Culinary Program

Find culinary inspiration and helpful career information on topics such as cooking with chocolate, French and Greek cuisine, the life of a Chef, and what to expect in culinary school.

Does your sweet tooth lead you straight to your oven? Read how to avoid the pitfalls of cheese cake, bake creative cookies, use fresh fruits in baking, and more.

Catering and Restaurant Management

If you've ever prepared a Thanksgiving dinner, you know that cooking for a group takes planning and skill. Learn more about the art of catering and restaurant management, including specialized catering such as chocolates or high tea and how to prepare for a restaurant career.

Culinary Schools in the United States

With culinary schools in all 50 states and additional culinary education available online, you don't need to relocate unless you want to. Each state has its own special mixture of culture, cuisine, and locally grown agriculture that inspires the chefs and students who work and live there. If you're passionate about Maine lobster dishes, California cuisine, or any dish or state in between, you'll find a culinary school that is where you are or where you'd like to be.

Home | Culinary | Baking and Pastry | Baking Tools for Serious Chefs

Baking Tools for Serious Chefs

By Emily Kerr

You can't bake the perfect cake without the perfect pan. You can't craft cookies that look like cars without car cookie cutters. And how do you get that tangy zing to your lemon bars? Not without a zest grater, of course!

Bake Like a Career Chef with the Right Tools

The right baking tools are essential to the best baking, so take a look at the tools serious bakers typically use to make their creations perfect and easy to prepare. They'll give you a glimpse of the much wider range of tools that professional bakers use, and those that you'll learn about in a baking diploma or certificate program.

Baker's mat. Instead of dousing your cutting board or countertop with flour, a flexible baker's mat allows your bakers to easily transfer rolled dough onto any pan or tray. It also is marked with various diameters for measuring ease.
Hands-free egg separator. When all you need is the yolk, it can be a pain to filter out that runny egg white, and vice versa. A hands-free egg separator rests on the edge of a mixing bowl, so bakers can crack egg after egg and quickly get exact bakery measurements.
Cookie press. Insert cookie dough into this futuristic tube, choose from a variety of shapes and patterns, and press out patisserie-perfect cookies. Friends will think these came straight from the bakery.
Pastry blender. If you've ever made pastry, you know how tough it can be to mix shortening and flour. This hand-held mixer does the job with just four steel bars. It's a bakery essential!
Zest grater. Resembling a miniature cheese grater, a zest grater is great for getting the essence of orange, lemon, or lime into your patisserie treats.
Cooling rack. Baking is a process with many phases, one of which is cooling. Whether it's pastry or pie, your chef will need a cooling rack to complete the bake cycle.
Pie-crust protector. Ever wonder how bakery pies are always golden and never burnt? At the bakery, chefs bake pies with crust protectors, thin aluminum bands that circle each pie, covering just the crust.

These are just a few of the baking tools that will put a smile on the face of someone dedicated to baking. If these convenient and time-saving utensils fire up your interest in the art of baking, all of them, and many more, are taught and used in baking and pastry/patisserie programs, offered at culinary schools across the country.

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