Sébastien Gaudard

My dairy product supplier is more important than the one who supplies flour! Cream plays a very important role because it’s a vehicle for flavours, which makes it possible to develop tastes. It is texturising and is involved in perceiving the sensation of freshness. Cream doesn’t fix flavours in the same way that oil, water and butter do. Its melting point is more or less the same as the temperature of the mouth, so it is a fat that melts very quickly on the palate.

You can heat it, use it cooked in a custard or boil it for a pastry cream, on a traditional chocolate mousse, where I add cream to give a very pronounced sensation of freshness; I also use it as a Chantilly (light and silky, not too sugary, not too rich) incorporated into a mousse. You can make Chantillys with what you like (mint leaves, tarragon, or even salted, by having a base infused into a cream that has been boiled, covered with film, and then left overnight). Chantilly is a very interesting aromatic medium.

You can put it in everything. In a ganache, it is texturising, without giving the same result as milk. If you take a heavy cream, it’s for flavour. In a mousse recipe, it provides an extremely pleasing tart element. In a pastry, cream adds richness and unctuousity where butter adds flavour and texture. Before, I made fruit mousses with egg whites. Today, I use cream for its freshness.

Passionately. It’s really a very beautiful product. With flour and eggs, it constitutes a very important ingredient, the medium for all of our pastries.

Caramelised cream puffs. With a choux (puff) dough that is not dry, it’s a veritable osmosis between cream and the caramel texture, the unctuosity, the melting of the cream and the vanilla flavour that develops between the time of preparation and consumption.