Working in a commercial kitchen is…

hard.

It’s loud and hot and hectic. There are knives and flames and harsh chemicals to cut, cook, and clean things, respectively. In the early weeks, you will burn yourself and acquire an assortment of scars on your arms and hands that will telegraph your newfound status as a kitchen professional.

You will stand for hours on hard floors while prepping ingredients, rolling dough, baking pie, and at the end of the day you will wash—no, scrub—you will scrub pots and pans, clean and sanitize surfaces, sweep and mop the floors. Later, your bones will ache and you will reflect on how you waited tables back in the day but had no idea how much lifting and carrying and overall laboring was going on in the kitchen.

The calm before the storm in a shared commercial kitchen.

Working in a shared commercial kitchen is even harder. You won’t have a dedicated space, which means you will share the ovens and griddles and mixers with other busy cooks and bakers. You’ll pay for every inch of real estate: shelves and floor space, a tiny section in the walk-in, a small rack in the freezer. You will walk to and from your dry storage/walk-in/freezer and work station constantly, wheeling appliances and sheet racks back and forth, blurting out “Hot stuff!” and “Behind you!”  Your things will go missing, e.g. spoons and bowls and random ingredients. This will cause you to beg and borrow from your kitchen mates. You will feed them experimental pies in exchange.

You will meet some super cool chefs who will teach you things and suggest equipment you might want to purchase when they see you peeling apples with a tiny potato peeler or squeezing key limes with the same kind of hand-held juicer your grandmother used to use to make your limeade when you were a kid.

You won’t eat or drink all day or until one of the Super Cool Chefs sees you have wilted since early this morning and offers you a slice of marinated duck or some other fancy morsel you’ve never tasted before because you make pie, not croissants.

Your aim is to have your own kitchen one day or share one with a chef you admire.

And that’s what I did this weekend. I rented a kick-ass kitchen space from a chef I admire. I’ve made some other upgrades too: a dough sheeter, an electric juicer, an actual corer/peeler thingy for the apples another chef friend gave me.

I’m planning to make some amazing pies and pie-adjacent things.

You’ll see.