Working as a Garden Centre Chef with The Chef Tree

What skills do you need to work in a garden centre kitchen?

Kitchen skills

A chef needs to run a smooth-operating kitchen. Doing so requires the implementation and maintenance of sanitary practices to ensure that a kitchen remains hygienic and that the food patrons receive is safe to consume. In addition, chefs are responsible for maintaining the necessary health and safety standards and should know how to apply first aid in the case of burns, cuts or other accidents in the kitchen.

Kitchen staff work with a wide range of equipment and tools, such as meat slicers, mixers, food processors and deep fryers. A chef needs to know how to operate everything in a kitchen so that they can ensure that kitchen staff use all equipment and tools correctly and safely. It’s also their responsibility to ensure that all equipment is properly maintained.

Food preparation skills

Whether a chef acquires this knowledge by attending a culinary school or through on-the-job training and experience, they need superior cooking and culinary skills. These include knowledge of the various cooking techniques applied in classic and modern cuisine, a refined palate to carefully balance flavours and seasoning and an understanding of wine and food pairing. A chef should also understand how to divide the duties in the kitchen and guide their execution.

Business skills

Apart from creating an exciting menu and ensuring that kitchen staff produce high-quality dishes, it’s a chef’s responsibility to guarantee the profitability of a kitchen. This means that they need basic accounting skills, including the ability to plan and create budgets and control labour and food costs. An important aspect of staying within a budget is purchasing quality products at the right cost, which involves choosing the correct suppliers.

Running a cost-efficient operation also requires hiring competent kitchen staff and paying them at a fair rate while also ensuring that employee salaries don’t exceed budgetary requirements. In addition, a chef must ensure unnecessary food wastage in a kitchen and must enforce strict inventory control.

Knowledge of nutrition

Working as a chef requires a solid understanding and an awareness of nutrition. Besides focusing on creating tasty and attractive dishes, a chef needs to consider the nutritional value of the food they present to customers. Factors to keep in mind when planning menu dishes, for instance, is the body’s ability to process various foods and whether certain products can cause an allergic reaction.

Quality chefs typically aim to serve healthy, fresh and nutritionally balanced food by sourcing their ingredients locally where possible and refraining from using artificial food colouring, MSG and GMO products in their dishes.