Is sugar making a mistake? How pastry chefs are reinventing their desserts

Fashion is not just about clothes. Foods also know hours of glory and crossings of the desert. Since the end of the 2010s, sugar has been particularly demonized, a favorite theme of literature detailing its harmful effects on health and proposing solutions for break free from sound “addictive power”. At the same time, supermarket shelves have been swollen with alternatives to beet sugar, which has been particularly criticized, such as muscovado or agave syrup. In the spring of 2021, the influential Pierre Hermé even launched a “reasoned delicacy” range, with less sweet, less calorie cakes.

After this peak, the debate around sweets seems to have calmed down a bit. In Pierre Hermé boutiques, pastry “reasoned”, whose merits had been acclaimed in the windows, has become more discreet: the offer now concerns a few cakes, which are suggested to customers looking for lighter pastries, but it is no longer a tool for communication. “Reasoned indulgence continues to be one of my lines of work, in the same way as plant-based pastry, but it does not concern all of my cakes”explains Pierre Hermé, careful not to deprive his loyal clientele of the classics (infinitely vanilla tart, Ispahan, etc.) that make him so successful.

  La Tarte infinitely fruit of passion by Pierre Hermé (in stores in spring 2023).
Saint-Honoré by Arnaud Larher.

Ultimately, is sugar diabolical? What do (good) pastry chefs think of it and how do they dose it? One thing is certain, most have reduced the quantities compared to what the school had taught them – and sometimes still teaches -, based on the standards of Gaston Lenôtre, in whom sugar played a role of enhancer of taste, texturizer, and also preservative at a time when refrigeration was not always possible.

“Today, I put 65 grams of sugar per liter of cream to make whipped cream, but when I was learning, in the 1980s, it was said that 160 grams was needed”, remembers Arnaud Larher, pastry chef in Paris. At the same time, Frédéric Bau, now creative director of chocolate maker Valrhona, was working in a pastry shop in Nice: “The cakes sometimes remained ten days in the window without being refrigerated and we soaked their biscuit with a very sweet syrup to prevent it from fermenting. »

Desugaring, a “monstrous job”

“The phenomenon of decreasing sugar in pastry began twenty years ago and has accelerated over the past six or seven years”, believes for her part Claire Heitzler, who passed through Lasserre and Ladurée and who now has her shop in Levallois-Perret (Hauts-de-Seine). Three decades after savory gastronomy, which became healthier in the 1970s with the advent of new cuisine, French pastry has been reduced in sugar, fat and alcohol. At the same time, a number of French pastry chefs such as Pierre Hermé, Sébastien Bouillet or Jean-Paul Hévin opened shops in Japan and, to adapt to local taste, learned to de-sugar.

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