Her unconventional desserts are also said to be less than 'Instagram worthy,' but she really could not care less
Her desserts are often not at all sweet and she couldn't care less if people complain they don't look great on Instagram. But that did not stop Jessica Prealpato from being named the best pastry chef on the planet on Tuesday by the World's 50 Best Restaurants ranking.
The 32-year-old French woman, who is about to have her first child, is the creator of a new genre of guilt-free patisserie. The subtle and sublime creations she turns out at the three-star Michelin restaurant of the Plaza Athenee hotel in Paris are a rebuff to the sugar-rush burn of food porn.
For Prealpato, it’s not about how a dessert looks, it's how it tastes—and the feelgood glow afterwards. Yet, even she has not dared to have her father—a patissier forged in full-on sugar worship of French tradition—taste her creations that match strawberries with pine shoots and lemon with seaweed.
"He would not understand what I do at all," she told AFP.
Prealpato has eschewed the sugar high for what her boss at the Plaza Athenee, French super-chef Alain Ducasse, calls "naturalité"—or naturalness—bringing out the full range of flavours an ingredient already has.
What Prealpato also does is use ingredients that would never normally make it onto a dessert trolley. So, you have malted beer sorbet with barley crumble and hop galettes, cherry olive vinaigrette or vanilla Jerusalem artichokes with truffles.
Sugar as seasoning
"We shake people up," Prealpato said with a laugh. She has already produced a book of 50 of her desserts called Desséralité, including her All Rhubarb, where the often astringent plant is served roasted, raw, fermented, grilled and poached. "I love to use vinegars and try every style of cooking so that I get the most flavours out of a product," she explained.
One of a tiny number of female patisserie chefs working in three-star restaurants, some of her peers have criticised her for the unfussy way she presents her food, claiming that it’s not sophisticated enough for such an upscale establishment.
But four years ago, when she was starting out at Alain Ducasse at the Plaza Athenee, she said that the famed chef left her in tears when he refused to taste one of her first fruit-based desserts.
"I can see why now," she said. "I had presented it like a patisserie chef usually would, with lots of mousse, cream and a tuile. "For him, a dessert didn't have to be about these things."