🧑‍🍳 Pastry chef

A pastry chef is a specialist who makes and decorates cakes, pastries, biscuits and other sweet treats in bakeries, restaurants and factories. The international occupation classification ISCO-08 puts pastry chefs, bakers and confectionery makers into a single group, 7512. Most creams, fillings and doughs are built on dairy products: cream, butter, condensed milk and cheese.

These products differ greatly in composition, and the recipe depends on that. According to USDA, per 100 g salted butter has 81 g of fat, heavy whipping cream 36 g and whole milk 3.25 g. Sweetened condensed milk has 54.4 g of carbohydrates and 8.7 g of fat, while milk has only 4.8 g of carbohydrates. Cream is whipped into frosting, butter is layered into puff and shortcrust pastry, cheese goes into cheesecakes, and milk goes into custard.

The job demands precision. According to BLS, a baker weighs ingredients by recipe, mixes and rolls out dough, sets the oven temperature and watches the baking. Large plants produce standard batches by machine; small pastry kitchens make smaller batches and made-to-order cakes. In French a pastry chef is called a pâtissier. Formal education is usually not required: in the US bakers train on the job for up to a year or in 1–2 year programs, and the median pay in 2025 was 37,160 dollars a year.

Why it matters to you. When a recipe says “cream”, “butter” or “condensed milk”, these are products with very different fat and sugar content. Cream with 36 g of fat will not give the density of butter with 81 g, and sweetened condensed milk will make a filling much sweeter than a milk-based one, so do not swap them without recalculating the recipe. Check the fat content on the label and take exactly the product the recipe names.