Cooking at home vs. cooking at work

[stamina888]

These are very different skills.   

When cooking at home, the goal is simple: make good food.

Being a good cook is only 1 part of being good at a cooking job.  Sort of like how making good songs is only 1 aspect of being a musician: you still need to market, network, have a public persona, etc.  You can't just release good songs and ignore the other aspects.

Other aspects include:
Being clean, organized, prepared
Time efficiency and multitasking
Adapting to changes on the fly
People skills
Work ethic/ and other general things that apply to any job

Cooking isn't just about the recipe.  You can find good recipes from restaurant jobs, but you can also find them free online.  It's more about the technique and attention to detail.

I've learned a bit about cooking from my jobs.  But you can also learn from books, youtube and trial and error in your own experience.

[TXCraig1]

In general, I disagree with pretty much everything you wrote. Whether cooking at home now or when I cooked at restaurants, I saw your "other aspects" the same either way. I also disagree that you have to be a good cook to cook commercially. Certainly there are restaurants where it matters, "cooking at work" is hardly a monolithic thing, but most well run restaurants eliminate variable and opportunities for error to the point where little skill is required.

Similarly, I see little in common between cooks and musicians when it comes to comparing hobbyist and professional.

[Timpanogos Slim]

I have only several months of commercial cooking experience and they were all in the 90's. But i know people who've operated restaurants, and I know a successful food truck owner who also operates an incubator kitchen & commissary that appears to be profitable. 

Pizza may not be the best window to compare the differences between professional and home cooking.

It's obvious that unless you're in a position to charge hundreds of dollars a plate, and probably even then, in a restaurant context you have to think hard about economies of scale, assuring a consistent product, and moving as much of your manual labor outside of the meal rush hours as you can.

And that necessarily means that a lot of the time the recipes are going to be different. Because neither the overly involved recipes intended for a dedicated home cook to slave over for hours nor the recipes intended for the overworked parent who just wants to whip something out in under an hour can directly translate to the needs of a restaurant.

Obviously it varies by the type of restaurant. In a steakhouse you're doing a lot of similar on-demand one-offs. In a restaurant known for curries you have various large pots of gravy and a bunch of different meat and veg to mix in. etc.