Partition

Chefs and bakers are very different creatures and this distinction is poorly understood. When I previously took a professional development course in frozen desserts at The Culinary Institute Of America's Greystone campus in Napa Valley, I learned this distinction in a very visceral manner. Their main kitchen isn't so much what most would picture as a kitchen as much as it was what most people would consider an enormous ballroom that happened to have a kitchen in it. I soon found out that the baking and pastry people had their own side of the kitchen and the general culinary people had their own side of the kitchen. It harkened back to the classic scene of siblings drawing a line down the middle of a shared bedroom to represent mutually exclusive personal areas. We were instructed to not use any of the equipment on the general culinary side of the kitchen and I'm pretty sure they were instructed to look upon us in the eye. That's an extreme example, but it does demonstrate a certain rivalry between pastry chefs and our savory counterparts.

A restaurant kitchen is one of the busiest environments you will ever find on the face of this Earth. Speed is king and the whole endeavor is a mad dash to produce everything perfectly as fast as one possibly can. Bakeshops too require one to work as efficiently as possible, but, "as possible," is the key phrase. Although cooks can often repair, replace, and regroup in the face of a mistake, bakers know, definitively, that a mistake will ruin a product completely, with no real option besides starting all over again. So bakers take their time to measure things precisely, to carefully apply the correct mixing method, to monitor thermometers, and to fabricate finished products. While cooks face a new deadline for a new order every time a ticket comes out of the printer, a baker faces a single deadline by which all the food must be ready. That means that bakers have the luxury of achieving successful time-management through planning out their entire workday, whereas cooks must constantly adjust their time management on the fly. These are very different worlds.

I think these differences very much offer clues as to why I'm a far better baker than I am a cook and why I would almost certainly not be able to thrive in a general culinary program the same way I could in a baking and pastry arts one. Adapting quickly isn't generally a strong suit of autistics and I am no exception. It's the planning and practice that take that element of cooking out of baking. All the adapting to new procedures, new recipes, and new environs is done ahead of time. One practices new procedures until one masters them, tests new recipes until they work consistently, and practices in new environs until comfortable with them. Time management isn't about adapting to constantly changing demands like cooking is. That's all about knowing from practice how long each baked good will take and keeping track on what is going on with each one. Many people who don't think I'll make it through CIA have, as their basic fallacy, a confusion between what it means to be a chef and what it means to be a baker. Don't get me wrong. All that planning and practice won't be easy, but I am capable of it.

-Frank