It's All About Pastry Chefs

[weinoo]

The January 3, 2001 issue of The New Yorker has a very cool article by Adan Gopnik called Sweet Evolution. In it, Gopnik heads to WD-50 in NYC to chat with dessert guru Alex Stupak, to Washington, D. C. and the White House to chat with Bill Yosses and finally to Spain to sample Catalonia's cutting edge dessert "scene," to meet and visit with the Adria brothers at their workshop in Barcelona and finally to visit and dine at El Celler de Can Roca with its star pasty whiz ("the young Mozart of pastry") Jordi Roca.

All to figure out the meaning of dessert...its past, its present and its future. One of the things he learns is that the two great movements in French cooking, according to his (Gopnik's) interpretation of Ferran Adria's interpretation were:

Carême's early-nineteenth-century revolution, and Michel Guérard's twentieth-century one and both had come from pastry cooks escaping the limits of pastry. Pastry-makers were natural magicians, and magic in cooking would always come from them.

I wonder if everyone agrees with that?

[AAQuesada]

You can add Michel Richard to the list of creative pastry chefs gone over to the savory side. Interesting article, thanks for posting about it or I may not have seen it.

There is a lot of truth to it of course it doesn't tell the whole story. Escoffier did some famous deserts but came from the savory side. I would say he was fairly revolutionary.

[weinoo]

You can add Michel Richard to the list of creative pastry chefs gone over to the savory side. Interesting article, thanks for posting about it or I may not have seen it.

There is a lot of truth to it of course it doesn't tell the whole story. Escoffier did some famous deserts but came from the savory side. I would say he was fairly revolutionary.

I didn't realize that Richard came from the pastry side of things - I like his restaurants a lot, and just last week ate at Central.

But I don't think you'd disagree when I say that even though some of M. Richard's dishes may be a revelation, he has not necessarily revolutionized cuisine and cooking in the same way that Adria suggests Carême and Guérard had.