Italy’s golden year continues. In fact, the Italian team won the first prize in the world pastry championship, the “Coupe du Monde de la Pâtisserie 2021”. The world stage saw 11 nations compete on September 25 in Lyon, within the Sirha 2021 exhibition (the global meeting place for hotels, restaurants, catering, and gastronomy).
Italy found itself in a challenge with the teams of France and Japan, true veterans of the Coupe du Monde. Despite this, the dream has become reality and the two countries have joined the Italian team, ranking third and second respectively.
The Italian team – formed by professional pastry chefs Lorenzo Puca, Andrea Restuccia, and Massimo Pica, and coordinated by the President of Club Italy Alessandro Dalmasso – has triumphed by winning the world title for 2021/2022. The team was guided also by the 2015 Italian World Champions Francesco Boccia, Emmanuele Forcone, and Fabrizio Donatone.
A PASTRY CHALLENGE
The theme of this edition was “All art is an imitation of nature”. With their creations centered on the world of bees, the Italians won over not only the international jury but also the entire world audience. The competition lasted ten hours.
Tight workouts for equally tight rhythms in the competition, with three pièces, related panel tastings – including the new special jury for restaurant desserts – and a final sculpture. Here are the winning desserts:
- The dessert to be shared: a chocolate cake with sablé base, chocolate cream, sponge cake; top, cream with crunchy part and, again, diplomatic cream – vanilla and chocolate, with exotic jelly – and chocolate sauce. Finally, a chocolate petal to enclose the whole dessert.
- Ice cream cake: sponge cake and pistachio crunch, mascarpone and raspberry semifreddo, mango and passion fruit sorbet, exotic compote, pistachio meringue, and red fruit jelly. all wrapped in almond and vanilla ice cream, almond and vanilla glaze, raspberry glaze, mango and passion fruit jelly, and red fruit jelly.
- Catering dessert: on almond sponge cake, there is mango compote and honey ice cream; above, a beehive-shaped wafer, in whose hexagons are blancmange, apricot jelly, honey, and apricot passion sauce. Next to it, vanilla and lime ganache, with apricot passion sauce to complete the whole.
- Artistic buffet presentation tableau: more than one meter and sixty of sugar and chocolate sculpture, with a beehive as the protagonist, constituted the presentation tableau of all the pièces, which impressed not only the jury but also the whole public present for the technical difficulty, the details, and the aesthetic prestige.