Who's The Best New Pastry Chef?

Avid watchers of reality food TV will say you don't need an award to show pastry's importance. There are enough clips of savory chefs forced into or dreading difficult pastry challenges to fill the world's largest virtual croquembouche. But Food & Wine's announcement that it had named its Best New Pastry Chefs was, if nothing else, a crystallizing moment, an acknowledgment by a major publication of something savory professionals and the growing class of dessert rock stars have long known: Pastry chefs have arrived.

The winners and their recipes will be featured in May's issue of Food & Wine. Who won? Shawn Gawle of Corton (New York City), Bryce Caron of Blackbird (Chicago), Laura Sawicki of La Condesa (Austin), Stella Parks of Table 310 (Lexington, Ky.), and Devin McDavid of Quince/Cotogna (San Francisco). And there are no better insiders to explain what the awards mean than the people most closely associated with them: Food & Wine's editor-in-chief Dana Cowin, deputy food editor Kate Heddings, and Chris Ford of Wit & Wisdom (Baltimore), winner of the first People's Best New Pastry Chef award.

So what does it mean for pastry chefs to be recognized, officially?

"Dessert is not an afterthought," said Cowin. "It's not a ball of ice cream. When you look at a menu and there's chocolate pudding, vanilla ice cream, panna cotta, and a cookie plate, you might say, 'I don't need to have that,' and pass. But what's so exciting is to see things on a menu and to feel compelled to say, 'I actually have to have dessert because it's so seamless with the meal, and such a part of the vision that the chef is expressing.' So I feel that is something to encourage."

Nominations were submitted from trusted sources across America, and only chefs who have run a restaurant pastry kitchen for five years or less were eligible. A team of editors tasted 300 to 400 desserts to determine the finalists. "When we go 'pasting,' when we taste pastries, we'll taste six to seven things in one sitting." And that's just at one restaurant. Editors can end up doing that in three to four restaurants in each city. "We actually had an editor have to do a cleanse," Cowin confided.

Nominees were, of course, encouraged by the attention and the increased authority associated with the award. It supports the idea that restaurants should devote resources to in-house pastry, but for the winners, awards can help shape careers. "Maybe some will open their own shops or be chefs at larger restaurants," Cowin suggested. "And maybe it will help some to develop restaurants where they take the lead, and develop the concept and then bring in a chef to match with their food."

Certainly, but with some 400 nomination-deserved desserts, did any particularly stand out? Isn't there sugar fatigue? If not, which left the greatest impressions? And what trends did editors notice? Which ingredients, plating techniques, and concepts rose and crested?

"I can tell you that Shawn Gawle's desserts at Corton blew everyone away," said Food & Wine's deputy food editor Kate Heddings. "He did this black sesame custard with Concorde grape purée, yuzu gelée, and cocoa nibs. He was telling me today that he's completely obsessed with sesame. He had an obsession with peanut butter when he was a kid and this is his adult version of peanut butter. It sounds cliché but you've got this creative mix of sweet and tart and there's this crunchy mix. It's an experiment in contrast. And then Devin McDavid of Quince/Cotogna did a Tainori chocolate tart with milk chocolate ganache, crispy caramel rice, and praline ice cream. It's like a candy bar in an elegant dessert format."

Desserts by People's Best New Pastry chef Chris Ford also stood out, garnering an award that to the chef represented the crowning achievement of eight years of work. "It's amazing," said Ford. "It's just a great acknowledgement, to be recognized by the editorial community and my peers." Ford, of Wit & Wisdom, chef Michael Mina's new restaurant in Baltimore, graduated from Le Cordon Bleu in Orlando, Fla. "I had this love for food that I didn't really realize until my mom said, 'You should really go to culinary school.'"

Ford, who named Chika Tillman as his biggest influence, described his own approach to pastry as an "elegant nostalgia." "It's trendy to say 'deconstructive' or 'reinvented,' but to take an old idea and maybe say, 'This reminds me of something my grandmother made, but just better,' at the end of the day, that's my ultimate goal, to take the diner back to their childhood, because when you're a kid, that's all you want: sweets."

On the plate, that could be a reinterpretation of Publix grocery store sheet cake. "That's what I grew up eating for birthdays, grocery store sheet cake," said Ford. "And I loved it. You go round and you can't really get a good piece of cake, so that's the kind of thing I'd try to make better. It's simple and classic." But right now at Wit & Wisdom, Ford is more likely known for his Baltimore Bar, an homage to the classic candy bar that, while technically not named for Baltimore-born baseball legend Babe Ruth, certainly benefitted from its association with the slugger. "My team and I wanted to do something to connect to the city," the chef explained. The dessert features a brownie topped with crunchy peanut butter ganache, caramel, and chocolate mousse. "The inside is soft and gooey, and then it's kind of reversed — topped with candied peanuts, some brittle, Maldon sea salt, dehydrated chocolate mousse, and peanut butter powder."

You can see more of Ford's desserts on his blog, where he posts photos he takes himself, a growing trend among chefs both savory and sweet. "I use a Canon t3i Rebel and a 50 mm aperture lens with a 2.8 aperture," he explained. Photography provides him with another creative outlet, a way to understand his own development, and the means to highlight the perfect angle and important aspects of his desserts. "A lot of people ask about my settings, but I just shoot with auto. Just like with a lot of pastry work I've taught myself, photography is one of those things you have an eye for or you teach yourself. I see something and I want to capture it so I have it long-term. A while back I wanted to take as many photos as I could in my life so I could look back and reflect. Even now I can see my growth."

For Ford, that growth has currently led him to focus on simplicity, a principal he sees as the next big thing in dessert. "I think the trend of over-the-top crazy combinations is ending and it's about getting back to basics." He may be on to something. Asked what trends Food & Wine editors noticed while sampling desserts across America, deputy editor Kate Heddings cited the omnipresence of one simple dessert topping, "Everything had a crumble, even if just as a garnish." Dana Cowin agreed — to a point. "It seems we don't want to be shocked. We want some comfort. And that's almost the nature of dessert, but sometimes the setting demands that we're surprised. Even talking about homey desserts, there's often something that we're like, 'Wow!'"

There were die-hard dessert flavors like lemon, hazelnut, a movement toward milk chocolate, and a return to familiar presentations like semifreddo, but there were also surprising ingredients, like sesame, and an increased influence of Middle Eastern cuisine.

Other notable trends included cremeaux, "Basically a cross between a custard and a pudding," explained Heddings. "It's everywhere." Notable trends included a continued influx of savory components — desserts involving smoke, duck fat, and foie gras. Tasters saw lots of black pepper during the summer, and chestnuts during winter. As for garnish, they often involved toasted milk powder and white chocolate powder.

Presentation-wise, the editors noted that pastry chefs seemed to be having more fun — demonstrating an increased ability to work with familiar flavors and plating techniques, but breaking them down and bringing them back together again in different ways. "There's a very interesting way of plating that seems to be taking hold where the dessert is either long and skinny, or long and skinny and plated in the shape of a crescent — a half-moon but narrow," Heddings observed. Some chefs have even started riffing on the idea of the cheese plate. "It's like they're saying, 'OK, I'm not going to serve three cheeses, but I'm going to take these three cheeses and make them into a dessert,'" she explained.

"In the same way that we've seen tableside service in restaurants on the savory side, we're also seeing some tableside presentations in pastry — and that's pretty stunning," Cowin said. "A sugar that melts, and then there's a surprise inside, for instance. I think pastry chefs are looking for new ways to find excitement."

And that's great for diners, who can also be heartened by one of the most exciting things Food & Wine's editors continue to notice: fewer molten chocolate cakes.