There are some essential qualities of a chef, without these one cannot become a successful professional chef.

The fast-paced world of the culinary industry welcomes professionals who are skilled, passionate about the trade and innovative in their creations.

Below are some of the very essential qualities of a chef that will help them achieve success in the trade.

• Passion: A great chef has to be passionate about food and cooking. They have to genuinely enjoy the whole process of procuring, preparing, cooking and serving food and have to be able to design menus too.
• Stamina: An essential quality of a true chef is stamina. The commercial kitchen is a hard place to work; long hours on foot exposed to heat, grease, high pressure and odd working hours; a chef needs stamina to remain focused and consistently produce top quality food.
• Leadership skills: It is the chef who is responsible for the kitchen. They have to be able to give direction to their team and maintain an amicable atmosphere in their kitchen. They need to guide, coach and monitor their juniors so that the operations run smoothly.
  

To become a chef you do not have to have academic qualifications, but you definitely do have to have a passion for food and cooking, the stamina to take long hours on your feet and the ability to multitask. And of course you have to have creativity and imagination in food presentation. In a large kitchen chefs work as a part of a team each looking after a different part of the preparation or food area like the frying or grilling station or the bread and pastry section, the meat or fish station or the vegetable station. In a smaller kitchen there may be fewer separate stations depending on the menu.

If you join the trade without any culinary qualification your first job in the kitchen will probably be that of an apprentice and you may have to spend hours peeling onions and potatoes. But a graduate with a culinary certificate or diploma joins the trade as a commis chef, the first rung of the ladder.

The job description or duties of a commis chef are:

Primarily learning the various cooking methods. He or she has to rotate in the kitchen from station to station and pick up the skills of each station.

• Practice the skills they have learnt so that they can master them and move on to the next level.
• On the job the have to do all the preparation of ingredients for the senior chef at his station
• They have to carefully and accurately measure dish portions
  

The legendary French chef George Auguste Escoffier in his book Le Guide Culinaire defined certain theories of kitchen management that have been adopted by professional kitchens all over the world. Among them is the kitchen hierarchy system known as the Brigade de Cuisine which specifies the types of chefs that are a part of a normal kitchen.

According to this Brigade system the types of chefs are as follows:

• Chef de Cuisine or Executive chef: He or she is the boss in the kitchen. Normally a restaurant or chain has one executive chef. It takes years of training at a culinary academy and decades of experience to reach this topmost level. An executive chef rarely has to cook and their duties are basically administrative wherein they supervise operations, plan out menus and ensure that the kitchen is running smoothly.
• Sous Chef or Assistant chef: The sous chef is immediately below the executive chef and is the person who is directly responsible for food production. Depending on the size of the kitchen there may be one or more sous chefs who are responsible for all the junior chefs and other kitchen workers.
• Chef de Partie or Senior chef: This individual is responsible for a particular type of menu that he or she specializes or excels in. It is his or her duty to direct the preparation necessary for his specific menu.
• Line Chefs or Station chefs: Working directly under the sous chef there are various types of line chefs each responsible for a specific part of a meal.
  • Saucier: It is their duty to prepare the master sauces required in food production. It is a very important role and the sauce chef has to be highly skilled since the sauce is a very vital ingredient especially in French cuisine.
    

On the 26^th – 30^th January 2015, The St. Moritz Gourmet Festival took place in the Upper Engadin in the Swiss canton of Graubünden. It was launched by top chef Reto Mathis in 1994 and established as the first festival of its kind. It is one of the leading gourmet festivals in Europe welcoming around 3,500 guests each year to take part in various events.

Since establishment, the festival has been a creative collaboration of outstanding international master chefs. Each year the master chef from each of the partner hotels invites a guest chef.

This year marked the Great British edition. This comes as Switzerland celebrate 150 years of winter tourism. The country owes this anniversary to the British who were the first to discover St. Moritz as a winter destination. The event held exciting and enjoyable encounters with highly creative master chefs from Great Britain’s top league.

The term  “Molecular Gastronomy” was devised in 1988 by physicist Nicholas Kurti and French chemist Hervé This. It was originally intended to refer to the investigation of cooking, though it has been adopted and applied to describe a type a cuisine.

Molecular gastronomy is a form of food science that investigates the physical and chemical transformation of ingredients in cooking. Cooking was recognised to have three components, which are social, artistic and technical. Molecular gastronomy is a modern style of cooking, it uses various styles of technical innovations from the scientific methods.

There are many aspects of food science that study different forms of food, such as preservation, chemistry, microbiology, engineering and physics. Until the creation of molecular gastronomy, there was no formal discipline dedicated to studying the chemical processes of cooking in restaurants or from home. Food science  has always been more concerned with the industrial production of food.

Here are some techniques, tools and ingredients of Molecular Gastronomy: