[Allovertheplace]

Greetings All,

I have enjoyed a number of the post so decided to throw my hat in and join. I am currently 49 years old and have been married to my wife for 26 years now with two kids in high school. I am at that point in my career where I am less concerned about office politics and climbing the ladder and more concerned about pursuing other passions I have. My background is in applied physics and quantum electronics as well as advanced degrees in finance. I grew up in the Midwest where we grew a lot of our own food and raised a lot of our own meat. I spent 6 years in the Navy traveling the world before going to college. I have lived in every corner of the United States. I have travelled quite a bit outside the US during my professional career as well and have been blessed to be able to experience authentic cuisine all over the world and I loved it all.

I love sushi and got serious almost two years ago in my pursuit of learning how to make it at home, I have purchased some decent single bevel Japanese knives (a Yanagiba and Edo Usuba, I love these knives!!) along with the usual accoutrements that go along with making sushi. Plus I have an H-Mart within 10 minutes of where I work in the Boston area.

I started getting serious about learning to cook in general in a professional manner earlier this year. I do not have time to attend any of the local courses offered in my area due to my work schedule. So being the geek that I am, I researched various culinary programs to look at the class syllabuses and what books that are making use of and have purchased quite a few textbooks and other reference books. I am working my way through CIA's The Professional Chef 9th edition and just started Gisslen's Professional Baking 7th edition. I believe in absorbing as much information as possible from reputable sources coupled with practice, practice, practice, and experimentation based that. I am also going through those self paced courses offered by Escoffier (no comments please, just another source of information for me). I try to find reputable You Tube videos as well as some courses at Udemy and Itune University. I also joined the ACF as a culinary enthusiast, not sure if I can make use of the benefits it offers a non-professional but we'll see.

Anyway look forward to all future interactions. Those that are on linkedin you can catch me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/timburbridge

Tim

 

[brianshaw]

Welcome.

 

[nicko]

@Allovertheplace welcome to ChefTalk glad you are here. We have had many people like you join up seeking help about becoming a chef. You and I are opposite I started out as a chef and left to move to the IT world. I work now as a senior developer for a large eCommerce site.

My advice to you is being a professional chef sounds very exciting but it is a very difficult career. It is a career that will pull you away from your family as you will often work nights, weekends and holidays. It is a physically demanding job and I know for a fact I could not handle the long shifts now at age 48 (49 in Oct) that I did when I was in my twenties.

One thing I always tell people considering the career change is saying "I love to cook" and "I love to cook professional" are two completely different statements in every sense of the word. If your goal is just to learn to cook better but not go the professional route that is fine but if you are seriously considering this then count the cost. Many people who end up cooking professionally often transition out of it because it is such a tough field.

Many culinary schools have weekend classes, one day classes and bootcamps you could try some of these. Check out CIA's bootcamp classes.