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This is good, this is good. Okay, I’ll start with the heavy ones. Watch out, hot ahead, when Guillaume and his entourage arrive in the kitchen. It’s a bit of a landing. So for now, we’ll put everything on the end. Food processors, And then we’ll spread out. three crates containing an arsenal of utensils
Bowl, chocolate bowl and a precious cooler with ingredients weighed to the gram. Mango and passion fruit pulp, sugar, peanuts and cocoa beans. This young pastry prodigy is about to compete in the final of the French Dessert Championship. So I begin. Before the battle, final instructions to the young apprentice drawn at random to
Assist him. And you come, you place the circle. The same way I ask. We’re going to war. War. It’s five hours of war. We’re not here to amuse ourselves. But the pressure’s on Guillaume has been preparing for this contest for eight months.
Ok, well this is the day that’s going to pretty much define the next five, five, ten years. I think for everyone here. The championship is like a tremendous springboard. Facing Guillaume, another candidate, the hopefuls of French pastry-making. They are students at the Lycée Hôtelier or apprentices in restaurants.
They’re hoping to win a title that will open the doors to the finest establishments. During a five-hour competition they have to concoct two desserts. An improvised creation using surprise ingredients. You have fifteen seconds left. and a personal creation. The end of months of work. Among the candidates, Colline, nineteen years old.
Careful with that… Yeah, when you’re leaning up there. She didn’t expect to be selected for this grand final and will have to fight her worst enemy, stress. jeez screw it ! Come on, we’ve got to go, we’ve got fifteen minutes left. You’re free to go. To decide between the candidates, twenty gastronomy professionals.
At their head is Emmanuel Renaud, a three-star chef. That’s it, we’re in another minute. In a few hours, they’ll elect the next French Junior Dessert Champion. Preparing for this competition has turned Guillaume’s life upside down. A few days before the event, breakfast with Emeline, who shares his life.
The last time I made jam, I made apricot caramel. Son of a teacher and a computer engineer, Guillaume fell into pastry-making by chance. But in recent months, his girlfriend has seen him transform. He’s changed completely, he’s much more passionate about pastry now. I find that
At the very beginning, even if you were already I think you’re more motivated than before Both obtained their degree in culinary engineering from the same hotel school in Alsace. The couple now dream of working in a palace on the French Riviera Madame loves the south and the sun.
If I send a CV with Guillaume Dufresne, degree plus honors, that’s fine. But Guillaume Dufresne, degree plus honors, plus good results at the French Dessert Championship, is much better. Maybe I won’t even need to send in a CV. Maybe people will come straight to me, I don’t know.
Emeline isn’t the only one backing Guillaume for the competition. Behind him, an entire restaurant has rallied behind him. A restaurant in Strasbourg’s historic center. A one-star gastronomic establishment, renowned for its lobster with Alsace cream or its Arctic char with snails, crayfish sauce. Emeline has been hired as a commis de cuisine. Hello chef
Guillaume, on the other hand, is on a sandwich course. Three weeks here and one week at school, where he’s doing a year’s specialization in restaurant desserts. Are we all set for lunch? Fabien Rau, the restaurant’s chef, decided to coach him to become a champion. ? Right, then.
He’s training his colt for the dreaded mystery basket test. Here’s your basket for today. He has assembled a dozen ingredients with which Guillaume has three hours to invent a dessert. I think you’ll be able to bring different textures, different temperatures. And some of them are confusing. Dehydrated porcini mushrooms and hay,
A choice that owes nothing to chance. The chef has done his homework. Come on, you’ve got two minutes left. These are Emmanuel Renaud’s favorite ingredients, president of the jury. He’s someone who works a lot with foraged products. So mushrooms and hay are
Really products he uses in his daily cooking. So maybe to throw the candidates off balance a bit, he’ll call on what he likes to work with. So maybe it’ll work, yes. two pm, you start. After the statutory fifteen minutes for reflection, Guillaume takes the plunge.
He infuses the hay to make an ice cream. Then he invents a chocolate ganache with porcini mushrooms. You can smell it inside. It’s very tasty. The gestures are precise. This is the seventh time Guillaume has trained here in real-life conditions. He moves fast. In this small room, he has everything at hand.
But on the day of the competition, he’ll have to run between the ovens and fridges of a gigantic kitchen. So the chef adds a handicap. Do you know the rule ? No. Do you know the rule here? At regular intervals, to waste his time, he forces Guillaume to go
Up and down the stairs. The chef and his traps, I think it’s going to last from the first training session to the last. Last time, he had asked me to turn off the freezer, which I absolutely need so that it freezes in time. Guillaume starts the most delicate part of his recipe.
Making ultra-thin chocolate circles. Careful with the chocolate tube in the fridge, Hugo would be fragile. An operation he intends to repeat on the big day. For the moment, I’m working on my techniques, just so I can bluff a little and
Say to myself, look, he’s done this in such a short space of time, and so on. Anyway, I hope they’ll be able to see how hard I’ve worked. Three hours later, it’s time for the dressage. In the chocolate frame, a small layer of crumble, That’s good.
The porcini ganache, a circle of hay ice cream. Five minutes, go, go, go. and a lemon pear brunoise. Ready, shall we? All right, come on, let’s go. The whole thing covered with a disc of sugar So that means you’re sending it a minute early.
To assess his apprentice’s work. The establishment has brought in professionals from Strasbourg’s gastronomic world to play the role of judge. An idea from Cédric Mouleau, the restaurant’s owner. You don’t feel it too much. You don’t feel it enough. I’m guessing, I’m guessing. It’s a bit subtle, actually. an investment that’s not completely disinterested.
He’ll represent the house. Maybe we’ll be able to put his desserts on the menu, let our customers enjoy them, tell a story and say, here we have a young man who won a competition and here’s the result. And I repeat, the level is top-notch. Over-trained, congratulated, Guillaume is hoping to make mincemeat
With the other candidates. A thousand kilometers away, another establishment is also preparing its protégé for the competition. The Anne de Bretagne restaurant, one of the few two-star restaurants in Loire-Atlantique. Chef, chef, the tiles, if I put them back in the oven for thirty seconds, they’ll soften a bit.
Colline is less confident than Guillaume. They’re all broken. They’re all hard so they all break put them back in for 2 min. After her degree a year ago, this passionate pastry chef landed an apprenticeship at this prestigious establishment. I called a lot, a lot, a lot, I sent lots of emails, I did
I did everything I could to show that I was motivated and that I wanted to come. in the end it stuck. She is practicing for the competition’s other event, the personal dessert. She chose to work with a surprising ingredient, butternut, a squash often relegated to making soups and purées.
It’s a bit like the vegetable of my childhood. We used to go to Grandma’s on Sundays. We’d make butternut soup. She had a big garden, so it was the butternut from the garden. So it was a bit… Yeah, those are my memories.
But it’s true that it’s a risk. Some people are going to stumble. Some people are going to say no. Nonsense, you don’t put a vegetable in a dessert. But on the other hand, it can be the little thing that makes people say: “Oh, she’s dared to put a vegetable in there.
I hope she did it right. Colline wants to present a butternut mousse with an exotic fruit coulis to the jury, caramelized pecans and tuiles in the colors of her favorite vegetable. With your sleeves, you’re sure to drop a tile. You’ll come within a centimeter every time. Roll up your sleeves. Jérémy Boussier,
The restaurant’s pastry chef, won’t let her out of his sight. You see, it’s super liquid. It’s no more dots The big contest is days away. there’s still some work to be done. The day before the test, Colline has an important appointment, Careful, I’ll bring back the leg of lamb a family lunch
With her grandparents, ! Hi ! How are you? Yes, love grandma. How are you? Hello ? Coming through. his butternut squash suppliers. Is this the butternut you brought from the garden? ? Yeah, it’s huge ! If I don’t win with it
It’s a sign that we’re working well in the garden, we’re making soup, we’re making purée, we’re doing everything with the butternut. We haven’t made a cake yet, but we think Coline will teach us. At Colline, cooking is a family passion. Her mother ran a restaurant for many years
And her stepfather is a caterer. Very young, Colline flourished behind the stove and as a teenager, she began organizing “Come dine with me” We’d go away, leave the house to her and come back. We’d have a decorated table and a dinner prepared. And we’d give notes, we’d give our opinion. Come what may
That’s me, that’s me. It’s a great experience. We’re keeping our fingers crossed. That’s it. The next morning, They’re all snowed in. Colline arrives in Grenoble where the dessert championship finals are being held. She is accompanied by one of her teachers. The young apprentice is anxious.
I eat in the morning, but I have to admit that my stomach’s in knots right now. But I’ll try to eat a little. A few meters away, Guillaume, the man from Strasbourg, He’s also under escort, with his teacher and Michelin-starred chef. Fabien coaches him right up to the last minute.
You can pour it over the desserts. But I’m thinking about it tonight. I think if you put your induction hob in the bottom, it might be dangerous. I’m telling you, with your ladder, if you take out a plate or something, and at the moment, you hit one of your pans…
My boss likes to think during the night. So in the morning, he’s there, he’s lazy, but that’s what I just thought of during the night. But that’s good, because during the night I sleep, I don’t move. Guillaume and Colline meet up with the other six candidates. First test, the mystery basket.
First of all, you’re going to be at the… In turn, they’ll discover the ingredients they’ll have to cook. All the same. I want you to make me a gourmet dessert, with meringue, with cream, with fruit, and then some Saint-Gilles pralines, which are also a local praline. No porcini, or hay.
Quite the opposite, in fact, a disconcertingly simple theme. Meringue and red fruit. Guillaume is taken aback. No trace of his favorite ingredient, It’s done. Well. chocolate. It’s done. It has to be, it has to be. Here we go for a five-hour marathon. Guillaume chose a crumble, strawberry sorbet, and chartreuse
I’ll let you do your drawing. and an Italian meringue. Tac. Tac. Tac. Tac. I like it. Why don’t you make me a little clean on the counter, please? Yes. Come on, don’t give up. Behind him, Colline takes her turn at her surprise preparation. She’s making thin meringue sticks,
Piloti that will support a sablé and a blackcurrant mousse. But when it comes out of the oven, disaster struck. The baking was a failure. Colline throws everything in the garbage can. She has to start all over again. Yeah, you got some eggs left. Fuck, I don’t have enough sugar. This you keep warm
Thirty grams of eggwhite Thirty-five grams of eggwhite Okay, it doesn’t matter. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. Colline uses all the leftover sugar to make the meringue again. She won’t have any for the rest of her recipe. So, for the next step, the sablé.
She uses pink pralines instead. Is it good or not? No time to change anything. Eight minutes left. Time to set the plates. On the meringue piloti the blackcurrant cookie is precariously balanced. ? Move -yourself. That’s it. Please go gently, gentlemen and ladies. It’s perfect. The dessert goes to the tasting room.
In the jury, Pierre Marcolini, world pastry champion. In the end, the lack of sugar works in Colline’s favor. What’s great is that it’s not very sweet, so it’s not sickening. On the other hand, are we on topic? No. There’s just a little bit of meringue. Whereas the main subject was meringue.
Colline is playing for all it’s worth in the second round. Her personal butternut squash dessert. Afterwards, I know it, so… Normally, it Will have fewer hitches. It’s all right, Laurent, it was tidied up. For Guillaume too, it’s the home stretch. ? Then we can start laying out the plates. Okay, that’s fine.
He assembles the six layers of the creation he’s rehearsed a hundred times. I missed. No, sorry, it’s just a second. You’d better watch out. He calls it chocolate peanut alchemy. And exotic hatching. Let’s go the service. Let’s stop, it’s good, it’s good. It’s going, it’s going. Here we go. Guillaume’s preparation
Is about to pay off. It’s a crazy job. There are restaurants that don’t serve this. And I’ll tell you, I’ll be very honest with you, I’m not even sure that at his age, I’d have managed to do this. As for Colline’s butternut squash, will it please the jury? Yes, there is
A pretty bold move. It’s a nice ride. When you read the dessert, I want it to keep telling its story. That’s what I’d say. The day after, So, for the bronze dessert, the results were announced. Thomas, Paul. Bronze for the candidate from Nice. Silver for Lozère. First place still up for grabs.
I won’t keep them waiting. Gaël, The Parisian candidate wins with his pineapple dessert and chia and linseed tuile. well good Guillaume finishes fifth. ? Yes. Yeah. We knew it. We knew it. Yeah. His Italian meringue didn’t live up to its promise.
I was a bit disappointed, of course. I had high expectations of my result, there were a lot of people counting on me, who had invested in me, and I would have preferred to put in a better performance. Colline finished second last.
She was punished by the jury for returning one of her desserts late. In fact, it’s just that I think about all the investment that went into it. After the hours I’ve spent… At least, that’s the first few minutes. I’m like that now, but I’ll be
There in two hours. I’ll be glad I got there. Colline won’t be able to take part again next year. Candidates can only take part once in the French Dessert Championship.