Dessert Masters brings King of Chocolate Amaury Guichon to our screens

Amaury Guichon is a master chef with a mission: he wants the world to share his passion and respect for the art of making pastry. The Swiss-born, French-trained pastry maestro, who’s hailed as the King of Chocolate, is based in Las Vegas where he runs a cooking school. He also produces phenomenally popular Instagram videos featuring speeded-up montages recording his creation of gob-smacking, meticulously detailed chocolate sculptures: life-sized giraffes, gleaming motorcycles, dinosaurs, robots, the Empire State Building (not actual size) complete with King Kong. And in honour of his mid-year visit to Australia, a kangaroo and her joey.

The hard-working, fiercely focused chef spent a month in Melbourne to co-host and judge Ten’s Dessert Masters with Melissa Leong. The MasterChef spin-off sees 10 chefs vying for the title of Dessert Master, a trophy and $100,000. And the contestants are no neophytes striving to make their marks: the line-up of talent boasts many already certified stars.

Among those hitting the benches in that now-familiar kitchen – which has been decorated in pretty pinks for this sweet-themed series – are Adriano Zumbo, Anna Polyviou, Reynold Poernomo, Kirsten Tibballs and Morgan Hipworth. There are chefs who’ve trained with greats like Heston Blumenthal and Joel Robuchon, built their own businesses, earned impressive reputations of their own in restaurants, and hosted their own TV shows. They’re not chopped liver.

Swiss-born, French-trained Amaury Guichon is often hailed as the King of Chocolate.Credit: Paramount/Ten

Guichon describes the competitors’ skill level as amazing, explaining: “I did not expect it. I live in America and I know a lot of the big players and I’ve never seen such a concentration of raw talent and passionate people in this industry. I would have never seen that in the US and I have my own show there (School of Chocolate, Netflix). It’s unique and I’m not quite sure why you have such a love for eating pastry and talented people who do it. I think it’s a hybrid between the US and Europe: you have the resources to do it high-end and you have the desire to eat it, like in Europe.”

Guichon arrived just prior to production on the series and left immediately after it wrapped. He’s not one to relax and enjoy a well-earned break. “Sometimes I do get extremely tired and I don’t give myself enough room to recoup because social media is calling and I feel that I can never stop,” he says. “But if I’m not being productive, I feel guilty. Leaving my school behind (The Pastry Academy), as well my other businesses, makes me feel immense guilt. The last vacation I took was five years ago, a week in Costa Rica. So even if I spent a week here, I wouldn’t be able to appreciate it. I used to stay one more day when I travelled and either I was exhausted and I slept through the day or I felt guilty.”

Dedication and discipline radiate from the trim 32-year-old. At one point in the first episode of Dessert Masters, he spies several errant spots on his pristine, perfectly tailored white shirt, small splashes of blackberry compote from Poernomo’s purple-themed confection. A spotless replacement was quickly provided off-camera by the wardrobe department.

Guichon has an unforgiving work ethic and a missionary zeal about his quest to dazzle the world with the joys of pastry and to afford its creators the respect that he believes they deserve. He left school at 14 to start an apprenticeship and by 16 was living independently in an apartment. “I had to grow very fast,” he recalls. “I always had the support of my parents, but I had to find myself in real life real quick. I would start at 3am and all I wanted to do was chase girls. I wanted to go to nightclubs. It’s hard because you battle that desire of wanting to do well at your job and the desire to be a normal teenager.”

Yet the experience proved formative and the battle was won when he found that his chosen field was under-valued. “I was told I was a stupid kid,” he recalls with a resentment that obviously still burns. “When I started, every trade field, every job that required working with your hands, was looked down upon, at least in Europe, because if you worked with your hands, it meant that you were not able to work with your head. So if you were a chef, you knew that you would be making minimum wage, that you would always be at the service of others, that you did it because you were not clever enough to do anything else.

Melissa Leong and Amaury Guichon on the set of Dessert Masters.Credit: Paramount/Ten

“I was deemed not good enough to pursue a general field, so I was asked to choose a trade: mason, woodwork, hair stylist, electrician or chef, and I picked chef. Pastry and chocolate was my choice, but it was really like pulling a number out of a hat. It took me a few years to learn that it does require a lot of knowledge and skill. So it was hard for me to understand that you have to be stupid to do it, right? But it took me years to be proud of the achievements, to be proud of the industry that I was in.”

Even within that industry, he says that his area was looked down upon, that savoury specialists were the stars. “Pastry chefs were always the fifth wheel. But social media drastically changed the game when it came to the perception of pastry because what we do is highly visual. Social media gave a voice to anyone showing what happened behind the scenes. That’s how I started to get my notoriety: I invited people into my kitchen in a very amateur way, using only my phone and showing them all the steps that it took to go from raw material through to mouth-watering product.”

He regards Dessert Masters as a project that gels perfectly with his mission: “I’ve dedicated my career to raising awareness and showing the beauty and the multiple aspects of the sweet-pastry industry. Doing a TV show that highlights all the beautiful aspects and challenges people to be creative, and broadcasting to a large audience, is exactly on-brand with what I love to do.”

Maybe when he returns for the recently confirmed second season, he’ll get to sample more of the local food scene that he glimpsed from where he stayed in Collingwood. “There was a bakery every other block,” he noted approvingly. “It’s crazy. In Vegas, I can name two places where they make bread.”

For now, though, he says, “I’ve been lucky to travel the world and explore many different cultures. And, in my head, I was not designed for this great adventure: I was designed to be this dumb kid making minimum wage. This journey has shown me so much beauty, so much fulfilment. When I was younger, I used to be scared of dying. For the longest time it was my biggest fear. But I could die tomorrow and be happy because I know that I was not meant to live this good a life, this interesting a life.”

Trivia for chocoholics
Eating: Guichon maintains that the Swiss excel at milk chocolate, while the French make the best dark. “I love every type of chocolate, even white. Even though I would never snack on white chocolate, it has a place in pastry because it can go in the base of a composition of many elements, bringing a natural sweetener and a strength from the cocoa butter. If I snack for pleasure, I prefer milk, but dark suits my stomach better.”

Art: Guichon says of his sculptures, “For structural, I use dark, for sculptural I use milk. Dark chocolate for the skeleton, because it’s very strong. The milk powder, the dairy component of milk chocolate, makes it a bit softer, there’s less of the cocoa butter that brings the strength, so I use that to carve the organic elements.”

Dessert Masters premieres on Ten, Sunday, November 12, at 7.30pm.

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