Pastry chef Christophe Michalak publishes "20 years of pastry", a box of three books compiling the great recipes he has created.
Total transparency, still rare in the profession, which does not worry this eternal researcher of novelty, as he explains at the microphone of Anne Roumanoff.
INTERVIEW
To reveal everything, does it not risk being copied, even equaled, and even exceeded?
In his box of 3 volumes
20 years of pastry
, Christophe Michalak tells by the menu 20 years of career, at the rate of about fifty recipes per volume.
Plagiarism is not, however, a concern for the pastry chef who, as he tells us in
It feels good
, is above all concerned with the transmission of his knowledge and the permanent search for taste innovations.
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Emulation, rather than competition
Christophe Michalak can easily imagine that a young pastry chef would draw inspiration from his box.
"Precisely, it pushes me! Whoever buys this box has 20 to 30 years of recipes in his hands," he explains.
"By the time the person who is going to inherit it assimilates all this, I will already be 10 kilometers away, because I work every day."
The pastry chef is himself passionate about the works of his colleagues.
"All the books that exist, I buy them," he reveals.
"And as soon as I see a recipe that I haven't tasted or that seems interesting to me, I have my teams make the recipe".
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Sometimes he even goes to their stores for inspiration.
“Often, I do benchmarking: I buy lots of cakes from a colleague. I call everyone in my office, and we taste them,” says Christophe Michalak.
"If you look closely in all my books, I specify the initials or the name of a pastry chef, for example, on a sweet dough on a particular cream."
Pastry, a collective combat sport
For Christophe Michalak, finding new recipes and new techniques is a daily struggle.
"I get up every morning and every morning, I go to war", he exclaims.
"My job is to do better every day, to offer a more pleasant working environment for my employees."
Because the pastry chef explains that he is committed to taking care of his teams.
"I feed them well," he smiles.
"It's kind of my job to realize that you can't do it alone. My success is also linked to all the people who work in my company. It is my duty to make them grow and develop them. "