How To Be A Creative Pastry Chef by Kirsten Tibballs

 Video by Kirsten Tibballs
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I love what I do because every day I do something different, it involves travel, creativity, and working with some of the best ingredients available in the world. If you incorporate air in this particular product, you create a foam on top, which isn’t great for tasting.

At a hundred and fourteen degrees, we still have some water in the sugar. I think everybody has a completely different creative process, for me I like to work around a theme and I draw what I’m going to create first with color pencils then I allocate flavor and then texture and then I try to design a unique and different and new recipe for each element of the product.

So it does sometimes change from the picture that I’ve created to the finished design but that’s a great way to start your designing process.

The three most important factors for me are the look and feel of the product, the texture, and flavor and they’re all of equally important.

There’s not one that’s more important than the other. If you’re starting out in the industry, it’s important that you don’t copy what other people are doing directly. Take what you’re inspired by or what someone else has done but you need to change it and make it your own.

It’s not a matter of just watching that technique being done to really own a technique and to be fluent in it, you need to practice as much as you possibly can.

So, I’ve been a pastry chef for a very long time, for more than 30 years now. So, for me it’s very important as a pastry chef, no matter where you are - whether you’re just starting or like me who’ve been in the industry for 30 years, it’s essential that you continue to learn.

So the fact that you’re in this class shows me that you have an interest in progressing yourself as a professional and making yourself a better pastry chef. If you create a product, you need to then let the product go and move forward.

It’s important that you share, so if you have a product that you’ve created that people are interested in - whether you share it on social media, you teach it, you give the recipe out because if you don’t do this, you will never create something new.

If you keep the same product and you keep creating the same product, you will never develop and evolve as a pastry chef because you’ll always be creating that one thing.

So, to be a better pastry chef, you need to share what you’ve done - the technique - and then you need to create something that was better than before. Where I can, I try to always create something new, sometimes people ask me to do something kind of done before, which is okay, but it’s always important to create and develop something new constantly.

For me, when I teach a class, it’s very important that I’m not doing all the work. I’m here to help you with the techniques and to tell you if you’ve done something wrong and then we can do it again to ensure you perfect it before I leave.

For this particular class, we’re splitting up into three separate groups. I’ve matched the products together - one entremet mon tart, in some aspects the entremet’s more complex, tart more simple, all the tart more complex and the entremet more simple.

What is interesting as well is that researchers have discovered that 80% of what makes somebody make a repeat purchase, so they return to purchase your product again, it’s texture. So, for me, equal importance is the taste, the texture, and the look of the product. 

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