When enjoying a meal at a fine restaurant, there are two things one should eschew if one wishes to avoid disappointment: The first is coffee, which I shall discuss at another time. The second thing that you must avoid is dessert.
Indeed, in American restaurants at any rate, a good rule of thumb is that the finer the savory elements of your meal, the more likely dessert is to be unsatisfying. The reason for this is simple: American pastry chefs seek to display their control over flavors instead of simply reveling in them.
I call out American pastry chefs here because most European pastry chefs seem to have a good understanding of the value of tradition, but I am quite certain that many among the international set are equally guilty. Indeed, it is said that Ho Chi Minh trained as a pastry chef under Escoffier himself, and look how that turned out. No, perhaps it would be safest to view all pastry chefs as the incipient radicals they doubtless are.
Any chef worth his salt (or even his pepper) will tell you that the key to fine cuisine is to combine quality ingredients in simple ways to produce superior flavors. If a savory dish requires more than ten ingredients, the chef has likely made a horrible mistake. Indeed, many of the most remarkable dishes I have ever tasted comprised no more than four or five perfectly selected and prepared ingredients.
On occasion, one may appreciate the artistry behind a more involved dish, savoring its complexity in the way one might appreciate the skill of a great conductor binding what could be a cacophonous mix of random instruments into the medium for a transporting symphony. Such dishes are rare, however, and most often my enjoyment of them is little more than an abstract appreciation of a well-done display of culinary skill.
Far better to eat a simple dish, with a few players interacting directly and clearly. Food should be like fine chamber music, with each ingredient acting as a perfectly-tuned instrument , and the flavors harmonizing with each other in the way that skilled musicians interact in a small, tightly-knit ensemble.
"Yes, but what does all of this have to do with dessert?" You ask, as you never seem to learn not to interrupt me. I was just getting to that, so cease with the endless impatient badgering!
The lesson of simplicity is one that seems to have been lost on most pastry chefs. Indeed, the more skilled the pastry chef, the less likely it is that the chef will trust in a few simple ingredients.
The primary reason for this lamentable situation is that many of the key ingredients in desserts are profoundly simple, and do not vary greatly in flavor so long as they are reasonably fresh, particularly after they have been baked into a dessert. I could, for example, easily identify a fresh, free range organic fried egg next to its month-old factory-raised counterpart, but I would be hard pressed to distinguish them if they were baked into cakes.
Also, the core ingredients of most desserts provide excellent opportunities for varying texture, but less opportunity for varying flavor. That is not to say that one cannot vary flavors significantly even with simple and similar ingredients , as anyone who has tasted both flan and crème brûlée could tell you. Eggs and sugar are incredibly versatile ingredients, especially when combined in various ways with cream, butter, milk, and flour.
However, there are limits to the variety one can achieve with just these few ingredients, and so in order to create desserts, one must look to other elements. Spices and flavoring are vital, and this is where pastry chefs begin to go astray.
Perhaps the most important flavoring in desserts in vanilla. There are some ignorant fools among you who will doubtless argue that chocolate is more important than vanilla. To you I say, shut your cake hole and heed my words, and I may yet raise you up from your benighted nescience.
Vanilla is to sweets as salt is to main courses. A dish flavored strongly with vanilla can be enjoyed for that reason, but most, if not all, sweet dishes benefit greatly from the addition of vanilla regardless of their primary components.
Chocolate, while a truly outstanding ingredient and one of my favorites, is a very strong, dominant flavor. It does not blend easily with other flavors, but instead insists that the entire dish be constructed to blend with it.
Vanilla, however, subtly enhances other flavors, including chocolate. Indeed, I have known several poor misguided souls who will not eat anything containing chocolate, but I have never encountered anyone who will not eat something that contains vanilla.
I have, of course, met those who say that they hate vanilla, but they are liars or self-deluded. What they mean when they say they hate vanilla is that they hate the idea of vanilla. They feel it is boring, uninteresting. It is even possible that to their pathetically underdeveloped palates it is boring.
Far more likely, though, they have never really tasted proper vanilla, having instead consumed execrable "French Vanilla" ice cream made from artificial vanilla flavoring and doubtless padded with sorghum or some other vile filler. Should anyone discover the name of the marketing homunculus who affixed the appellation "French" to this monstrosity, kindly tell me where they are buried so that I may spit upon their grave... And please do this even if they happen to be living at the time you discover their identity. I find it quite a nuisance to have to bury people before spitting on their graves, and I would greatly appreciate your assistance.
But I digress.
Vanilla, chocolate, nuts, spices, fruits; all these and more may be combined in various ways to create an enormous variety of flavors and textures. In the complex variety of dessert, however, there lies a trap, and it is one that is far more likely to ensnare the expert than the amateur.
Many excellent desserts are in fact created flavors, arising from the subtle mix of spices, extracts and oils to create a new, unified taste. Indeed, most chocolate is not, in fact, simply chocolate, but rather contains a range of subtle ingredients that differentiate the products of one chocolatier from those of another.
A skilled pastry chef knows this, and will seek to create ever more complex new flavors. This quest for new flavors can be a wonderful thing when it results in dishes that build on the strong flavors of the main ingredients, enhancing and complementing them to create ever more intense and varied experiences. Indeed, bringing out the strong flavors of chocolate, nuts, or fruits is not terribly difficult, and most amateurs can create quite tasty desserts at home.
Given that most anyone can in theory produce a dessert that is worth eating, pastry chefs will be tempted to differentiate themselves by abusing their culinary skills to produce subtle, controlled flavors. When they inevitably succumb to this temptation, all is lost.
The beauty of their perfectly-textured puff pastries, delightfully rich éclairs, earthy chocolate tortes, and seductive fruit tarts becomes lost as these formerly great chefs embark upon their misguided quests to make a pear taste less like a pear, or to introduce yet another subtle gradation of caramelization to the woefully inadequate sugar in something that now only vaguely resembles ice cream, or to add orange oil to a chocolate chip cookie to give it a subtler flavor.
Dessert is not about subtlety. It is not about control. Dessert is the very epitome of excess. When I bite into a chocolate chip cookie, I do not want to detect a subtle hint of orange oil neutralizing the lingering aftertaste of the chocolate chips. I want the chocolate aftertaste, you microcephalic dolt! If I wanted something frou-frous and controlled, I wouldn't be eating a damned chocolate chip cookie!
Dessert is where we seek an intense, climactic experience to bring an evening of dining to an ecstatic close. It is the time when the chef should stop teasing, stop testing, stop leading us into little-visited culinary corners and side streets, and should instead finally deliver true, intense, uncompromising flavors perfectly combined to bring us to complete, exhausted satiation.
And what is the idea behind putting green tea into everything? Yes, it is a subtle, complex flavor that can enhance some dishes, but come on, enough with the green tea ice cream and such. I have even encountered green tea tiramisu, for Brillat-Savarin's sake!
What the hell are you people thinking?
Each ingredient in a dessert dish should enhance or complement the other ingredients. No ingredient should be included solely to control or minimize the other flavors. Nor should ingredients be there to prove how clever you erroneously think you are, or to what absurd extremes you are willing to follow the latest food trends.
Each time I see a great pastry chef begin to produce these overly-controlled monstrosities, a small part of me dies, and a somewhat larger part of me develops the urge to find a large, blunt instrument and apply it repeatedly to his or her head until I manage to kill whatever deformed knot of brain cells is responsible for this aberration, while hopefully preserving the part that made them great in the first place... Impossible, I know, but euthanasia is certainly a valid option to consider in these cases, as well.
Perhaps it would be even better to surgically implant electrodes in the genitals of these chefs, and give diners the ability to remotely send negative feedback (and perhaps positive feedback, but I am not too concerned on that point) concerning the food using some kind of remote control. This kind of operant conditioning approach might produce better quality pastry.
Indeed, it might be good to apply the technique to chefs in general. I'd certainly enjoy giving a sustained jolt to the next chef who attempts to serve me undercooked chicken, overcooked duck, or architectural polenta.
I confess this idea may be impractical, but something must be done. We must all strive together to persuade our pastry chefs that it is possible to be great simply by executing a classic perfectly. They must learn that dessert is not the time for abstract appreciation of a chef's skills. It is a time to be transported by pure, raw, uncontrolled flavors assembled with care and beauty by a great master.
And if persuasion doesn't work, we can always fall back on the blunt instruments and electrodes.
- Ram
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