Dorie Greenspan

For one hour we were transported to pastry central in Paris as cookbook author and Bon Appetit special correspondent Dorie Greenspan took us on a tour of the city’s greatest patisseries and showed us how the latest and most innovative creations of the top chefs are based on the deeply rooted traditions of the pastry chef’s art. We saw how Sebastian Gaudard of Delicabar takes a single form, perhaps a roulade, a simple quatre-quarts (a pound cake) or even a mousse, and works it three different ways, highlighting vegetables, fruits and chocolates, in his cakes and desserts; how once immutable classics like the Gateau Saint-Honore, created in the mid-19th century, or the religieuse, a cream-puff sweet, can now be found in flavors like rose and violet at Laduree; and how Fauchon has rejuvenated the éclair, offering it in more than half a dozen flavors. There were also highlights from Pierre Herme’s Spring-Summer 2005 Collection which, like a couturier’s collection, was introduced to the press in a runway show. Among the season’s treats were the latest version of the Ispahan, Herme’s bestselling rose and raspberry cake. The original version, two rose-flavored macaroons sandwiching rose cream, raspberries and litchis and topped with a fresh rose petal, has since been spun into a buche de Noel, a galette des rois, an ice-cream sandwich and the 2005 mini-cake on an ice-cream-pop stick, one of three little tea cakes in the series called Mister H. that came down the runway. Closing the presentation, Dorie showed a video of the late baker Lionel Poilane making old-fashioned sables the old-fashioned way – by hand on the baker’s bench. It was a tribute to tradition as well as to a man who worked all his life to integrate tradition into modern life.


Yusuf Yaran

Seeing Yusuf Yaran in civilian togs and talking to him about pastries from France and Italy, you might have taken him for a hip, well-traveled Angeleno with a sweet tooth, but attending his demonstration it was clear he was a messenger from a culture most of us knew little about. Yusuf, who has worked around the world, is the pastry chef at the Ciragan Palace Hotel Kempinski in Instanbul, where the main dining room has won wide acclaim for serving traditional Ottoman cuisine.

Turkey was one of the earliest centers of “the sweet culture”, a place where sweets flourished in the courts of the sultans and pashas and, as Yusuf explained, today sweets remain central to Turkish culture. “It is exceptional not to eat sweets at a Turkish meal,” he told us, then added that it is a custom throughout the country to not only have a sweet dessert, but to eat something sweet before dinner. (Could there be a better place for a pastry chef?) Similarly, he pointed out that if you have guests in your home, you are expected to welcome them with sweets. Of course, after hearing Yusuf talk about the panoply of the country’s sweets, you have to wonder how anyone could decide what to serve, since traditional Turkish sweets seem to come in endless varieties – for example, there are more than 50 kinds of baklava and over 250 kinds of lokum, a sweet most of us know best in its Turkish Delight form.

Yusuf Yaran Giving a Demonstration at the 2005 Worlds of Flavor Baking and Pastry Arts Invitational Retreat

For his demonstration, the chef chose to make two very traditional sweets using two very exotic ingredients. The first dessert was a pumpkin confit – and it wasn’t the pumpkin that was exotic. The vegetable was cut and left to soak in a solution of water and plaster of Paris! As Harold McGee explained, the plaster of Paris, a.k.a. calcium carbonate, serves to break down some of the pumpkin’s cell walls and to build up the vegetable’s pectin. Rinsed, then confited in sugar in a slow oven, what emerged was a sweet that was gently crisped by the soak and reminiscent in texture of watermelon pickles. So that we could see the effect of the plaster of Paris even more clearly, Yusuf served pumpkin confit made without the pre-soak – it was sweet and soft and closer to what most of us would have expected had the pumpkin been slow-roasted or gently simmered in a sugar syrup. The pumpkin confit was served with its pan juices and crushed walnuts and tasted as modern as if the recipe had been invented that moment.

Similarly, the Palace-Style Rose Milk Pudding was both profoundly traditional and very up-to-date – can there be a hotter flavor than rose these days? The surprise ingredient in this dessert was mastic, obtained from the sap of mastic bushes. It is not easy to describe the flavor of mastic except to say that it is as elemental and, yes, as resinous, as you’d think sap would be; neither sweet nor bitter, it had an almost flat, vegetal flavor that played as a kind of base, or sub-flavor, for the floral sweetness of the rosewater. Suffice it to say that no other history lesson ever tasted this good.