Italy, as you may have noticed, is having a very good year for championships but you may not have heard about one that has nothing to do with sport, namely the World Pastrycook Championship - La Coupe du Monde de la Pâtisserie, which the country won, for the third time, in Lyon on Saturday.
Chefs Massimo Pica, a chocolate specialist, Lorenzo Puca, who specialises in sugarwork and Andrea Restuccia, a gelato specialist, were given ten hours to produce a chocolate dessert for sharing, an ice cream cake and a restaurant dessert plus a chocolate sculpture and a sugar sculpture, both 165 cm high. The team executed all these tasks impeccably and I am delighted to say that the chocolate sharing dessert contained the Sicilian ingredient of Tarocco oranges.
"Nothing to do with sport", I said - except that I imagine the training and preparation must have been just as rigorous for, as a cook, I am exhausted just thinking about having to produce all that in the time allotted! Anyone who watches Bakeoff programmes will have some idea of how difficut it is. Many congratulations, then, to the Italian team and also to their trainer Alessandro Dalmasso.
The runners-up were Japan, France was placed third and the UK a respectable fourth.
I cannot reproduce the pictures but you can view some here.
3 comments:
Reminds me of a programme I saw, I think it's this one from 2009:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1558972/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl
One moving moment came when an elaborate sugar sculpture made by one of the contestants exploded as it was moved to another room (change in temperature and humidity) and the fellow was in despair; one of the judges laid his own MOF medal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meilleur_Ouvrier_de_France in front of him to motivate him to continue; he quickly made something else and yes, gained his own MOF.
I wish I'd seen it!
I love the bee presentations :-)
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