Her desserts are often not at all sweet and she couldn’t give a fig if people complain that they don’t look great on Instagram.
But that did not stop Jessica Prealpato being named the best pastry chef on the planet Tuesday by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants ranking — the first woman ever to receive the honour.
The 32-year-old French woman, who is about to have her first child, is the creator of a whole new genre of guilt-free patisserie.
Photo: AFP
For Prealpato it is not about how a dessert looks, it’s how it tastes — and the feelgood glow afterwards.
The subtle and sublime creations she turns out at the three-star Michelin restaurant of the Plaza Athenee hotel in Paris are a rebuff to the sugar-rush burn of food porn.
Yet even she has not dared to have her father — a patissier forged in full-on sugar worship of French tradition — taste her creations that marry strawberries with pine and lemon with seaweed.
“He would not understand what I do at all,” she said.
Prealpato has eschewed the sugar high to go for what her boss, the French superchef Alain Ducasse, calls naturalit — or naturalness — bringing out the full range of flavours that an ingredient already has. What Prealpato also does is use ingredients that would never normally make it onto a dessert trolley.
So you have malted beer sorbet with barley crumble and hop galettes, cherry olive vinaigrette or vanilla Jerusalem artichokes with truffles.
SUGAR AS SEASONING
“We shake people up,” laughed Prealpato, the fourth French chef in a row to pick up the top prize.
She has already produced a book of 50 of her desserts called Desseralite, including her “All Rhubarb,” where the often astringent plant is served roasted, raw, fermented, grilled and poached.
“I love to use vinegars and try every style of cooking so that I get the most flavors out of a product,” said Prealpato, one of a tiny number of female patisserie chefs working in three-star restaurants.
Some of her peers have criticized her for the unfussy way she presents her food, claiming it is not sophisticated enough for such an upscale establishment. And four years ago, when she was starting out at the hotel, she said that Ducasse left her in tears when he refused to taste one of her first fruit-based desserts.
“I can see why now,” she said. “I had presented it like a patisserie chef usually would, with lots of mousse, cream and a tuile. For him, a dessert didn’t have to be about these things.”
So Prealpato “took everything away... today I rarely ever work with chocolate or coffee.”
Instead her desserts play with sourness and acidity, and she uses sugar as others would salt — for seasoning.
PRETTY ISN’T EVERYTHING
“I understand why some clients may not like that,” she said.
Initially hurt by such negative feedback, Prealpato has become used to it.
It also makes being crowned the world’s best pastry chef all the sweeter.
“I am amazed. It’s enormous for me. I never would have guessed that my patisseries would go that far.”
With a frankness rare at the top of her profession, Prealpato admitted that “they aren’t exactly beautiful to look at.”
“They may seem very simple but a huge amount of work goes into making them,” she said.
“Her cooking is absolutely of the moment,” said William Drew of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. “The way she manipulates natural sugars without sacrificing flavor chimes perfectly with the cultural zeitgeist to cut down on sugar intake.”
On average it takes a month to create a new recipe and her dessert menu changes with the seasons. However, the Earth generally does not shake when Prealpato puts them on Instagram — unlike for her Parisian rival Cedric Grolet who won the title last year and has more than 1.3 million fans who eagerly share his visually stunning creations.
“My poor 20,000 followers!” the humble Prealpato joked.
Unlike Grolet — who like her is something of a sugar sceptic — she said she doesn’t have the time to make her desserts look good by putting them on a white background.
Nor does she have anything against traditional French patisseries, which she loves — she just doesn’t want to spend her life making them.
“I came here [to work with Ducasse] because I was sick of doing chocolate pistachio and cherry almond all the time. Some classics are so good I don’t see how you can revisit them,” she said.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS