Amaury Guichon Tells All About Chocolate, Showpieces, And The Art Of Pastries – Exclusive Interview

Meet Amaury Guichon. Tear your gaze away from his four-foot-tall, impossibly-detailed spinning chocolate Ferris wheel. Stop staring at his ethereally beautiful and seductively perfect coconut-vanilla pearl pastry. Meet Amaury Guichon, the person. He’s a teacher, a husband to Fiona, and he’s a newly-minted Netflix star. He’s always in the kitchen, working six days a week and hardly taking vacations. He may have renounced fast food, but he has only ever given up on one project.

If you haven’t been obsessing over Guichon’s creations on social media for years (five million of us have), you’re familiar with his work from Netflix’s “School of Chocolate.” In it, Guichon plays part-magician and part-mentor to eight contestants who — through pastry and chocolate showpiece challenges — compete to take home a $100,000 prize. “School of Chocolate” isn’t quite like any other televised pastry competition out there. We’ll let Guichon tell you himself, and in this exclusive interview with Mashed, the Geneva, Switzerland-born French pastry chef gives us a behind-the-scenes peek into the creation of the series and lets us in on some of his secrets along the way.

Meeting Fiona changed Amaury Guichon’s life

You’ve said that to succeed at what you do, you should find somebody that inspires you on a daily basis. Who is that for you?

Who inspires me on a daily basis? I don’t have one particular in mind that is a role model. I think I met a lot of people within my whole life/career who inspired me to be better on a certain level. But I don’t have a mentor or someone I look up to that kind of guides my every decision and move in my career, unfortunately. I think surrounding yourself with the good, the right people [is important]. And it’s funny, you meet some people at some stages, whether you know it or not, they will unlock some possibility for you. And maybe they don’t even know it, whether it’s [a] mental or physical opportunity. I think the key [to] succeeding is being able to recognize when an opportunity arises. Don’t be scared to take it because once the opportunity has passed, it might never represent itself.

Can you remember one instance in your life where that happened?

There [are] multiple. There is no one turning key point in my life. I think there [are] multiple turning points, but I remember having one chef when I was an apprentice in Paris, who really inspired me by his professionalism and his kindness. I remember when I was [doing] my first job in Paris as a chef, I used to be an apprentice [to a chef] … They brought up a TV show that was just launching, which was the very first pastry professional TV show in France. And at the time I told him I wasn’t interested because I had so much work and he kept on very insisting. And he said, “It’s made for you. You have the right profile. You have the look, you have the charisma, you have the skills,” et cetera. He kept on pushing.

And eventually, just as a joke, I gave my application and I ended up being on the show and did very, very well on the show. And this opened a whole other network of people that were able to bring me to the U.S. Once I was in the U.S., I think the biggest turning point after that was meeting my wife [Fiona], who was able to give me, how to say, the confidence I needed to become the chef I am today. [She is] able to work behind the scenes, to make sure I can focus on the craft and that everything behind the scenes [is] taken care of. Because most of the time, as a chef, you have to do every single aspect, which doesn’t allow you to be able to really focus time on what you’re good at, which is your craft, creativity, recipe making, et cetera. And when I met Fiona, I was able to. It was another turning point, probably the latest turning point in my life. Yeah.

A day in the life of Amaury Guichon

What does a day in your life look like from start to finish?

I usually work about six days per week, five days in the kitchen, and one day editing the content for the week after that. I always have a plan. So on this Sunday, my day off, I plan the week after that: what will be done, et cetera. I don’t have like — well, I do have a routine now that I don’t travel as much because COVID canceled my international trips. But I used to — for the last four years — travel the world and teach in private schools, only pastry oriented. My daily routine at the time was going on [a] plane. Every other week I was in some part of the world, whether it was Latin America, America, Asia, Europe. But now I’m mostly at the Pastry Academy in Las Vegas.

And there is a week I teach my long-term students — whether it’s wedding cake sugar showpiece, chocolate showpiece — elaborate modern style entremets. Or I create content for the social media platform, or rarely, but it still happens, I do [a] commission job. So I’m kind of always, always in the kitchen. We rarely take vacations. And I cannot say that my life outside of the kitchen is very interesting.

Nguồn: Read More: https://www.mashed.com/708946/amaury-guichon-tells-all-about-chocolate-showpieces-and-the-art-of-pastries-exclusive-interview/