Catering & Hotel News Middle East caught up with three chefs about their recent pastry trip to Singapore.
To make a good dessert, the quality and consistency of the ingredients being used is of utmost importance to ensure the end product is exactly how a chef envisioned it to be and in order to achieve this, using the perfect cream, one of the most staple ingredients of any dessert is vital.
We spoke to three chefs, Antoine Chassonery, executive pastry chef for Fauchon Middle East, Nicolas Bacheyre, a 31 year old chef at the helm of the dessert menu at Un Dimanche a Paris and Vincent Cockenpot, executive pastry chef, Bateel on the use of Cream of Europe in desserts.
Chef Bacheyre, who was part of the Singapore trip and also hosted a pastry evening for desserts made of European Cream, last month said: “I used about four different brands of European cream to make my desserts and I would recommend them to other chefs because European cream is made with a lot of tradition and knowledge and this brings a lot of taste to the Cream. I travel lot for masterclasses and I can say that French cream is the best, the taste is so good you can almost drink it like milk.
“The second point is the exhausting flavour. You do not need to put in a lot of vanilla, chocolate or other ingredients in the cream because the cream itself is going to bring a lot of flavour hence you do not need to spend more money on added quantities of other ingredients.”
Chef Cockenpot who started working in the pastry kitchen in France at the age of 15 said: “ Singapore was an amazing trip, the team leader asked me to do my cake with the gianduja milk, mix of milk chocolate and hazelnut paste, from Valrhona and I was so happy to use this chocolate as the raw material because it is one of my favorites, full of flavour, tasty, a little sweet but so generous.
“It made a perfect combination with the French cream. The fresh cream is very easy to use. I would recommend using the French cream because if you want to make a French pastry you have to use French raw materials. The taste and texture is very stable at any given time.”
Chef Antoine Chassonery, who handles the pastry creations for 20 branches of Fauchon in 10 countries said: “Not just for the Singapore trip, I mainly use French ingredients for my cooking because French cream is the best. It is one of the pillars of dessert making. If you use good chocolate, you get a good cake and vice versa, same goes for cream.
“The quality, taste, technicality all of it is just right in European cream, especially French and when you get all of this ins one product you will not look at any other product because you will win more guests with good quality food. Once you start using European cream, the guests will be able to tell the different too and that is the ultimate goal for any chef.”
