The Future of Pastry

Where do we go from here?

Ethnic flavors and inspiration: I’m always surprised that while people are receptive to the wanderings of avant-garde cuisine, they remain largely ignorant of the cuisine of ‘immigrant’ cultures. Mexican-style churros and Japanese-inspired mochi ice cream may be moving into the mainstream as have ethnic ingredients like dulce de leche and matcha but we still have lots of room to grow.  Cuisines that we have yet to raid include Indian, Thai, and Middle Eastern.  Ingredients that we have yet to exploit are adzuki (red bean paste), pandan leaves, durian fruit,  and rosewater. Gulab jamun, anyone?

Preserving Tradition: This is an interesting time to be a pastry chef because while some pastry chefs are pushing the boundaries of avant garde desserts, others are looking towards the past for inspiration. In keeping with the saying “everything old is new again”, chefs are once again curing meats, pickling vegetables, and making sausages. For us in the pastry kitchen, we are canning jams, preserves, marmalades with some enterprising chefs selling their wares in small retail areas of their restaurants. Other chefs have been riding the wave of local, seasonal produce by freezing them as purees for use during the off season. And while fine-dining chefs are striving to re-invent classic desserts like tart tatin and creme brulee, others are content to continue preparing the classics.

‘Alternative’ Desserts: Let’s face it, no one needs to eat dessert in the way that we need to eat other foods to live. With rising rates of diabetes and obesity, dessert is regularly fingered as the culprit and is {seeminly} loaded with allergens and villainous ingredients: milk, refined sugars, eggs, flour, and nuts. Have you ever tried to make dessert without these ingredients? Would you even consider dessert to be dessert if it didn’t contain sugar, eggs, flour and milk? Even so, some pastry chefs are answering the call for alternatives to the overly-sweet, mousse-based confections that we traditionally call dessert. Kyotofu is a NYC-based Japanese dessert bar that features tofu-based desserts, many of which are vegan and gluten-free.   Hu Kitchen, also based in NYC, features gluten-free pastries made without cane sugar.

If we can learn anything from up-and-coming trends in the pastry field, it’s that it’s time to rethink dessert.

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