would be good in the same way they could if they were asked to make a dish in a style they had years and years of practice in.
posted by Zalzidrax at 7:48 AM on April 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

I didn't go to one of the university-type cooking schools like JWU or CIA, but I did go to a private one here in the Boston area that is pretty well-known locally. We did a baking unit that lasted most of the first "semester" that covered a lot of basics including cakes, puff pastry, bread, yeast pastry, and so on, but not anything too advanced. Eventually, that cooking school hired an instructor to do advanced baking/pastry and offered that as a separate program as well, but everyone learned the basics.
posted by briank at 8:15 AM on April 20, 2020

I have a PhD in math and I know a lot of mathematicians who are not so great at addition. Sure, they can do it, but most of them don’t spend much time practicing the skill, and often eg an accountant would be better and faster at casual arithmetic. I’m not so great at it myself.

Likewise, lots of chefs/culinary school grads can technically bake, but don’t have much experience compared to someone who does it hundreds or even several times per week.

So I think your analogy is apt, but not in the way you think.
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:18 AM on April 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

Best answer: " Can one feasibly graduate culinary school and become an executive chef without knowing how to bake? "
Please unlink the concept of "graduating culinary school = chef", this is one of the biggest fallacies modern food media perpetuates. A graduate of culinary school is just that, a graduate. A cook is a culinary professional who works a specific station within a professional kitchen, as in a line cook, a grill cook, garde manger, etc. A chef is a professional cook who manages other cooks, the entire kitchen or portions of it (in the case of sous-chefs, pastry chefs, etc). An executive chef manages chefs and cooks; is often the liaison between the business partners & the public and the chefs who manage the day to day operations.
Baking is a broad term, is generally defined within professional cooking as pastry and/or bread making specialties. A bakery is an entirely different food production facility than a restaurant (even though sometimes joined) so let's leave that alone for now. We're talking about restaurants.
If a restaurant has a pastry chef, they will probably be far more skilled at churning out quantity or quality of dessert & baked goods, that their technical superior the chef cannot perform.
Being able to manage people is its own specialty, as is understanding budgets, costing, and all the other 'running of business' that is not the actual making of widgets. Or croissants.
I've certainly worked for several chefs who would not be able to make a restaurant worthy pie crust or meringue on demand. Yet they had the job of managing people who could, because being a chef is a management job.
So a better question would be: can a cook become an executive chef without knowing how to bake, and the answer is Yes. IF if if, you're skilled and talented, work hard within an organization and get promoted; or if you're good at shmoozing ownership and investors; or if you have family money and start a chain of restaurants based on grandmas recipes; if if if.
posted by winesong at 10:36 AM on April 20, 2020 [11 favorites]

Response by poster: We were watching an amateur baking show and a contestant labeled themself as a culinary school grad and currently working as an exec chef.

However, they couldn't produce a cake, at all. Not a bad cake--they just gave up on baking and presented Rice Krispies covered with fondant or something as their presentation to the judges. A bad cake is understandable but not being able to bake contrasted weirdly with their stated background.

Thanks for the responses. So they should have been able to produce something even if it wasn't perfect. Possibly they had an on-camera freeze then.
posted by jojo and the benjamins at 11:17 AM on April 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

ha! I saw that episode of Nailed it and wondered that too. I think that they choose their contestants not by their baking skill, but by the likelihood that they will screw up entertainingly.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 12:43 PM on April 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

I work at JWU and last week I was discussing this very issue with one of the culinary faculty.

All culinary students will have some exposure to baking, and depending on their degree program they may have a lot (e.g., Masters in asking and Pastry Arts degree).

In some cases it may be as little as a two-week section devoted entirely to baking.

Depends on your degree and on your school.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:30 PM on April 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

We were watching an amateur baking show and a contestant labeled themself as a culinary school grad and currently working as an exec chef.

Having watched 16 seasons of Top Chef in the past 12 months, this appears to be an extremely common phenomenon. Total fails in the first few seasons, and then as the show became more popular, contestants with no pastry background started coming in with like, ONE baked dessert memorized.
posted by deludingmyself at 8:46 AM on April 21, 2020

Cooking/baking reality shows put their contestants under heavy time pressure, because otherwise outcomes can end up with a boring range from "pretty good" to "pretty okay." So it's also a solid possibility that a restaurant chef could be able to bake fine when calm, but might not do it under pressure as well as he does his normal specialty, and so might end up losing his shit in front of the camera with a ticking clock.
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:47 AM on April 22, 2020