The internet is full of fabulous facts about everything from current events to the history basket weaving. Because of this, as we research for our daily content on food trucks, food carts and street food, we stumble upon some items of knowledge that we just did not know. We have decided when these fun facts pop up, that we would share them with our readers in our section titled “Did You Know?”

For today’s DKY facts we will look at Chef Hats.

The Facts: The tall chef’s hat or toque blanche traditionally had one hundred pleats to represent the number of ways an egg could be cooked.

• Toques (from the Arabic taq for “round”), originally worn by French magistrates, were adopted by the inventors of French haute cuisine, Marie-Antoine Caréme and Auguste Escoffier, to make it clear just who was boss – literally “chef” – in the kitchen.
• The reason they are white (along with the traditional chef uniform) was to represent the cleanliness of the kitchen.
• Different heights of hats sometimes indicate rank within a kitchen.