it’s the most creative area.
You can give a chef a steak and a few vegetables and I know there’s many different ways and techniques of presenting those ingredients, but the raw ingredients that the pastry chefs work with on a day to day basis, the possibilities are endless. You get given eggs, flour, sugar, butter, milk, cream and vanilla and you can just knock out hundreds of different possibilities and I’ll never know them all.
That’s the beautiful thing about the job, it’s nice to learn new things every day from all different types of people.
What would you say is your signature dessert?
I’m not a traditional pastry chef in the sense that a lot of pastry chefs I find quite old school, they use lots of sugar techniques. My speciality are things that we used to eat when we were younger. For example, taking a trifle and reinventing it to make something completely different from what you used to have, so you have all those same sensations that you got from eating a particular dessert when you were younger but it looks completely different.
I also often try and lighten things up – whether it’s taking a lemon meringue pie, I really enjoy those flavour combinations, and trying to reinterpret them and do them differently. It’s flavour focus really, I wouldn’t say that there is a particular dessert that I do that’s me in a nutshell because I enjoy so many different things but I like simple things – it is definitely flavour focused.
Chocolate is also a big thing for me, the awareness of chocolate is growing and the different chocolates that you can use when making a recipe has such a big impact on the outcome. It’s kind of like wine, where it is from really can impact the flavour profile that it has. For example Venezuelan chocolate on the whole is a lot smoother but I love the fact that when you get into procuring unique ingredients chocolate is no longer just chocolate. It’s the same for bread – at Fifteen we buy really course, unrefined flour to make our bread as it has such a huge impact on flavour.
So talking about chocolate - had you entered any competitions before you won Callebaut’s For The Love of Chocolate competition?
This was my first competition! I like making great food and sharing with people and I’ve never really felt the need to enter a
competition. I do enjoy going to industry competitions though but the reason why the Callebaut one is good is because it’s purely chocolate based.
It appealed to me because the categories they have are quite nostalgic. They wanted a chocolate dessert and it could be with ice cream or brownie; it gave me the opportunity to create quite a nostalgic dessert which was fun.
How easy was it deciding what to make for it?
Recently I’ve been playing around with ice cream sandwiches. In the village that I grew up in we got a lot of ice cream vans around and I remember you would always get some sort of ice cream sandwich – a soggy wafer with some ice cream in the middle and some crunchy chocolate around the outside and 100s and 1000s.
It was just quite a kitsch, old school thing that I thought was quite fun and you don’t need a knife and fork to eat it, you pick it up, you eat it, you get messy and that’s what I like about the food, the fun side of it. That was the idea behind it I just wanted to do something that was fun, I thought that people would be doing plated basic desserts or quite chef-y things and I wanted to be chef-y with a lot of technique but still fun.
Do you think competitions are key for pastry chefs? Are they a good opportunity for people like yourself to showcase your skills?
Yeah, competitions are good. There seems to be a certain kind of person that will tend to enter a competition. It is quite an ordeal and is quite stressful, it’s a completely different level of stress from working a busy service; it depends on the person you are.
I do think they are important – any way that you can draw attention to the industry is a good thing. Everyone likes the idea of being a chef nowadays but for pastry chefs there’s still some way to go in terms of highlighting the industry and the fact that there’s a lot of possibilities in the industry as well it’s not just restaurant based.
For people who are in your team and the group, are they able to move around?
Yeah. That to me is one of the most beautiful things about the group. The aim is that if someone wants to leave a restaurant, you can give them another opportunity within the company because we have a number of different places doing different things; there is quite a lot of scope for moving around.
Doing this role it enables the company to carve out a real amount of good opportunities for pastry chefs. Jamie really likes pastry chefs as he started out at Neal Street Restaurant with Antonio
Carluccio as his pastry chef, so he has an understanding of what a pastry chef is. Some chefs think that they don’t take it that seriously or there isn’t that appreciation there but he really values them within his company and he also involves me in other areas that aren’t just pastry related because he sees the benefit of having a structured pastry chef and my point of view that I will have on other areas of the business.
I’m not just limited to pastry, I have an influence on other areas of the menu as it is a collective and pastry chefs are a different breed and they can see things slightly differently.
What are your future plans, anything coming up that you can reveal?
Yeah Barbecoa 2 on Piccadilly, we’re opening on the back end of this year, it’s going to be a huge opening, a large scale restaurant and it’s the first time we’re going to do an all-day offer. So the view there is to do breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea– a great opportunity for a pastry chef to showcase some skills and a good creative outlet. Obviously this is brilliant for a pastry chef and we’re going to be right on Piccadilly so a great place for people to come and experience that.
