Can you see yourself baking for a living? Is your love of baking such that you would enjoy a means to pursue baking as a career? If you would like to make baking your main income source, chances are that you’ve taken at least one class. You may well be ready for culinary arts school to make baking your life’s career.
Becoming a professional baker means taking more than just one or two classes in the art. With so many different specialties out there, even in the baking facet of cooking, the chances are good that in order to master them all, you’ll be required to attend a culinary art school to achieve that dream.
Your selection of a course that will cover all of the facets of baking that you want to learn will be very important. You can elect to become a pastry chef, creating decadent and fancy kinds of pastry, or perhaps you may simply want to bake cakes. Bread bakers will want a different focus than those who are interested in baking the kind of cupcakes the clients drool over. With so many different specialties, it’s difficult to select the school which will put the focus precisely where you want it. That’s why it is so important to go over every aspect of your prospective culinary art school prior to enrolling in something that may not give you the focus that you want.
There are wide arrays of ways to learn baking. Very often renowned bakers will offer classes which range from beginning or novice up to the intermediate or very experienced. These classes will help you to learn new ingredients, new tools and new methods and techniques of baking the things that you are most interested in. Many culinary art school classes are one-off classes which will allow you to see what you’re going to be doing in a short term way, prior to enrolling in a full time class to make baking your living.
Select a few short term classes and take those before you enroll full time so that you see what you’ll be getting into and if you really want to bake for a living. Everyone who bakes has something that they love about it, but you may find that doing it for a living as opposed to doing it for a hobby isn’t what you want after all. Then again, you may discover that your passion is as great when you do it on a day to day basis as it ever was while you baked for a hobby. Baking classes will give you the chance to find out before you enroll in culinary art school to begin your new career.
Mark Lynch is a guest writer for Le Cordon Bleu culinary schools.