Gilles, Pastry Cook

Gilles is the pastry cook at our Auchan Kirchberg store.

He uses all his know-how to create beautiful handmade cakes in his workshop!

• Gilles, you have one of the jobs that requires the most preparation time. Do you wake up with the lark?

  At an ungodly hour, and even a bit earlier! I get to my workshop at 3 in the morning: it is very early, but the cold keeps you awake – it is always 6 °C in the workshop… It is better to be wrapped up!

  Pastry requires time, because there are a lot of steps, there are several different textures; I have to let the preparations rest before assembling them. Every morning, we make 6 cakes and 5 pies, both in individual sizes and in desserts for 6 people. Just as in fashion, we have summer and winter collections: our recipe suggestions change twice a year.

• Could you be compared with a fashion designer?

  Somehow, yes! Our cakes require a lot of detailed finishing touches; the job demands a huge amount of precision. We also have to be creative to bring new recipes to our customers. It is important to listen to them.

• What do your customers ask for the most?

  I have been a confectioner since 1976 and he have evolved along with our customers. The amount of sugar is the biggest change: we use much less sugar in our pastries. Twenty years ago, I used to make whipped cream with 180 grams of sugar for 1 litre of cream, and now I put 80 grams tops! At Auchan, we chose to follow this trend because our customers’ health comes first.

• How do you answer all of your customers’ needs?

  I am not working on the stall, but the sales team shares our customers’ impressions with us – when things are great, but also when something can be improved. And can sale figures cannot lie!

  Experience has taught me that we are always asked for traditional pastries, modernized or not! For example, even though we create more and more desserts with mousse, there will always be buttercream lovers. It would be a mistake to fully stop using it! We do everything we can to make each one of our customers happy.

• What else do you do to please your Luxembourg customers?

  In Luxembourg, we just love gingerbread: put it in a cake and it will sell like hotcakes! I remember a dessert with mandarin, crystallized orange and chocolate cream on a gingerbread base… It is one of our best sellers!

• When you talk about it, it seems like pastry making is an exact science?

  Pretty much: pastries do not do well with approximations. We have to be careful, very precise when we weigh our ingredients. Do you how we create a new recipe? It is a very rigorous process!

  We test a lot of ideas, do tastings and one day, the recipe is set in stone. We write it down in our recipe book and it will never change. We also take pictures of the cake so aesthetics details stay the same. It is important to respect pastry traditions, and that is what we do at Auchan!