The 9 Dishes That Made My Career: Dominique Ansel

The James Beard-nominated chef walks us through his menu of inventive pastries.

Hannah Norwick

Plenty of pastry displays around New York City lure sweet tooths with bright colors and hand-piped designs, but few deliver the mix of personality and impeccable technique as Dominique Ansel Bakery. Inside the glass-encased kitchen of his bustling Soho workshop, the pastry maven and his crew turn out whimsical creations that meld classic French technique with bright seasonal ingredients, inspirations from architecture and other cuisines, and riffs on beloved American flavors like peanut butter and chocolate ganache. His signature kouign amanns—traditional sweet croissants from Brittany—are baked three to four times a day and usually sell out before the close of business. Equally as coveted are his lemon-inflected madeleines, spongey bite-size cakes that are baked to order and served warm with a light dusting of powdered sugar.

Before taking on a more visible role in the kitchen of his own bakery, Ansel worked mostly behind the scenes as a mastermind for a number of renowned pastry programs. He has worked with Christophe Adam at the exotic and popular Paris Epicerie—Fauchon—and spent six years as the Executive Pastry chef at Daniel in NYC. After helping the restaurant rack up three Michelin stars and a perfect four star review from the New York Times, Ansel decided to set out on his own, opening Dominique Ansel Bakery in 2011. Recently, his talents and creativity have been recognized by the James Beard Foundation with a nomination for the Outstanding Pastry Chef 2013 award. Though the lanky and jovial Frenchmen is finally in the limelight, he remains grounded in the same fundamentals that have attracted all the accolades and success. For Ansel, it is only about pushing the boundaries of his mind, his ovens, and his fellow bakers.

Amid all the critical acclaim, Ansel seems to get the most joy from customers who regularly return for seconds after making it only a few blocks away from the shop. This type of craving isn’t surprising once you’ve had a chance to taste his playful, ever-changing lineup of treats—from seasonal creations like Easter eggs filled with marshmallow chicks, to honeycomb-infused tarts. His shop offers an escape from the stranglehold of cupcakes (though requests have been made), trading them in instead themed religieuse (tiered creme puffs) for birthday celebrations and classic cannelles baked in traditional copper pans rather than cheaper, more practical silicon stand-ins. Amazingly, all of this comes from the mind of a man who admittedly doesn’t eat many sweets, and hates the feeling of meringue between his fingers.

Ansel’s inspirations come from childhood memories, including family meals featuring blood peaches soaked in wine, and the cities of Paris and New York (he makes a twist on the classic Paris Brest that looks like a hamburger but tastes like a Snickers bar). The nine dishes celebrated here are those that best represent Ansel’s tireless quest for pastry perfection.

Written by Hannah Norwick (@HannahNorwick)

The DKA (Dominique's Kouign Amann)

When I first started the bakery and told people I wanted to make kouign amann, their response was always, “You want to make what?” Selling an unpronounceable pastry (pronounced kween ah-mahn) is probably not the best marketing strategy, but I’ve never been the smartest kid in school. The kouign amann is a Brittany-based pastry that’s similar to a caramelized croissant. It is crispy and caramelized on the outside, and flaky and slightly moist on the inside. There are only three main ingredients (dough, butter, and sugar), but it’s really hard to make well. Think of it like an omelet—depending on the chef, it could be light and fluffy or completely overcooked. Every little variation makes a big difference. I’ve had a lot of traditional kouign amann. It comes in a large cake (usually about 8–10 inches), is very dense, very sweet, and very buttery. It is like a brick. It is not my favorite, and most French people don’t like it unless they are from Brittany. In my version, we use about half the butter and sugar, and bake them fresh daily so they don’t get soggy. That’s when we started calling it the DKA, for Dominique’s Kouign Amann. Funny enough, a customer informed me one day that DKA also stands for a medical condition for diabetes. When we opened our doors in 2011, the customers flooded in, and before we knew it, DKAs had sold out everyday for the first six months. It was reported by the New York Times as being the next “it” item hitting the U.S. We even had tour groups from Brittany visiting just for it. People buy one and then they walk a couple blocks, turn around and come back for two more. It is very unique and very special. Since day one, production has quintupled.
The Paris New York

Remember that scene in Ratatouille when the food critic has a taste of the ratatouille and it brings him back to his childhood when his mom cooked for him? That is how I felt when I first tasted peanut butter in the United States. I was already in my 20s then. Believe it or not, I did not have any peanut butter growing up in France, except for this one time when my mom bought some from the shop in the small town where we lived. I spread it on toast and thought it was delicious, but due to lack of demand, the shop stopped selling it. Years passed and I forgot about it. I ate a lot of peanut butter in my first months in New York and loved the way it played with chocolate and caramel—the Snickers Bar is hands down my favorite candy bar. I knew that I wanted to do a dessert using these iconic American flavors, peanut butter, chocolate, and caramel. I decided to do a twist on the classic Paris Brest dessert which is a ring of choux dough filled with hazelnut cream. In my version, we do a chocolate ganache, peanut butter cream, and soft, slightly-salted caramel. It tastes like a Snicker’s Bar cream puff, and we’ve continued to improve it. We’ve done about three updated versions since the beginning. From the top, the dessert looks like the shape of a New York bagel, and from the side it almost looks like a mini hamburger, but it is also French.
Madeleines

I had eight items on the dessert menu when I was at Daniel, and do you know what people remember the most? The madeleines at the end of the meal. People couldn’t get enough of them. If there is one item that I have made over and over again, it is madeleines. Every night, every table, madeleines, madeleines, madeleines. Puff Daddy liked his with fruit jam. When I first opened the bakery, people didn’t think it was possible to do fresh-baked madeleines for the customers. “It would take too much time,” “It’s too complicated,” they would say. Trust me, when you work for Daniel Boulud for six years, nothing seems that hard or complicated. Least of all madeleines. Today, there is a long line every weekend for them. People have no problem waiting five minutes for something that is right out of the oven. They are warm and light-as-air miniature cake bites—about the size of a thimble—with a slight hint of lemon. We serve them in sets of ten per person. It was very important for me to bring something to the bakery that is baked to order. Growing up, I was going to bakeries getting bread for my mother and grandmother three or for times a day—once in the morning, once at lunch, and once in the afternoon, and then once for dinner. In France bakeries are so small that they bake bread all day long to answer the needs of all the people. These small, fluffy bites with a hint of orange and lemon are so much better when they are baked and eaten straight from the oven. They are warm and very tender. I insist on telling people who order them to eat them right away and not to wait. It is a different experience that way.
Vacherin

A vacherin sounds fancy, but it’s really a straightforward dessert made with meringue and ice cream. One of the first desserts I worked on when I started at Daniel was the vacherin. In my version, there are six or seven different components. This was no ordinary vacherin, and it looked very different with tiny meringue kisses in lychee and violet that dotted a long cylinder of ice cream. I even added raspberry marshmallow kisses to give a new texture to it. The staff at Daniel who now had to do a lot more work for one dessert hated me for it. But the customers instantly took to it, and it became a longstanding dessert that I would bring back with different flavor profiles from different seasons. We can’t do plated vacherin for the bakery today, but those same meringues kisses on the vacherin eventually inspired our Mini Me’s (miniature meringues), which our customers use to top their ice creams or even add to cereal.
Blood Peach

I remember my aunt buying a small peach tree from Spain and planting it in her back yard when I was little. I must have been like six or seven years-old when my family would have these crazy lunch/dinners at her house. They would start at like 11am and last until like 8pm, with over 20 people there eating. She had a farm that they turned into a house, and she had a huge backyard where she grew tomatoes and herbs and raised rabbits. She grew what I called a “blood peach.” The fruit that came from the tree had deep, dark, and sweet flesh the color of a beet. During the summertime she’d take the ripe blood peaches and slice them up, adding a little red wine and sugar, and serve them chilled. She was macerating them in the morning and we were eating them at night. The juices of the peach would mix with that little bit of red wine and it was wonderful. That was very memorable for me. If you came to my house for dinner, this is the type of dessert I would make for you at home. It’s complete and doesn’t need anything more.
Walnut Cake

When I was an apprentice in France, there was this very simple walnut cake that we made. We used this special walnut spread that we were getting from the South of France, and it out came to be this moist cake with the rich scent of walnut laced throughout. It was just that spread with a little bit of walnut powder, egg whites, flour, and a bit of butter—a very simple recipe. We were baking it into small containers and serving it warm with a little bit of powdered sugar. Believe it or not, I am not the biggest fan of desserts, but I could not stop eating this walnut cake! It was the first time I thought I wanted to be a pastry chef instead of a savory chef. Back then I didn’t think twice about it. I brushed it off as a basic dessert and never bothered to keep the recipe. Years later, I decided I really wanted to make it again, and I have tried so many times, but I can never get it. I don’t remember if there were other ingredients or maybe it was just the way that I was doing it was different. You would think that at the level I am at today I would be able to make something so simple, but sometimes it is just one ingredient that changes the recipe. So the mystery of the walnut cake remains, and I’m still trying to replicate it. I believe one day it will happen.
Fauchon Éclair

My resume barely covers half a page. Before opening my own bakery, I had only worked in two places—Daniel here in New York and Fauchon in Paris. I was at Fauchon for eight years, and if there was one main calling card for the epicerie, it’d be their éclairs. We developed a lot of different éclair recipes there, and one of the most memorable was one that I worked on with Christophe Adam, the executive pastry chef at the time. It was a very intense éclair. For the glaze it had three alternating stripes that went down the length of the pastry and then the pattern slightly curved up on one end and down on the other. It took me and another pastry chef one hour just to finish four éclairs the first time we tried it. We finally realized that if you use a ruler on both sides to keep things aligned and then slide that ruler up on one side and down on the other, you could do it a lot easier. It is very beautiful, and now they do all these different colors. At that time all these chefs were asking, “How do you do It?!” I would just go, “It’s easy!” It wasn’t easy. Now they teach the same technique in the Culinary Institute of America to the students. It makes me feel old, but also really proud that I was there during the invention of this technique. Christophe, who is a very close friend, has made the éclairs original, colorful, and fun. People love them in France, and he started a trend. He has since opened a shop in Paris that is dedicated to only éclairs, it is called Eclair de Génie.
Religieuse

A religieuse is basically a two-tiered cream puff, but here in the bakery we call it the "anti-cupcake." We call it that because it is about the same size as a cupcake, finger-friendly, and easily customizable. When I first opened the bakery I toyed with the idea of making my own cupcake because they are so popular. Then I decided maybe I should bring something else, something that people here had never seen before, and that is new for Americans. The story of the religieuse is that it got its name from looking like a nun’s head (with a smaller ball of cream puff sitting on top of a larger one). Traditionally it was covered with chocolate glaze and decorated with white buttercream. I thought that if it can be dressed up in black and white to look like a nun, I could certainly dress it up in a different way. From there we started doing a new religieuse for every holiday. There is the Santa religieuse, the Frenchie religieuse with a marshmallow beret, the bunny religieuse, and more. For our one year anniversary we got together all the religieuse we had done for the whole year and showcased them. In France, they are everywhere, but here in New York a religieuse is a rare thing. The ones we do, that’s only us.
Perfect Little Egg Sandwich

We create a lot of pastries here at the bakery that I’m proud of, but this tiny sandwich started stealing a lot of the spotlight. Calling a sandwich “perfect” invites people to come test it out, and we didn’t realize the amount of buzz it would get. Actually, our direction behind this sandwich was to focus on simplicity. It's only made up of eggs, a paper thin slice of gruyere cheese, and homemade brioche. We wanted to make every component perfect. I love tomago—the Japanese steamed eggs—and I have been making these scrambled eggs with shallots and chives for years. Whenever I make them for people, they just love it. I wanted to bring some of those things together. It is kind of a tomago, scrambled eggs, and custard-like creme brulee, and then there are chives and shallots inside. It is a very fluffy and pillowy piece of egg that we steam, served on homemade brioche bread with a slice of gruyere cheese on top. We call it the perfect little egg sandwich because of the square egg and square cheese, so it looks very clean and neat, it is straightforward and super tasty. The results in the fluffiest, custardy pillow of egg you can imagine. We cut one-inch thick pieces for the sandwich. A lot of people think that a sandwich has to be quite heavy-handed—you know, full of brisket, glazed with pork fat, and with cheese oozing out. This sandwich defies that.
Plenty of pastry displays around New York City lure sweet tooths with bright colors and hand-piped designs, but few deliver the mix of personality and impeccable technique as Dominique Ansel Bakery. Inside the glass-encased kitchen of his bustling Soho workshop, the pastry maven and his crew turn out whimsical creations that meld classic French technique with bright seasonal ingredients, inspirations from architecture and other cuisines, and riffs on beloved American flavors like peanut butter and chocolate ganache. His signature kouign amanns—traditional sweet croissants from Brittany—are baked three to four times a day and usually sell out before the close of business. Equally as coveted are his lemon-inflected madeleines, spongey bite-size cakes that are baked to order and served warm with a light dusting of powdered sugar. Before taking on a more visible role in the kitchen of his own bakery, Ansel worked mostly behind the scenes as a mastermind for a number of renowned pastry programs. He has worked with Christophe Adam at the exotic and popular Paris Epicerie—Fauchon—and spent six years as the Executive Pastry chef at Daniel in NYC. After helping the restaurant rack up three Michelin stars and a perfect four star review from the New York Times, Ansel decided to set out on his own, opening Dominique Ansel Bakery in 2011. Recently, his talents and creativity have been recognized by the James Beard Foundation with a nomination for the Outstanding Pastry Chef 2013 award. Though the lanky and jovial Frenchmen is finally in the limelight, he remains grounded in the same fundamentals that have attracted all the accolades and success. For Ansel, it is only about pushing the boundaries of his mind, his ovens, and his fellow bakers. Amid all the critical acclaim, Ansel seems to get the most joy from customers who regularly return for seconds after making it only a few blocks away from the shop. This type of craving isn't surprising once you've had a chance to taste his playful, ever-changing lineup of treats—from seasonal creations like Easter eggs filled with marshmallow chicks, to honeycomb-infused tarts. His shop offers an escape from the stranglehold of cupcakes (though requests have been made), trading them in instead themed religieuse (tiered creme puffs) for birthday celebrations and classic cannelles baked in traditional copper pans rather than cheaper, more practical silicon stand-ins. Amazingly, all of this comes from the mind of a man who admittedly doesn't eat many sweets, and hates the feeling of meringue between his fingers. Ansel's inspirations come from childhood memories, including family meals featuring blood peaches soaked in wine, and the cities of Paris and New York (he makes a twist on the classic Paris Brest that looks like a hamburger but tastes like a Snickers bar). The nine dishes celebrated here are those that best represent Ansel's tireless quest for pastry perfection. Written by Hannah Norwick (@HannahNorwick)

The 9 Dishes That Made My Career: Dominique Ansel

The DKA (Dominique's Kouign Amann)

The Paris New York

Madeleines

Vacherin

Blood Peach

Walnut Cake

Fauchon Éclair

Religieuse

Perfect Little Egg Sandwich

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