Photo: Honey cake by Igor Melnikov
There aren’t many things that Chinese, Belgian, American, Hungarian, Japanese, Spanish, Argentinian, Chilean, and French people are passionate about at the same time. Soccer might be one of them. What is certain is that among those few activities that are as appealing as they are universal is patisserie. Above and beyond culture, language, beliefs, and individual hobbies, pastry chefs around the world speak a common language made up of words such as sugar, butter, flour, and chocolate. They all use their hands to a greater or lesser extent. They wield knives, whisks, and rolling pins with precision and open the freezer and oven doors several times a day.
But most importantly, all pastry chefs, or at least the vast majority of those we have had the pleasure of meeting at so good.. magazine 34, also share a kind of unshakeable professional pride. They know how lucky they are. It is that indescribable satisfaction of knowing that you have chosen the right profession.
Pastry chefs don’t get intimidated or feel inferior to cooks, no matter how much more visibility and media attention the latter may have achieved. Pastry chefs and cooks know that the world of desserts requires technical and aesthetic skills that are reserved for only a few, and that what a pastry chef does can only be done by a pastry chef. The profession demands a complicated and strange balance between technical rigor and something much more intangible, such as creativity and artistic sense. At that indeterminate point between the absolute discipline of the scale and the timer, and the imagination needed to turn chocolate or caramel into pure art, lives the pastry chef, proud and passionate to the point of exhaustion.
If there are two pastry chefs at a meeting, no one should doubt for a moment what the topic of conversation will be to which they will end up dragging the rest.
