Un pâtissier, un artiste: a collab

While pastry chefs draw their inspiration from seasonal produce, perfumers work with chemical molecules that are anything but sexy. Yet their approach is very similar. Far from being trivial, the meeting of two worlds is a source of mutual enrichment, each feeding off the other's creative approach. Consciously or unconsciously, the impact remains, helping everyone involved to evolve. Let's take a behind-the-scenes look at this tête-à-tête, which gave birth to the Yule log and an original chocolate-tonka-lavender dessert.

Gault&Millau: Is this your first collaboration with another world?

Adrien Bozzolo: It's our third. The first was in 2019, when I met the interior design studio Gilles et Boissier, who had worked on the hotel. That made me want to do more. Earlier this year, I worked on the Easter egg with a Sardinian jeweller, Caterina Murino, and for Christmas, the idea of designing the log with a nose appealed to me.

Nisrine Bouazzaoui Grillié: This is the very first time. I accepted out of curiosity, because I find the world of pastry-making fascinating. It touches on senses that are different from those I use in my daily life. I was really impressed by a chef's creative process.

G&M: An olfactory memory that stands out?

A. B.: Before I met Nisrine, I would have said caramelized muesli coming out of the oven. Now it's the combination of passion fruit and chocolate, which I'll never approach in the same way again. Nisrine gave me a feel for this composition, which she works by highlighting the passion fruit and adding roundness through the chocolate, which is very different from my approach, where the chocolate remains in the foreground and is acidulated by the notes of the fruit. This opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me.

N. B.G.: I have a particular affinity with the world of taste, and spices in particular. I grew up in Morocco, immersed in the fabulous smells of my mother's cooking. And my father always talked to me a lot about perfume. It's something very inspiring for me. Orange blossom is one of my strongest olfactory memories. It symbolizes home, joy and celebrations. It's very present in my creations.

G&M: What was your joint approach?

A. B.: The very essence of my profession is taste. So I have a taste library in my head that I use to create my flavor combinations. Nisrine knows the chemical compounds of each raw ingredient, so she can design coherent associations, even olfactory textures, that give body to her fragrances. We approached the creation of the log as we would one of our own, thinking top, middle and base notes. The challenge was to imagine a sequence of flavors that would reveal themselves throughout the tasting. The first note is chocolate, followed by acidity and the scent of iyokan, then toasted rice to finish. To achieve this result, we tasted dozens of ingredients.

N. B. G.: Right from our first meeting, we realized that there were bridges between our vocabularies, whether in terms of textures, temperatures or even sensations. We reason in the same way. When I create a perfume, I need it to have a color, a consistency, to imagine it in the mouth. In the end, we have very similar evaluation methods, even if, for perfume, the sense of smell is invisible. It's the chemical molecules that help me to reproduce an impression, such as dry, rough, crisp or crunchy. For my part, I use an absolute or an essential oil, while Adrien uses the raw material. The advantage of pastry chefs is that they have dozens of ingredients from the same family, whereas perfumers only have a few. So we tasted almost 25 chocolates and 12 mandarin juices to imagine the flavors of the log and choose, as with a perfume, those that would marry best and allow sequencing.

G&M: Collaboration, freedom or constraint?

A. B.: Total and unlimited freedom. Being open to other creative processes allows you to step outside your own framework and enrich your own way of innovating. Working with Nisrine has given me a new dimension to my job, and I'm able to decipher taste in a different way. For example, lavender and tonka have coumarin in common, and this works wonderfully in a perfume. I'd never have thought of this combination in pastry. I made a chocolate-tonka-lavender dessert with it, and the result is incredible.

N. B. G. : Liberté, without hesitation! A collaboration is the ultimate in personal enrichment, especially when you meet someone like Adrien, who is curious and cultured. I really enjoyed myself, both literally and figuratively.

G&M: Are there any impossible collaborations?

A. B.: I don't think so, but some are certainly more difficult than others.

N. B. G.: It's always possible to find a link. There's no limit to creativity. You just have to give yourself the time and the means. Then, the key is to translate that inspiration into emotion.

G&M: Will this collaboration have an impact on your respective creations?

A. B.: Absolutely. It's the start of an evolution. I'm already imagining new flavor combinations, going further in the gustatory structure of the cakes. In future, I won't systematically use a head, heart and bottom sequence, but rather use each ingredient as a spice that needs to be combined to find the perfect balance.

N. B. G.: When I follow my creative process, I have a common thread. It's a mix of intuition and reasoning. My encounter with the world of patisserie will bring a different punctuation to my work, without me necessarily being aware of it.