There is no surer way to a woman’s heart, reckons pastry chef Fred Ponnavoy, than puddings. Rich, chocolatey, calorific puddings, preferably knocked up in your own kitchen to show commitment. “A pudding made with care says ‘I love you, you are sweet like sugar, you melt my heart,’” says the 41-year-old Frenchman who, as head chef at Gü, is responsible for the confections in ramekins to be found in nearly every supermarket.
If his formula is correct, he must have incited the passions of half the woman in the land, for it’s Ponnavoy’s job to devise fruit and chocolate puddings that have never been tasted before, then the culinary techniques to bring them to the mass market. It’s estimated that one of his creations is being consumed somewhere in the world every four seconds.
Despite 27 years in the pastry business and 11 at Gü, Ponnavoy insists that each shift in his experimenting kitchen is a thrill. “The fun of it is phenomenal,” he says. “You can start each time with a blank page and work out where to go from there.”
Much of his work involves new twists on familiar themes. As well as rarified ingredients, weeks of scientific experiment is required to work out how to mass produce delicate puddings which will survive being packaged, transported and displayed over a period on shop shelves. “The first product we ever worked on had to be chocolate souffle,” he says. “There was none in the supermarket in those days and the technical team had to invent a special machine to produce souffles that wouldn’t sink. More recently I wanted to use my grandmother’s chocolate mousse recipe but it turned out to be very hard to produce it en masse. It took 18 months to work out how to whip hundreds of eggs and get the sticky consistency right.”
Ponnavoy, born and raised in Burgundy in France, realised during a school careers day that his future lay in puddings. “I entered the classroom aged 14 and saw a pastry chef and chocolatier demonstrating and I knew then that I wanted to be a chef,” he says.
That same year he began an apprenticeship with a pastry shop in Dijon, working six hour shifts around the school day. “It was even more exciting than I’d expected,” he recalls. “I’d been used to seeing the finished versions in shop windows and it was unbelievable being able to create so many things out of eggs, butter and flour.” By the end of his first year, aged only 15, he was put in charge of croquembouches, a cone of choux pastry balls bound together with caramel, popular for weddings and baptisms. After three years of training there he worked his way through restaurants across France and Switzerland to learn from as many masters as possible. “The world of pastry and chocolate is constantly evolving with new techniques,” he says. “Everything you are taught you can challenge and experiment with.”
In 1997 Ponnavoy left the land of haute cuisine to work in an English hotel. “It was a shock to go to an English supermarket and see how poor the variety was.” In 2003 he answered an advert for a pastry chef at Gü, then a supplier of puddings for other brands. The company had decided to set up its own range specialising in chocolate and required a chef to devise new recipes for it. “I began the day the company launched,” he says. “I didn’t know anything about manufacturing or marketing and none of us had any idea what would happen.”
Gü subsequently launched Frü, specialising in fruit-based desserts, and then the two merged to create a range of puddings for the mass market. An innovation team keeps an eye on prevailing trends and sends briefs to the kitchens on what’s likely to be in demand. Ponnavoy’s job is to think up creations around these whereupon his recipe and technical teams work out how practically to realise them. “Every three months we have an innovation day and everyone comes along and discusses trends and by the end we have half a dozen ideas to work on,” he says. “Salted caramel, for instance, is big now so we want to create a twin dessert that can be served hot or cold.”
Ponnavoy suggests catering school as a launch pad for a career in a pastry kitchen, then as many jobs as possible in as many different places to broaden the knowledge. “You need to understand marketing, packaging and science,” he says. “You can’t be too precious. Chefs tend to think they are always right but you need to be flexible and listen to the consumer.”
His latest creation, to be released for Christmas, has been perhaps the greatest indulgence of all. “It’s a box of six chocolate baubles each filled with three chocolate bon bons,” he says. “Each box takes half day to create because each bauble has more than 50 pieces of chocolate in it. There’s so much work that goes into these things that people don’t see.”
Only 50 boxes will be available and they only to those with £85 to spare for festive nibbles. But it may, of course, be an express route into that female heart.
