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/ck/ - Food & Cooking

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3850792 No.3850792[DELETED]  [Reply] [Original]

Hey /ck/ I have recently decided that my dream job is being a baker! I have a little experience but I was hoping to get some advice on what it takes to become an apprentice baker. How hard is it to make this my profession?

>> No.3850812
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3850812

Your dream job is actually being the OWNER OF a bakery.
>working in a bakery is a health hazard and pays minimum wage for a reason.

>> No.3850817

In this economy? Good luck.

No one, especially bakers, will be hiring anyone without either experience, or an education. Seeing as you have never worked in a professional bakery before, you would need to get an education and try and get a job at a large-scale place, making thousands of items a day. They tend to need a large staff, meaning openings pop up more frequently. There, you would need to accumulate more skills and work your way up.

Also, if you are a 20-something female with no direction (until now, I guess), you have thousands of competitors in your bracket. If you started a small-scale operation, you would have to find someplace where the market isn't already saturated with punk/hipster/vegan/counter-cultural/I-have-no-real-grasp-on-life-and-don't-want-to-get-a-real-job girl bakeries.

>> No.3850834

>>3850792
i'm guessing you go to your local technical school or something.

no one's going to hire you to bake their bread.

>> No.3850903

>>3850792

I wouldn't take these guys too seriously.

What I would urge you to do is to keep doing whatever you're doing now, and try to find a great local bakery in which you might be able to work for free while building the requisite skills. Bakeshop schedules are all sorts of wonky, so it shouldn't be hard to work around your current school/work schedule.

>> No.3850938

>>3850903
Don't take the other guys seriously? Are you serious? They're pretty dead on. However, if you really ARE dedicated, Fuck Flour does have good advice. Work for free, work hard, and show you're dedicated. If you learn quickly enough and somehow get a job out of it, congratulations, you're now at the bottom of the staff totem pole. Now you're even with pretty much the rest of the apprentices and it's time to work up all the way to the top.

>>3850812 is pretty spot on. Many people have this romantic fantasy of running a simple cafe/bakery, but it's not easy. Being a baker(even an relatively hands-off owner) means often odd, probably long hours, low pay, monotonous tasks, etc.

But if you really are serious about becoming a master baker, and this isn't some fleeting dream, I wish you the best of luck.

>> No.3850969

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VM20uKWn8g

>> No.3850981

Try it out before you decide this is your dream job. For one month, get up at 4:30am, 6 days each week. Get ready for "work." Be on your feet for 4 hours to start, doing things. Bake a ton of things and when you can't bake anymore, keep working your hands. Get Play Doh and knead it, feed it through a toy machine, etc. Take a 15 minute break, then repeat. Randomly burn your hand (once a week should do it) and keep working. If you can't do this for a month, you have no business in a bakery.