The Story of "Latin America's Best Pastry Chef 2018". Told by Jesús Escalera
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When I started, I hated pastry making, I was told that pastry making was something exact, millimetric, that if you spend two grams, it doesn't come out, and that overwhelmed me, until I did an internship. The first day I arrived, the head chef was there and asked me what I preferred, sweet or salty, I got so nervous that I said sweet.
How he fell in love with pastry
When you realize that in a dessert you can use vegetables, you can use ingredients from the savory world, when you start to break a little bit with those simple things, suddenly a very big field opens up.
The vanilla flower is a dessert that for us is very symbolic because vanilla is a very pastry ingredient, a very Mexican ingredient, you say "tremendous combination, vanilla, whiskey, black olive and caramel, that can not be good in life", of course it is not good because we have no references, of that dessert, but when people taste it they say "I did not imagine that this combination could taste so much vanilla".
How to transfer flavors
For example, a forest, what can a forest dessert version taste like, well you go to the forest, many herbs, the forest is pure air, you breathe eucalyptus, pine, then with that we are forming little by little, we want to make a cocoa landscape, a landscape of Mexico, of agave, and then with the technique we know, we apply the textures.
How Latin American pastries look
I think that, in a few years, I see a great sweet revolution, just as there has been a salty one, at present, the sweet one will take three years at the most, the time for it to be a little more informed and to come out.
In the end, I also say it, if you take away Latin America, the pastry industry is left without vanilla, without chocolate, without many fruits, without coffee, it falls, the world recipe book of Swiss and French pastry falls, what does the pastry industry do without chocolate, without vanilla, imagine that. I think it is time for Latin America to raise its flag high and say here are the most renowned pastry chefs in the world.
We want to focus much more on what I was telling you about, making sweet culture and, above all, training and counseling.
How do you feel after receiving this recognition?
I have been in the sweet world for almost 14 years now, since I started, since I was a teenager, and I always watched this gala, the world gala, the Latin American gala, and it was won by people I admire, people who have been my teachers, so the fact that they have given it to me this year, well, I have no words, it has been very nice and I feel very proud, to tell you the truth.