There are regular home cooks, social media cooks, social media chefs, and then…The Chef.
I hate personally how these terms get thrown around so loosely and it tarnishes The Chef title who has worked for years to get in that position.
Let’s start off with the regular home cooks. These types of cooks are your mom’s, pops, uncles, aunts, or the step dad who is trying to be your real dad and win you over with food. The home cooks are the people who follow recipes try to mix and mash their favorite recipes together or sometimes try and create some things at home. Sometimes they post videos and find out that people like what they cook and it can turn into the next title…
Social media cook, now social media cooks solely focus on color, good tasting ingredients that everybody will like. For example: cheesy stuff, pasta, burgers, seafood boils, wings, eggrolls or popular seasoning combinations: jerk lemon pepper, garlic Cajun butter ETC. they will focus on popular stuff that they know would pop off and look good to become viral. Which is fine but once they start calling themselves The Chef it becomes a problem. They are making their living on what’s viral and have their personality along with it. We have to refer to it as social media cooks and not social media chefs.
Let’s dive into a genuine social media chef. These are the chefs who genuinely want to educate the public on technique, equipment, newer ingredients, and show you their day in a life of being a chef is. These chefs focus on making sure that the social media cooks are getting better at their craft using newer ingredients and trying different techniques to enhance their dishes. They are usually a wealth of knowledge who have probably worked as a line cook, sous chef, or even an executive chef for years. They put a lot of focus on the prep of a dish by showing the growing process, how to do everything from scratch, educate on different knife cuts, and keep the chef integrity alive so it isn’t tarnished by viral recipes. They are usually line cooks who love to create great dishes and share the recipes online.
The Chefs of the world who have spent years working their way into that position from years of line cooks are too busy to even be on social media. Nine times out of 10 they are an owner of a restaurant or in a high position at a fancy restaurant. Their time on social media platforms is limited to just a picture of a creation they made and that is still rare. They are constantly trying to create, learn, and promote their restaurant to make a living. These are the people who have genuine passions for the art of cooking to a point where they sacrifice so much time of their life to the craft. They have to give up family time, social life, and hobbies. True Chefs are called chefs because they understand the perfect dishes and what it needs. They have created their own flavors and have a wide range of culinary experience and can take any type of random ingredients and turn it into a masterpiece. This is what it means to be The Chef.
In conclusion it seems like the traditional route of working from dishwasher to line cook for years until you reach sous chef and become eventually that executive chef are obsolete. In all honestly it makes sense. Why waste your time in the lower positions in back of the house trying to get to the executive chef position. Now in todays time you can practice multiple dishes, learn from social media chefs, create your own dishes/flavors, and gain a wide range usage of ingredients and maybe get to that chef title. If we have to operationalize the term chef let’s say have 3 of these under your belt.
- Held a position in a restaurant for more than a year.
- Mastered 3 or more cuisines
- Have 10,000 hours (40 hour weeks in 5 years) on experience of cooking food
- Being able to grow your own ingredients and take other random ingredients and create being timed. (20mins for app, 30 mins for entree & dessert) - Chopped rules 🔪
- Create a 5 menus of your own flavor with a appetizer, entree and dessert. (5 apps, 5 entrees, & 5 desserts)
- Apprenticeship under a well experienced chef for a minimum of a year.