Amaury Guichon Tells All About Chocolate, Showpieces, And The Art Of Pastries - Exclusive Interview

Meet Amaury Guichon. Tear your gaze away from his four-foot-tall, impossibly-detailed spinning chocolate Ferris wheel. Stop staring at his ethereally beautiful and seductively perfect coconut-vanilla pearl pastry. Meet Amaury Guichon, the person. He's a teacher, a husband to Fiona, and he's a newly-minted Netflix star. He's always in the kitchen, working six days a week and hardly taking vacations. He may have renounced fast food, but he has only ever given up on one project. 

If you haven't been obsessing over Guichon's creations on social media for years (five million of us have), you're familiar with his work from Netflix's "School of Chocolate." In it, Guichon plays part-magician and part-mentor to eight contestants who — through pastry and chocolate showpiece challenges — compete to take home a $100,000 prize. "School of Chocolate" isn't quite like any other televised pastry competition out there. We'll let Guichon tell you himself, and in this exclusive interview with Mashed, the Geneva, Switzerland-born French pastry chef gives us a behind-the-scenes peek into the creation of the series and lets us in on some of his secrets along the way. 

What does a day in your life look like from start to finish?

I usually work about six days per week, five days in the kitchen, and one day editing the content for the week after that. I always have a plan. So on this Sunday, my day off, I plan the week after that: what will be done, et cetera. I don't have like — well, I do have a routine now that I don't travel as much because COVID canceled my international trips. But I used to — for the last four years — travel the world and teach in private schools, only pastry oriented. My daily routine at the time was going on [a] plane. Every other week I was in some part of the world, whether it was Latin America, America, Asia, Europe. But now I'm mostly at the Pastry Academy in Las Vegas.

And there is a week I teach my long-term students — whether it's wedding cake sugar showpiece, chocolate showpiece — elaborate modern style entremets. Or I create content for the social media platform, or rarely, but it still happens, I do [a] commission job. So I'm kind of always, always in the kitchen. We rarely take vacations. And I cannot say that my life outside of the kitchen is very interesting.

Who is one chef you'd want to cook you dinner?

Hmm, that's a good one. Being in the pastry industry, I'm really not involved so much with savory chefs. I don't know if I can pick one in particular because I have great respect for many savory chefs. I think having a dinner, a personal dinner by Gordon Ramsay must be very, very entertaining because he's a fun guy, even though he is a little bit harsh in the way he approaches things, but this would be very fun. But there are so many other talented individuals, whether it's in the Nordic countries, or in Spain, or in France, or in Italy, or in Asia. Oh gosh. Do I have to pick one? 

What's one ingredient you can never live without? Chocolate must be one, but do you have another one?

Yeah. Chocolate is a very obvious one, and it's really true because without this beautiful ingredient I would not be able to do most of my work. I will have to pick vanilla, because vanilla, not a lot of people know that, but vanilla is a flavor-exhausting natural ingredient that we use in many, many of our preparations. It just has that, it's not sweet per se, but it encourages and gives a floral aspect to the sweetness of our elements that we put in desserts. So I pretty much put vanilla in everything. And lately vanilla has been becoming harder to get, more expensive to get, because big industrial companies [have] got into the vanilla product [business] and bought so many plantations and jacked up the price. But if not chocolate, vanilla would be the second one.

What is your go-to fast food order? And from which restaurant?

That's going to be tough because I don't eat fast food.

Nothing ever?

It's not nothing ever, but I stopped, years and years ago. I used to like In-N-Out, but yeah, I'm trying to stay away from fast food. As I'm getting older, I found that it's a lot harder for me to digest. I feel very heavy after, I feel almost sick. So I kind of removed it from my diet. Personal choice.

You create almost impeccable, perfect pastries and chocolate illusions that we get to see on Instagram. What are your biggest failures? We never see you fail.

So I'm human, of course. Sometimes things don't go according to plan, but because I'm able to post one creation per week, that means I'm usually always succeeding every week. I don't have a biggest failure. I can give you a little insight if you want a funny story ... On a small scale, working chocolate becomes very tricky. Every thin detail can melt so easily with your hands. And then when you apply the color, because it's an edible color, which is cocoa butter, which has a certain viscosity, it's not as fluid or liquid as water-based color. This can really remove design. Originally, I wanted to put the plane onto the [chocolate showpiece] challenge [in "School of Chocolate"] where you see a rocket ship, do a plane.

I spent a full day working on the plane. And it's the only time I actually gave up on a project because I knew the level I wanted to accomplish, I would not be able to reach [it] at that time. Because I wanted to craft little sugar windows. I just, I went with a simpler ship just to be able to make it work. Because very small, extremely detailed, modelist real-life oriented projects are not my favorites. I don't have an epic fail where, okay, I built that three, that five-foot-tall showpiece, and because I forgot something everything collapsed. This, so far, has not happened to me.

Is there one flavor profile that you have that has so far alluded you or that you are looking forward to playing with in the future?

Flavor profile-wise, my creations are pretty much always based on the same ideas, which is instead of trying to jam as much flavor as possible and making it taste good, I try to express one flavor through the use of textures, and in multiple ways. Because you can eat a strawberry, you can eat a fresh strawberry, you can eat a flavored yogurt strawberry, it's still a strawberry flavor, but your mouth senses it in such a different way. And my idea, when I craft something, I try to work on one flavor, usually highlighted by a secondary one that isn't really essential in the name of it. But just to exhaust the flavor and textures, usually playing with textures [to] open parts of your taste buds that usually can be less receptive if you don't have that texture, which allows you to feel flavor in a very different way.

As far as what I like, flavor-wise, I love exotic flavors, and I love simplistic cakes. Mine do look elaborate, there is a lot of work in [them], but when you look at it, it's pretty straightforward. You have a crunchy element, you have a smooth [element], [it's] very intense flavor-wise, whether it's a compote, a cream, et cetera. Then you have a sponge for the textured parts, and also to absorb some of the moisture. And then you have a mousse that brings some lightness, some freshness to the recipe. The rest is tricks and decor to make it look very appealing.

If there was a bloopers reel for "School of Chocolate," what's something we might see?

Bloopers for "School of Chocolate?" ... I mean, the dolphin falling down was a pretty good one. Something that you would've not seen? I don't know. I think you know, my English is not [my] first language, and I think the edit did an incredible job [of] removing some of me trying over and over to say the right thing. I don't know if this would be considered a blooper, but I don't know. I don't think we had a lot of [failures]. For [a] first [season], a pilot and recording during COVID, everything went pretty smoothly. So there is nothing really too, let's say, too article-friendly to make it like a big, big news, unfortunately ... One funny blooper, but I don't know if this could be a blooper. I think it's when Tyricia Clarke, the second time she did a chocolate and raspberry flavor, I tasted it and I recognized that it was my chocolate mousse, and asked her to show me the recipe she used. And it was actually the mousse from my own book. So I thought it was kind of funny that she put that [in her pastry] and she did it very well. It was actually a great success. But it was very funny that she would use my own recipe to try to wow me.

Were there any creations that came out of the show from your students that particularly surprised you?

Yeah. I know how difficult it is to create illusions [and] elaborate pastries, even more so when you are not in your [own] kitchen. So the sets, I was part consultant producer, so I made the sets with all necessary equipment for them to succeed. And they probably had more equipment than they would have ever had in their own kitchens. So they had everything to do it, but now it's still a challenge to be able to do it while being recorded, while being ... timed. I think they all had great ideas. When you see them not succeed, I think it's because of the time constraints, and not for a lack of ... skills. Flavor-wise, some of them really surprised me. I can recall Cedrick's inflated pear, with the wine and pear. This was surprising and extremely good. I did not expect that because I know how tricky it is to balance wine into desserts, even more so when it's red wine.

I think that during the sugar challenge, what Juan did, in my opinion, was close to perfection. As far as flavor, I would not be ashamed to sell that if I had a dessert shop, everything was balanced. The look of it was sexy. The cut was perfectly centered. You can always work a little bit on the glaze, have something shinier, but as far as the taste of it, it was incredible. 

In your pastry school, you talk about teaching students the scientific processes behind what they're making. What's the number process that people need to understand to make pastries?

Oh, okay. I don't think there is one rule, but one thing I always tell every student that comes to the school, is in our industry, on social media I do show a lot of the beautiful aspects of what we do. The visual part, the R&D part, the playing with flavors, et cetera. But the day-to-day of [a] pastry chef, you have to be willing to make great sacrifices. And I think if there is one advice I can give every [person] that [is] looking to get into the industry — our industry is rarely rewarding and you have to be willing to sacrifice your birthdays, your holiday, your vacations, Christmas [and] Easter. Because we are working to make other people happy during that period.

And whether you work for someone or for yourself, sacrifices in our industry is the keyword. You have to look down, you have to accept to sacrifice things, and work extremely hard until you can get to the point where your skills and levels are to a point where you can start doing it for yourself and maybe being able to be rewarded for that.

But don't expect to come to school, whether it's mine or anywhere else, and after a few months or years of training, become a chef or open your own establishment, and be able to succeed right away and become the next pastry influencer on social media. It doesn't work like that. I'm very grateful [for] everything that is happening to me at a very young age, but it's very uncommon in the industry. And I think it's a succession of very low-key coincidences and risk-taking I did that brought me to where I am today. But it's not the right standard. It's not the common standard. So I wouldn't give you any advice on particularly a trick or recipe per se. But if anyone gets into the industry, you will have to deal with much more difficulties than what my social media, and every other successful pastry chef social media leads you to believe.

For more insights into Amaury Guichon's spectacular pastry creations and chocolate showpieces, tune into Netflix's "School of Chocolate."  Follow Amaury Guichon on Instagram for weekly updates on his latest masterpieces.