After a cycle of national selections, the European selection of the Pastry World Cup will be held on Sunday 21st and Monday 22nd January 2024, at Paris Porte de Versailles, during Sirha Europain, opening the year 2024 with continental selections: Europe, Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Africa. Under the eyes of Pierre Hermé, president of the competition, and Stéphane Leroux, honorary president of the Jury, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom will compete for 2 days to earn a place at the Grand Finale of the Pastry World Cup, in January 2025 during Sirha Lyon.
The competing teams will have 5 and a half hours to present the 16 tasting desserts and 2 artistic pieces, as well as a buffet, to a discerning jury:
3 frozen desserts with Capfruit fruit puree (+1 dummy)
3 pastry pieces: Paris-Brest revisited with Elle & Vire dairy products (+1 dummy)
8 restaurant style desserts incorporating a hot chocolate soufflé Valrhona
1 sugar artistic piece
1 chocolate artistic piece
1 buffet including the artistic sugar and chocolate pieces, the frozen dessert dummy and the pastry piece dummy
Increasingly ambitious and innovative tests
For this new cycle, the International Organising Committee has decided to introduce a new test for the continentalselections: the Elle & Vire pastry piece. During each continental selection, the pastry piece will be a speciality of the country where the selection takes place, in order to highlight the local culinary heritage. During the European selection, the candidates will have to revisit the Paris-Brest, a French pastry staple made from choux pastry. Made without the use of mould or freezer, this dessert is the result of meticulous hand-crafted work, which will enable the jury to assess the competitors on their technical pastry skills.
The participants are therefore invited to challenge themselves to rethink the choux pastry, using new flavours, mixtures, techniques and creams.
The Valrhona restaurant dessert style reinvents itself
Introduced during the 2021 Grand Finale, the restaurant dessert style test has been reinvented. These chocolate desserts, which must include 2 different textures and 2 different temperatures and which are tasted immediately after being sent, must this year include a Valrhona chocolate hot soufflé.