When Franck Geuffroy — the instructor from Ducasse Education — pronounced, “Action”, all 15 participants at the baking workshop (organised by the Taj Group of Hotels) beat a hasty retreat to their stations to put into practice what they had just seen demonstrated a few minutes earlier.
I had been watching the group of 15 make sweet pastry, the first step in a lemon tart. The participants, working in two groups had added butter, sugar, egg yolks and four to a KitchenAid mixer to get the dough to the right consistency.
For Daniel Fernandes, whose family runs a catering business, the opportunity to hone his skills in patisserie, which his father has outsourced so far, is something he didn’t want to miss. Much like the others who participated at this workshop held at Andheri’s Callebaut Academy, Fernandes had paid ₹15,000 for a class with Geuffroy a teacher at Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée, Paris. Geuffroy one of France’s top dessert chefs began teaching at the prestigious culinary institute, Alain Ducasse Education (where he’s the Pastry Director), six years ago.
As part of a tie-up between the Taj and the Ducasse Education, Geuffroy is one of two chefs travelling the country taking classes with baking enthusiasts. This will be followed by a trip to the Institute of Hotel Management (IHM) Aurangabad where chefs from across the country will get a chance to learn new techniques, plating ideas and keep up with international patisserie trends. The workshop at IHM is an alliance between the Maulana Azad Education Trust and the Taj Group. To wrap-up, Geuffroy has a workshop in Delhi for Taj chefs from across north India.
At the class, Geuffroy gamely fielded questions on vegetarian substitutes for gelatin and its proportion in recipes. The chef talked about different brands that he’s encountered on his travels—often leading to subtle changes in flavour and cooking time. “There is a challenge with moving from place to place,” he said. “In the Philippines, I had to make a croissant, and I found it hard to find the right ingredients. But I have to oblige, to whatever circumstance and situation comes [and] constantly adjust.” It’s this ability to keep tweaking recipes, while teaching them, is one of the reasons that Geuffroy enjoys his job, and interacting with students. He elaborated, “You need to have [the] understanding, if you don’t have the right ingredient, there will be a difference.”
The participants, who varied from expatriate wives to Indians with a penchant for baking, were eager to learn, working to replicate the techniques shown. They took videos on their phones to make a note of the consistency that the pate à choux should achieve before being piped onto a baking tray and topped with chopped peanuts, walnuts and almonds. Working collaboratively, the members of each group took turns working with ingredients, manning the mixers, whisking ingredients, zesting lemons, filling piping bags and then piping out dough. When asked why she enrolled, Klara (who declined to give her last name), a Hungarian who’s been living in Mumbai for three years says, “the opportunity to improve my technique,” In the same breath, she added, “and to meet a big chef”.
As the class took a break for lunch, I chatted with Geuffroy as he talked about working with seasonal ingredients like the king of fruits. “To make a mango tart here would be better than using any other fruit, since it is available here locally,” he said. For him travelling around the world throws up its fair share of challenges, but there’s the benefit of local produce to balance that out.
