By Baker/Chef Adam “The Bearded Baker” Majewski

When thinking of a chef, most people out side the food world imagine, a guy in a, white coat, checkered pants, and either a black skull cap or puffy/cylindrical white hat. Which for the most part is pretty much true as an image. How ever, the look has more to do with tradition than fashion for the most part, and though there are some practicalities to most of the culinary uniforms, what you where in the kitchen is fully up to you, I’d only suggest, that you make sure your clothes are comfortable, and you don’t mind getting them dirty. When picking out your clothes to cook or bake you want them to be comfortable, yet some what tight fitting, mainly this is to insure your sleeves or other articles of clothing don’t get in to what you’re making, also you don’t want to be wearing jewelry of any kind, mainly because there is a high likelihood you will lose it in the preparation part of cooking.

Now the type of equipment you have in your kitchen all depends on what you plan to cook or bake the most. It also depends on your skill level and what you feel most comfortable using in your kitchen with the given burners or type of oven you have in your kitchen. A lot of the time when people start to get in to baking their intentions are to eventually bake bread, you need to understand what you’re working with as for your oven and how your planning to mix the bread as well. Now what I must state right off the bat is that, if you do plan on making bread, don’t, I say don’t buy a bread maker, it’s under no circumstance worth wasting your money on it as a unitasker product. If you’re going to bake bread and if all you have at home is a standard residential oven first you will need to make sure your oven can getup to and hold 500 degrees Fahrenheit if your not able to get your oven to this temp. then there is no point in attempting bread based off of your ovens ability. If your oven is able to handle this high temp. then I would suggest looking in to buying whats called in most retail stores as a pizza stone. Why do this is, because first you can use it to bake many different items with great results so it is a good multi-tasking unit, second if your trying to truly replicate at home bakery/bakehouse results, the only way you can do so without buying a full commercial grade deck oven of any size, you will need to buy a pizza stone in order to replicate the heat from below a deck oven or wood fire oven would do.

How ever for newer cooks going in to baking and wanting to have a good list to start with on what you will most likely use most often when you’re just getting started.

Keep in mind this is just my suggested list some other bakers may tweek this list to their liking as should you over time:

1. Spatulas both heat proof and non-heat proof.
2. Mixing bowl set of different sizes.
3. Hand whisks.
4. Dry ingredient measuring cups.
5. Wet ingredient measuring cups.
6. Measuring Spoons.
7. Scale measuring in grams. pounds, kilograms, and Oz with at least an eleven pound minimum.
8. A one and a two ounce ice cream scoop for cookies.
9. Two cookie sheets.
10. Flippers.
11. Three square 9″ cake pans, can double as a brownie pan.
12. Three circle 9″ cake pan.
13. Three One pound bread pans.
14. Either a hand mixer or a stand mixer.
15. Two Cupcake pans.
16. Icing spatulas.
17. One sheet cake pan.
18. Sauce pans.