How To Become A Vegan Chef

People with great cooking skills & who have plant-based knowledge are becoming increasingly popular. With the global increasing awareness for health & nutrition, there are now opening opportunities for people with plant-based cooking skills in the hospitality & restaurant sector. Becoming a vegan chef is an exciting career choice, but not without challenges.

As the world becomes more aware of the health benefits of plant-based foods, now is the perfect time to turn passion for vegan cooking into a career as a professional vegan chef. The combination of personal passion and professional training will help you maximize your chances of success as an amazing plant-based chef.

First of all; If you want to work as a chef you need to become a chef. Becoming a chef means accepting long working hours & hard work. You need to be 110% sure in your decision. It’s a lifestyle and a big dedication! It is not enough to know a lot about food & be good at cooking at home to become a professional chef. There are many tasks in the kitchen you necessarily don’t see directly on the plate when you dine in a restaurant. This could be all from the cleaning to the preparation of a big amount of food ingredients as peeling onions.

If you are already an excellent chef, but you need knowledge on plant-based cuisine we recommend you take a Advanced Certification in Plant-based Nutrition. You can easily do so online. It is really important for you as a chef to understand the health benefits with the food you soon will prepare. Many chefs who don’t understand the nutrition of plant-based food fail to complete satisfying dishes, because these dishes mostly lack filling & the right nutrition.

If you don’t have many years of cooking skills from a restaurant kitchen, but you have the knowledge of food nutrition. Go to chefs school if you dare. The challenge is that many ordinary chefs schools work a lot with meat, dairy, fish & eggs. They have at the moment very little or no knowledge of plant-based cuisine at these schools. The ordinary chefs school takes around 4 years to get graduated. This is 4 years of knowledge & experiences. So if you don’t want to work with animal products, you will need this experience from somewhere else. An option could be to first find a vegan chefs course somewhere in the world. They will be a challenge to find, but if you do so you will learn techniques and recipes from different cuisines.

Find a vegan chef to look after you. Another solution to improve your plant-based chef skills is to pack your best knives & your working clothes, and then go talk with the already established vegan restaurants. Asking for an internship might be the fastest way to learn. If you are an intern at a plant-based restaurant you will for sure talk with people passionate about the food, but also about kitchen skills. Be humble and learn. When you give the restaurant the opportunity to teach you everything they know, and you at the same time help them with the daily challenges it will be a win-win situation - if the chemistry is there.

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