Memories are made of these

Chef Oppermann's creations are art, edible art that look and taste so good that they are pretty hard to forget. Mike Peters gets a glimpse of the creative process.

His hands turn pastry into fantasies, from dainty puffs shaped like swans to a multi-layered chocolate bar bristling with paper-thin sails of caramelized sugar. But Yannick Oppermann, the newly installed executive pastry chef at the Peninsula Beijing hotel, insists that he's not in the business of making desserts that are "too pretty to eat".

"I make desserts for the pleasure of the person being served," he says. "Sharing that pleasure is part of the creative process for me."

Oppermann admits that he sometimes cringes when he has created a showpiece for a corporate event or a wedding catered by the hotel.

"When some people want to eat a decoration like that, it's a little bit painful because it took many hours to make.

"My way to make desserts is to make something tasty first, then beautiful," he says as he pipes curlicues of walnut cream onto a gleaming bar of chocolate. "If you do the opposite, make them beautiful but without taste, no one will remember the desserts no matter what they look like. If you make something tasty, people will remember it."

As a top-flight pastry chef, the young Frenchman has to deliver some "wow factor" before the first bite is taken. He acknowledges that his game has become pretty competitive.

"It's kind of a fashion, very trendy whether you are making pastry or you are any kind of chef. There are so many TV shows now about cooking, so it is difficult to play your cards and shine."

So is being a French chef a good way to meet ladies?

"That is a funny question," he says, laughing. Opperman says he met his girlfriend at a travel agency while they were booking flights. "So I can't say that happened because of my work.

"On the other hand, it's for sure a good way to meet women, the only problem is, you don't know if they like you for what you make or for what you are."

Oppermann got the cooking bug at the age of 14, he says, inspired not by fast talking and slicing celebrity chefs on TV but by his uncle, who is a restaurant chef to this day, now working in Jakarta.

"He gave me the passion for food," Oppermann says. "I was a cook at first, but I decided I had more feeling for the pastry, for the sweets."

While his eyes gleam brightly as he sprinkles his favorite French chocolate powder into a mixing bowl of molten caramel, he says that working in China for five years has changed his thinking about sweets.

When he arrived in Hong Kong, he says, he quickly discovered that Asian people don't like sweet desserts. That flash of illumination could have sent a lesser wizard of sugar scampering back to Paris.

Today, he says, "I thank Asians a lot for that! I have reduced the amount of sugar in my recipes 25, 40, even 50 percent, and I really appreciate the desserts now much better.

"When I go back to France now and I try the desserts - oh! They are really, really sweet. Too sweet for me. But now even French people are starting to understand that making desserts with less sugar is better. It's healthy, and you can work with different sugars, honey, fructose, all the sugar contained in the fruits"

"I've also learned from Chinese culture how to better manage your team, without screaming, with more calm and serenity," he says. "You definitely get a better result from people you work with by being a good listener, and trying to understand that we have a different vision, a different mind."

After a recent cooking demonstration at the Peninsula, Oppermann gets animated at a suggestion that making puff pastry from scratch is a waste of time. But isn't the pastry easily found in a grocer's freezer case just as good?

"No!"

When you are creating desserts and presenting them at a table, he says, "it's like you are sending out a part of you. You cannot compare that with something that you just go into a shop and buy. I really take pleasure in making my own puff pastry, to see it proofing, then baking in the oven.

"And the butter you choose when you make your own pastry must be good," he says, "so you will have a better taste, a better crispness."

Nowadays, he says, it's a fast life and people don't cook at home, even in France. But there are no big secrets to it, he says, just training and practice.

"When you say 'nice dessert', people think right away 'difficult', 'complicated', 'too sophisticated for me'".

Opperman tells a recent cooking class that anyone can get tasty results by using quality ingredients, using a cooking thermometer and "knowing your oven very well".

He knows that kitchen disasters have been good for laughs on TV sitcoms since the days of I Love Lucy, and he's had a few. The worst, he says, was at a media dinner hosted by his old boss Alain Ducasse, the two-Michelin-starred chef at Spoon in Hong Kong.

"It was a very big event, but for my chocolate praline I couldn't use my favorite brand of chocolate because it was out of stock. So I used another brand and it was too soft. I took out all of my desserts, 20 minutes before I had to send them to the tables, and they started melting. Terrible! I mean, it wasn't a soup, but it wasn't perfect - and when you present for Mr. Ducasse, everything must be perfect.

"So I sent the most beautiful one first, to his table, and then sent the other desserts out for the media. It wasn't a disaster, and at the end of the dinner, they were all happy. The dessert still tasted great, and that's what they remember."

Contact the writer at michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn.

(China Daily 08/18/2013 page14)