Chefs and Head Cooks
Chefs and head cooks are involved in almost every step of food preparation: planning menus, creating recipes, ordering food, preparing dishes and deciding how to present them.
If you love nothing better than to create a delicious meal or to whip out a batch of tantalizing cookies, then you are probably a chef or head cook in the making.
With this career you will manage the making, cooking and seasoning of soups, meats, salads, vegetables and deserts and you will get to use your creative mind to plan and create menus.
Other duties include ordering food and supplies, monitoring sanitation procedures, ensuring the quality of foods, managing cooks and estimating costs.
Besides all the detail-oriented work that goes into preparing a dish, you will get to do the more creative things too like planning menus, deciding how foods are presented and even creating new recipes.
Successful chefs and head cooks are usually good at managing time, serving customers, overseeing others, managing resources and decision making.
As a chef or head cook you will use lots of different tools and types of equipment every day. You will use kitchen shears, chefs’ knives, box graters, shredders, slicing machines, fruit zesters, thermometers, meat slicers, pots, pans, ovens and stoves, and that’s just scratching the surface.
On a day-to-day basis you will make decisions about what foods to order, think creatively to create menus and recipes and communicate with others to manage the production of dishes.
To hit the ground running in this field you will need an associate’s degree. An educational program will teach you all you need to know about the culinary arts as well as things like food production, processing, customer service, administration, human resources and management.
The average hourly wage for chefs and head cooks is about $18 and the average annual income is about $38,000.