Baker / Pastry Chef

Bakers and pastry chefs produce bread, rolls, croissants, cakes, tarts, viennoiserie, and specialist baked goods. Work settings range from artisan bakeries and craft micro-bakeries to in-store supermarket bakeries, hotel pastry sections, and large-scale wholesale bakeries. Artisan bakers work with sourdough starters, long fermentation, and hand-shaping techniques; pastry chefs focus on laminated doughs, sugar work, chocolate tempering, and dessert plating. The daily rhythm is distinctive — many bakers start at 3am or 4am to have fresh product ready for morning trade. Skills include dough mixing and fermentation control, scaling, moulding, oven management, and decoration. The UK artisan bakery sector has grown significantly since 2015, with the Real Bread Campaign and Sourdough School reflecting a consumer shift towards quality, locally made bread.

Baking is a sensory craft — dough feel, fermentation timing, crust colour, and crumb structure all require trained human judgement that cannot be replicated by automation at the artisan level. While industrial bread production is automated, the growing consumer demand for sourdough, artisan loaves, and craft pastry creates a distinct market for skilled bakers. Physical presence is required: bread and pastry have short shelf lives and must be produced fresh and locally. The sector faces a persistent skills shortage, with the National Skills Academy for Food & Drink identifying bakery as a priority area.

You arrive at the bakery at 4am. First task: check overnight sourdough proofs and load the first oven. While loaves bake, you scale and mix the day's doughs — white, wholemeal, rye — and begin shaping croissants from laminated dough prepared the previous afternoon. By 7am the shop shelves are filled with fresh loaves, pastries, and rolls. Mid-morning is spent mixing afternoon doughs, preparing laminated dough for tomorrow, and cleaning down. You finish by early afternoon.