My Culinary Moment #2: Underpaid in F&B Line

The thing that most culinary students (like me) would think about working in F&B line is that, it's glamorous. Most celebrity chefs that we saw in TV deceived us to think that F&B world would be glamorous (Not that I choose to study culinary arts for the glamour).

But let’s face it. The F&B world isn’t as glamorous at all (unless you end up as a celebrity chef). The working hour is terrible; the environment is awful and the pay isn’t that much. Then, there were times where you get to be treated like shit by your customers and supervisors.

The thing is, no matter what’s your academic qualification, whether you graduated from school with your diploma or degree or high school you would still have to start off from the bottom and the salary didn’t differ much no matter how high your academic qualification is. After you received your diploma and degree, you would expect to work with something that pays you better. Perhaps that is why most of my friends end up working out of F&B line. Or some end up as a lecturer.

I think, to work in the F&B line, you would have to have a lot of passions. You have to love it really much that you wouldn’t mind all that crappy pay and working hours. So, if anyone wanted to study something related with F&B line, I would ask them if they would stand the working hour and payment even though your academic qualification is high. If they do, well... good luck! It's a jungle out there :)

My Culinary Moment #2: Colored Vanilla Muffins

Last week, I was really busy with baking vanilla muffins. An ex-schoolmate ordered 1600 muffins for her wedding - as a door gift to the guest. Making 1600 muffins on your own was not easy. So, I started making these muffins a few days earlier. I made these muffins into a few colors - red, orange, pink, purple, blue and peach. And these muffins comes with a few designs too - spiral, polka dots and marbled. I think, marbled muffins looks the best!

Working with lots of muffins isn't as easy as I thought. You have to work quicker with muffins. You need to pop them into the oven once you mix the ingredients and scoop them into the paper cups to prevent loss of volume. So, I figured that I should be preparing the muffin mix in advance. I weighted the dry ingredients, sifted them and portioned them into 250g each packet. I figured that I couldn't work with large volume of muffins all in once as I was working in the kitchen by myself. There's no way that I could scoop the muffins into the pan, checking the muffins in the oven, cooling the muffins and arranging them on the table all at once.

Fortunately, my family helped me a lot with packaging (my customer requested me to package the muffins into individual packaging). Folding the small boxes and packaging those muffins were time consuming. So I am really glad that they help me with packaging and counting those muffins. THANK YOU! :)

My Culinary Moment #1

I'm thinking of starting a few post of my culinary moments. It's going to be fun, and silly (since I was an idiot when it comes to food. It does't matter that I had a bachelor degree in culinary art, I'm still an idiot)

I still remember the first time I went into the kitchen (or class) back in 2005. I was wondering around looking for our kitchen class with a few friends, including Aimi from burb! le festin avec moi. We were all naïve (Okay, I’m not sure about my other friend, but I was pretty naïve back then (and still do)).

The first class (pastry) was kind of fun. My lecturer was really sweet and kind. My classmate and I (there were +30 of us) had to jam packed into one small class. Watching demonstration from my lecturer was quite hard though…

But, I was really looking forward to class, not knowing that I’ve signed in for something tough which includes a back-stabbing, harsh world that makes me and my fellow classmates cursed a lot! (chuckles)