Towering Torreblanca
Pastry Pro A leading light of the avant-garde, artisan of delicate desserts and extravagant cakes, manufacturer of mass-produced confections, Paco Torreblanca presides as inspirational touchstone of Spain's culinary emergence. Gerry Dawes reports.
Gary Tucker
Posted: June 8, 2009
Paco Torreblanca, Spain's greatest pastelero (pastry chef) and chocolatero (chocolate maker), has been called "the Ferran Adrià of chocolate" and no doubt can be credited as the padre of Spain's modern desserts movement. The 58 year old Torreblanca counts among his top disciples his own son Jacob, a noted Spanish pastry chef; Ferran Adrià's brother Albert, a superstar himself; and Oriol Balaguer, the Barcelona wizard Kuidaore's Joycelyn Shu calls "the Dalí of desserts." Torreblanca was named Mejor Pastelero Artesano de España (Best Master Pastry Chef of Spain) in 1988, received the Best Master Pastry Chef of Europe title in 1990, and has won numerous prizes for his confectionery creations. Regarded by European professionals as a genius, Torreblanca's penchant for making elaborate sugar sculptures such as several pieces he fabricated as a tribute to Pablo Picasso—one a copy of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon—may yet earn him the tag of "Picasso of Pastry."
In 1991, Ferran Adrià was little known outside his corner of Catalonia's Costa Brava when he and Albert showed up at Torreblanca's place in Elda in the province of Alicante. "We spent two weeks with Paco in his pastelería, working together and reflecting on the world of pastries and cooking," Adrià recalls. "It was a fantastic experience, and we developed a great friendship and professional relationship." Both Adrià and Torreblanca deny having had any great influence on each other's culinary direction, but one wonders how much Torreblanca's nonconformist mentality influenced Adrià's future.
Already known by his peers, Torreblanca rocketed to public acclaim in April 2004 because of a wedding cake. After some 15 tasting sessions, including two with the engaged couple, his original creation was chosen for the wedding of the Prince of Asturias, Felipe de Borbón y Grecia, heir to the Spanish throne, to Letizia Ortiz, a former television anchorwoman now in line to become the next Queen of Spain. The royal wedding was the first in nearly a century in Madrid, and the fact that Ortiz was not only a commoner, but a divorcée, enthralled the Spanish public. Coming barely two months after the terrorist attack on Madrid's Atocha train station, the wedding brightened Spain during a very dark period. Made from all-natural ingredients—including olive oil, pumpkin seed oil, pumpkin, milk chocolate, dark Tanzanian chocolate (75 percent cacao), hazelnut mousse, and Marcona almonds—the "Gianduja Real" cake incorporated Felipe's coat of arms. The layers, each a cake with the red, yellow, and black colors of the Spanish flag, were arranged separately along an elegant, spiraling ribbon of chocolate nearly seven feet tall.
In the United States, Torreblanca is known only by a relative handful of culinary professionals. Some American chefs received an introduction to Torreblanca at the "Spain's 10" event sponsored by The French Culinary Institute in New York City in 2006, where he staged an enthralling demo of isomalt sugar magic, making crystalline creations to encase fruits and decorate desserts. Some American pastry chefs have ponied up for his spectacular dessert books, Paco Torreblanca and his frontier-pushing Paco Torreblanca 2, focusing on new ideas in savory pastries.
The first book displays his mind-set and range: over a dozen ice cream flavors from basil to goat cheese to apricot and saffron; olive oil sponge cake; dehydrated raspberries; candied jasmine; and crunchy chocolate bonbons with sea salt. Another book, La Cocina Dulce de Paco Torreblanca, comes with 160 recipes and a CD/DVD.
In late February, Torreblanca announced the publication of Colección de Piezas de Azúcar (Collection of Sugar Pieces), which he considers to be "undoubtedly the most personal and creative book that I have ever written." In this book, Torreblanca fleshes out a theme that has fascinated him for several years: the construction of elaborate, artistic works from sugar falling somewhere "between architecture and sculpture." In his pieces he applies new techniques to pulled, blown, cast, and bubbled sugar, isomalt sugar, and pastillage, working his materials into surprising and magical shapes that alternate between opacity and transparency. Many play on light and shadow, and indeed, some are even towering torres blancas—white towers.
Americans may be hearing more about Torreblanca soon. "There is a before and an after the royal wedding in my career," he says. Last spring he inked a major deal with Zurich-based Barry Callebaut, the world's largest processor of cocoa and chocolate, for whom he has long been a Cacao Barry (the French brand) ambassador. In September, the company opened its American headquarters in Chicago and installed in the Montgomery Ward building a 8,500-square-foot Barry Callebaut Chocolate Academy, its largest to date and one of nearly a dozen around the world, including one in India. Next month, Torreblanca is scheduled to conduct a two day workshop (along with Balaguer and chef Rick Bayless) at The French Pastry School in Chicago.
The few American chefs who've visited Torreblanca's Totel desserts factory (pasteleviatotel.net) in Monóver, Alicante, have come away in awe. Last year, I took New York City chef Terrance Brennan (Picholine and Artisanal), who effusively recalls Torreblanca's factory "the most impressive food production facility I have seen. I was blown away by how spotless and well organized it was and by the high-tech equipment Paco helped design, especially the machine that precision cuts chocolate with pressurized water jets. Using such devices, he can accomplish high-volume artisanal production, with his team finishing everything by hand. I also loved the laboratory where Paco holds brainstorming sessions. The ceiling has pin-point lights representing constellations in the night sky. I would love to have a room like that."
Greg Drescher, executive director of strategic initiatives at The Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in St. Helena, California, came away equally impressed after a visit. "Paco's delicious vision for the future of pastry production left me breathless: marrying the exacting standards of one of the world's great pastry artists with the capabilities of a gleaming high-tech factory. For anyone who cares about bringing the pleasures of the culinary arts to a wider world audience, this is a man to watch."
Born in 1951 in Villena, Alicante, during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, Torreblanca grew up in the medieval quarter of this historic town. He can trace his Jewish roots back nearly 700 years in Spain. In the 14th century, his family emigrated from France to Navarra, then to Córdoba and Granada, finally converting to Catholicism during the Inquisition rather than leave Spain. His two sons, Jacob and David, were named to honor his heritage, and he wears a neck chain dangling a gold Star of David. At 14, Torreblanca, whose grandparents owned a bakery, moved to Paris to apprentice with his father's friend Jean Millet, a Meilleur Ouvrier de France and one of France's greatest pâtissiers. There, Torreblanca experienced great French cuisine and became engrossed in the lives and works of Robespierre, Carême, and Shakespeare, whose line from Richard III—"For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost"—he often quotes as a reminder that exacting attention to detail is essential to great pastry making.
At 25, Torreblanca returned to Alicante, married Chelo Coloma, and moved to Elda, where in 1978 he opened Totel (inspired by the Japanese expression for the first rays of light that shine through the trees), just around the corner from Mari Carmen Vélez's celebrated La Sirena restaurant (see "From Rice to Riches," Food Arts, May 2007, page 104). Under what he calls the "anarchical and liberal" culinary atmosphere of post-Franco Spain (Franco died in 1975), Torreblanca began applying his vanguardista ideas to traditional desserts and products, developing such techniques as substituting olive oil for butter in his pastries and chocolates, which, he points out, is nothing new, since "the old-timers here always used olive oil in baking." He's right, of course, since Spanish children snack on bread smeared with olive oil and chocolate, the root of Torreblanca's chocoholismo fixation. One of Spain's best-known producers, Valor, has long made chocolate in the nearby Alicante coastal town of Villajoyosa, famous in post-Civil War Spain as the capital of dark, sweet, rustic chocolate a la piedra (stone-ground) made by grinding cacao beans to a paste on a heavy heated Mayan metate-like granite stone, then mixing it with beet sugar, cinnamon, and rice flour to be either eaten as candy, softened and spread with olive oil on bread, or melted to make hot chocolate.
Torreblanca's off-beat combinations have had a major influence in Spain on the way chocolates are made and flavored. He began making chocolates flavored with spices such as saffron, star anise, cinnamon, and licorice (major spice suppliers Verdú-Cantó Saffron Spain and Carmecita are located in next door Novelda). Then he began imbuing his lovely little square bombons with matcha tea, ginger, curry, onion, and cuatro especias a la sal (cinnamon, cardamom, and Jamaican and Sarawak peppers, each garnished with Maldon sea salt). Some of his chocolates are based on contrasting flavors (sweet and savory or mild and spicy) and textures (soft and crunchy); have liquid centers (Alicante's high alcohol rancio Fondillón wine); or are modernist, like his caviar de chocolate—small crunchy cereal balls bathed in chocolate—sold in faux caviar tins. At Totel, Torreblanca makes 50 different chocolates divided into 10 different groupings, including savory ones.
While working in Paris, Torreblanca continued developing his lifelong passion for drawing, making colored sketches of the desserts he was learning to craft. His artistic bent has served him well, enabling him to sketch the structure and intricate designs of his desserts. In an attic studio at home, he also sculpts, a talent displayed in his elaborate sugar constructions, like his impressive showpieces paying homage to Picasso, Joan Miró, and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, the 19th century Spanish post-Romantic poet-artist.
In a nondescript Monóver industrial park near Elda, Torreblanca installed his state-of-the-art Pastelería Totel facility, where he works with sons David and Jacob. David runs the business and Jacob followed in his father's footsteps, winning Spain's Best Desserts Chef title in 2003 and World Sub-Champion Desserts Chef in 2004. They are assisted by a cadre of 10 young pasteleros-in-the-making, chosen from a waiting list of 350.
Early in 2006, Torreblanca, in partnership with Sergi Arola, opened a shop featuring his desserts and chocolates shown in jewelry shop-like cases at Arola's El Panino D'E breakfast/sandwich/panini restaurant in Madrid's exclusive Barrio de Salamanca. In 2008, Torreblanca withdrew his chocolate shop from its space at the entrance to the restaurant in anticipation of a mini-chain of stand-alone Paco Torreblanca shops, the first of which he opened in his home provincial capital of Alicante last autumn. Others are planned soon for Barcelona, Málaga, and Sevilla. This fall, Torreblanca and Arola will open what Arola describes as "the best dessert shop in the world," in Madrid. And more Torreblanca shops are planned for Barcelona and Málaga.
Totel desserts and chocolates are shipped frozen from Monóver to top Spanish restaurants, to European customers, to the lucrative Japanese market he has developed, and to his new store in Alicante. Finished desserts are flash frozen under nitrogen, kept in superchilled walk-in coolers, then shipped to customers in special freezer trucks or containers. Left to thaw in a refrigerator overnight, Torreblanca's exquisite, artfully decorated desserts, which travel perfectly despite their fragile appearance, emerge like new.
Barry Callebaut was so impressed with the Totel operation, they tried to buy it, but Torreblanca declined, opting instead for a deal with a separate plant in which he will have a 20 percent partnership. In the same Monóver industrial park that houses his Pastelería Totel, Torreblanca supervised the building of the Barry Callebaut Manufacture Ibérica plant, a nearly 54,000-square-foot factory, which opened in mid-October. At a factory in Rotterdam, Torreblanca helped design and supervise the manufacture of the advanced equipment for the new plant. As part of his production team, Torreblanca was planning to hire some 100 employees laid off by local shoe factories and give them six months training, enabling them to produce a staggering 10,000,000 gourmet-quality frozen desserts per year.
The Barry Callebaut-Torreblanca collaboration was set up to produce some 15 frozen pastries, including single portion cakes, large rectangular ones, and portioned strips. These cakes would also serve as the foundations for mousse, cream, and chocolate combinations, including Torreblanca creations such as Ceylon tea mousse and Bourbon vanilla cream. A particularly attractive element of the new operation was to be a special area where clients, in consultation with the Torreblancas, could develop their own recipes.
Torreblanca's recipe lab will be one popular place indeed, if among those recipes are the marijuana-smoke laced chocolate dessert he showed at the Lo Mejor de la Gastronomia conference in San Sebastián in November or the video performance art piece exhibited there and at IVAM, Valencia's institute of modern art, last year, the latter a gorgeous model who had a vertical swath of chocolate painted from her shoulder down across a bared breast and naked midriff. In the video, Torreblanca, who likes to apply himself enthusiastically to his work, proceeded to sample his creation at a strategic point in the chocolate swath's trajectory, perhaps to the discreet delight of the unperturbed model, but, one doubts, to the great pastelero's wife and business partner, Chelo, who was in attendance.
On the day Torreblanca opened his Totel shop in Elda, a Japanese friend who appreciated the name and its rising sun motif arranged for a truckload of goodies to be delivered, along with a message: "Que esta luz no se apague nunca" ("may this light never go out"). Anyone who has followed Torreblanca's career knows that his light has begun to shine like a beacon—a torch his two sons will help keep lit—attracting pastry makers worldwide to Alicante.
