In some restaurants, the once-stout walls between savory cooking and dessert making are tumbling down as professionals from both disciplines share equipment, ingredients and ideas.
At Citizen Cake Restaurant and Bar and Orson Restaurant and Bar, both in San Francisco, equipment and know-how regularly change hands between culinarians and pastry chefs.
“We mix it all up,” said executive chef-owner Elizabeth Falkner. “It isn’t about ‘This is the savory-kitchen stuff’ and ‘This is the pastry kitchen stuff.’”
For example, Falkner’s chefs freeze savory preparations in the ice cream machine, and her pastry chefs fire fresh fruits on the grill for desserts. So it’s not surprising for her to serve a dessert sorbet flavored with a usually savory seasoning like black pepper, or an amuse of savory marshmallows made with pink peppercorns and fleur de sel, or French sea salt.
“I think that people are at the point where they somewhat expect that, at least in my restaurants,” Falkner said.
The sweet and savory sides of the kitchen “used to be two different worlds,” said Vincent Pilon, executive pastry chef of Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. “Now, they are getting closer and the minds are getting more open.”
Furthering the collegial relationship between the two camps is a change in management style that has been taking place for some time now, said Tina Casaceli, director of pastry and baking arts at the French Culinary Institute and owner of Milk & Cookies Bakery, both in New York City.
“Professional kitchens used to be more geared to being very French, with the brigade system, which was very structured from top to bottom,” Casaceli said.
Things are less regimented today: “Now chefs and pastry chefs are allowed to talk and work things out. It used to be a battle.”
Casaceli notices cross-utilization of such things as fast, small-batch ice cream machines, juicers and a variety of cooking gear, including the vacuum machines and thermal circulators of sous vide cookery. Pastry pros use the latter devices to make custards, ice cream bases and fruit fillings, she noted.
In fact, sous vide is the method Citizen Cake uses to make the warm chocolate cake that stars in a composed dessert with Hunan-spiced pineapple liquid, crunchy nibs and hazelnuts, priced at $10. For this, flourless chocolate cake batter is vacuum-sealed in a plastic bag and put in the low-temperature water bath of the thermal circulator, producing a cake with a texture that is fluffy, uniform and crustless, because the entire product cooks at a uniformly low temperature.
“We do a lot of sous vide cooking, not for every single thing, but it’s really interesting to cook fish that way and really interesting to cook chocolate cake batter that way,” Falkner said.
Mandalay Bay’s Pilon said the creativity of pastry professionals is influencing their peers on the culinary side.
“You see a lot of savory chefs using napoleons and tuiles in presentations like pastry chefs,” he said, “and I’ve seen chefs looking at pastry books to get ideas.”
At Craft Los Angeles, the West Coast outpost of New York-based chef-restaurateur Tom Colicchio’s Craft family of restaurants, pastry chef Catherine Schimenti reported that her dough sheeter gets at least half of its use with savory rather than sweet doughs. One example of the savory use is a white truffle brioche that she planned to make in collaboration with chef Matthew Accarrino.
Craft’s cooks also borrow her sauce gun, a hand-operated dispenser that she uses for portioning panna cotta and glazing mousses, to make savory custards. They also borrow her pastry cutters to cut pastas and her baby flan molds for miniature brioche. She in turn reaches to the culinary side for the kitchen meat grinder, which processes streusel topping to the proper crumbly texture.
“There’s a lot of sharing, both ways, definitely,” Schimenti said.