How a High-End New York Pastry Shop Sells Out of Desserts Each Day — The Experts

The reason I wanted to be a pastry chef, to me, pastry is an edible art. When people come to our shop, I'd like to feel like they are not only in the bakery, but also in the art gallery, and then they enjoy the space, the pastries, culture, like ambience, everything. When you go to the museum, you go look around, and then after that, you go to the souvenir shop. That's the same concept. We're going to start with the corn. We usually use like two cases per day. We have six different components. For making our pastries, corn is the most energy. Usually it takes three days. I'm going to make the base of the caramel. This is a vanilla bean. We're using like 700 grams of the vanilla bean per week, and we're going to infuse it to our cream. When I create the dessert, it comes out like, I don't know, a week or two weeks, but sometimes some dessert takes like a few months. That's the most fun part, because you're, you know, using, buying all the different type of ingredients. For example, like the white corn, and the yellow corn, and the bicolor corn, and all the different company of the corn can. Even making for one cake, corn cake, you're having like so much different type of the base of the corn. So once the caramel is done, I'm straining. Now I'm going to add the butter to finish our caramel. So we're going to make a corn biscuit. The biscuit is a French word in cake. So it's the simple sponge cake. We're using the corn flour. It makes the corn taste of our cake. So I'm going to whip it, all these ingredients. The second step, we are going to make a meringue with the egg whites and sugar. We're going to add the meringue into the biscuit. It has to be folded very delicately to keep the meringue texture. You know the corn caramel, we spread on the sofa, and then we're drying for at least two days to make this corn powder. And then after that, we mix it and then sift it. This corn powder makes more corn flavor of this corn cake. We got the corn biscuit from the oven after baking. I'm going to punch it. When I create the cakes and desserts, I love to play with the texture. I like to have creamy texture, crunchy, and then like soft texture, everything, because texture can bring more fun into your mouth. I'm going to mold the corn sublet for the bottom of our corn desserts. I'm making the corn mousse. It's more fun to see it. Like visually, it looks like a corn, and then when they taste it, it's sweet, but also a little bit savory. It can be anything. It can be a fruit. It can be food ingredients, but also it can be like object or anything that I inspire. The most important part of the process is piping the corn kernel. It defines the final visual of the corn dessert. I'm piping all the corn kernels one by one, and every morning. I got faster than beginning, so maybe like an hour before there was two, three hours of the piping. This is our yellow chocolate sauce with the white chocolate. We are going to spray on the top of the corn for making a realistic visual. When we spray, it's important to spray evenly everywhere because if it's too much, it's too thick and it's not good for the taste, and if it's too thin, it's going to be very fragile. The chocolate, it protects our mousse, but also it gives a little bit of crunchiness outside of the corn, so it's fun when you cut it. So this is done. This is enough amount of the spray, and I'm going to finish with the corn leaf for our final set. So this is the white chocolate with the green coloring for making the corn leaves. We sprinkle the corn powder on the top. At the beginning, you can taste like corn, like grilled corn flavor. My favorite part of this corn, it's a sublet, so you finish with the crunchiness and then chewiness of the sublet. It's a little fun. It remains a long flavor into your mouth. We are selling about 350, 400 corn per week. Since everything is hand-piped and then it takes time to make it, we can't do the mass production. We have a limited quantity that we can make per day. That's why we keep selling out the corn around 2, 3 p.m. But I think the most fun part, it's when I see people enjoying the cakes and desserts, so that makes me happy. For pastry, we have to use five cases of the egg and then five to six cases of butter. Every week, we go through more than 30 kilogram of chocolate. We're using white chocolate, milk chocolate, different type of dark chocolate, so overall, we're using more than 30 kilo per week and maybe more. We are going to make the chocolate crema for our cake, VLC, very important chocolate cake. I wanted to make the chocolate layer cake. For me, it's very American-style dessert. Personally, I love to eat the chocolate layer cake. I love steakhouse here. Even though I'm full of the steak, I always wanted to finish a chocolate layer cake, and then that's why I named it as a very important chocolate cake because to me, it's important at the end of the meal. We have 13 layers. We have six chocolate biscuit and then six chocolate crema, including the black pepper caramel, and we have the sablé, and then we finish with the glaze on the top with the ganache at the side. It's 80% of dark chocolate and then 20% of milk chocolate. I'm going to add the cream into caramel. I'm adding the egg yolk to make the crema. I do enjoy this process because it's kind of satisfying to punch exact same shape of the biscuit. I'm going to put the biscuit at the bottom. This core gets better to make it flat and also it's a circle, so it's easier to make it flat and even. The next step is we're going to put the chocolate crema in the caramel. I'm not really a chocolate person. I like more fruity and then acid. I want to accommodate to everyone. So this is our chocolate layer cake after unmolding. Right now it's frozen, so I can be able to pipe it correctly, and then I'm going to freeze it quickly for spring. This is a dark chocolate sauce. The reason why I'm finishing with spraying is not only for the protection of our cake and cream, but also visually it's very nice to see the matte texture compared to the shiny glaze on the top. It's the best way to clean when you work with chocolate because it's so hard to remove it. So working with the torch is better. It's easy to clean it. We are going to finish with the chocolate glaze and gold leaf. Then this much, it's 180, so it's precious and expensive. This is our V.I.C. very important chocolate cake. I've been a pastry chef for 17 years. I had a lot of ideas in my head. Everything was really fun, from creating this space to creating the menu. All of our dessert, the Lisé, is my babies. I have 25, 26 babies. Mathieu is my husband. He handles the bread side, and then I handle the pastry side. He's a very good pastry chef. Actually, it's really fun to work together. It's very good energy. Now we are going to make the kouign-amann. It's very important to laminate the dough with the butter and respect the certain temperature because the butter, when it's too warm or when it's overworked, it's going to be melted and then mixing with the dough. So we are brushing the water to stick the sugar onto the dough, and then I'm going to sprinkle the sugar. It was in the proofer for two hours, and then now it's ready to bake. I like to shape the dough. I like the texture. This is our shape we're going to put into the mold. After that, it's ready to go into the proofer, and after two hours, we're going to bake into the oven, and we're going to have our higher, crispy, airy, and flaky kouign-amann. So sometimes at the end of the day, we are doing kind of like competition, like who's making it faster. So this is caramel powder, so we're going to add it on the top and for making more crispy and then shiny texture. Then we're going to bake it just a few minutes. Now it's caramel, it's cooked, so it's so much shinier. It's going to add more, like, crispy texture. You can see all the layers. This is the caramelized sugar, like naturally caramelized in our kouign-amann. It's airy and then flaky, so when you eat it, it's not too heavy. It's just the richness of the butter, but when you love butter, you love kouign-amann. So good. Pastry is very detailed. It is made by hand, everything like piping, from making, scaling, everything by hand. It is very important to have good people and then great team to have the good quality and they keep making the best products and keep the consistency. The team is really important to me. Until opening and then running the shop, maybe until like first month, I couldn't really realize that is this real or is this true that finally my dream came true and then in the New York City, I wanted to make people like to see our dessert as an edible art, but also joyful when they eat it. I will tell younger Eunji to keep chasing your dream with passion and love. Keep continuing, keep chasing it so your dream can be true one day.