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Anyone who wasn’t at this year’s Worlds of Flavor® Baking and Pastry Arts Invitational Retreat must have had a tough time finding dessert, since the best of the country’s pastry chefs, and many of their counterparts from abroad, left their kitchens to come to the The Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone campus for this third annual retreat, co-hosted by Food Arts Magazine.

This year’s theme, Of Modern Flavors and Lost Arts: The European-American Pastry Connection, gave the more than 50 assembled pastry chefs, dessert specialists, food experts and representatives from the conference’s generous sponsors the chance to explore the pastry arts of Europe, which have been — and which continue to be — our country’s deepest, most recognizable and most prolific source of inspiration and culinary exchange. Through presentations, demonstrations and tastings, we drew the lines between the preparations, flavors and techniques we use daily in the American kitchen and their sources in Europe, “old” and “new”. And, perhaps most important, we found new ideas and new creative energy.

A Demonstration by Spanish Chef Oriol Balaguer

A more contained and more narrowly focused offshoot of the CIA’s Worlds of Flavor Conference held in November, this retreat provides something rare — time for pastry chefs to work with their colleagues. If it was rare for our American chefs, it was even rarer for many of the Europeans. As Oriol Balageur, the avant-garde pastry chef from Barcelona, commented: “I had never even heard of such an event before coming here and I am impressed by how open, generous and helpful the chefs are with each other.”

It was in this spirit of generosity that chefs from both here and abroad explained how they worked, the materials they worked with and the sources they drew on for inspiration. Over the course of two days, experts talked about everything from the history of strudel and the current rages in Parisian pastry to the sweets of the Ottoman Empire. There were demonstrations of European classics, such as Sachertorte and dumplings, and some of American sweets with European ancestors, such as ice-cream filled crepes or Italian panettone made with strictly American ingredients. And there was the grande finale on the conference’s third day, a tasting of every participating pastry chef’s own rendition of a dessert incorporating the flavors, ingredients, techniques or sensibility of a European dessert.

It was fascinating to see how quickly the conference’s ideas became reality: Many of the chefs tweaked their finale recipes so that they could include something that had excited them in the previous days’ discussions. At the last minute, Alex Espiritu eschewed chocolate and caramel for nougat glace with a rose-infused syrup, an edible homage to what we had learned about Turkey. Similarly, in a flash of spontaneity, Jule Vranian’s offering included candied lemon and kumquat zest from fruit she plucked on her way into the kitchen, and it took a sweet-and-savory turn when she infused her sour cherry compote with black pepper. “I’d never done that before,” she said, “but I thought this was a good environment in which to try it out – being here you’re motivated by new things and not afraid to try them.”