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Off the Shelf

Metropolitan

Off the Shelf,
by Helen Greenwood
Sydney Morning Herald
"Good Living" October 31 2000

If the choux fits.

A French pastry chef brings a wealth of experience to Sydney.

They say the lights are bright on Broadway but Sydney's version of New York's Great White Way is about noise and petrol fumes. That's why, if the traffic lights change quickly or a bus roars past, you'd easily miss Jean-Marc's French Patisserie, a few doors along from the entrance to the Broadway Gym.

It's 11am and I perch on one of Jean-Marc Masset's two stools in his tiny wood-paneled shop and sink my teeth into a childhood favourite, a chocolate éclair. This morsel of yielding choux pastry, with gorgeous chocolate créme patissier and chocolate icing, is nothing like the chewy eclairs of my memory.

Mornings are busy for Masset, a big, convivial Norman with a ruddy colouring and a fine pastry pedigree. There is a continuous stream of mums and toddlers, students and regulars. The 31-year-old Masset began working as a 13-year-old apprentice pastry chef in Vincennes, an outer suburb of Paris. He set sail on a cruise ship, where he met his English wife, then disembarked in London for seven years. He spent two of those years as the head of Harrod's pastry kitchen (where he cooked for royalty) and two years as the development chef creating desserts for 250 Marks & Spencer stores.

He came to Australia a year ago, keen to run his own business, and seven months ago leased this former Turkish bakery. Masset kept on the baker, who is now happily shaping croissants, and the steam oven, which turns out, among other things, friands. Masset shakes his head and says: "I never heard of friands till I came to Australia. Look them up in any pastry book. You won't find them." They may not be in the books but the savvy Masset has eight varieties on his top shelf - they are big sellers.

Shelf's eye, however, goes straight to a giant macaroon, a sandwich of chewy chocolate meringue and chocolate filling, then alights on the chocolate creme brulee dome, a gleaming ball of creaminess. There are small tarts (strawberry custard, berry charlotte, lemon), coffee and cheese cakes, a chocolate tart of melting ganache, croissant, of course, and brioches in two sizes, small and a loaf.

The breads are good, too: rolls, wholemeal, sourdough and plain, baguettes, walnut rye, demi baguettes and a demi viennoise for sandwiches. I pounce on his baguettes with their ends that give you extra crust. Masset laughs and says he does them because he likes that, too. It took Masset three months of baking and making to get used to the conditions and ingredients. The humidity and the different flour and butter were enough to change all his recipes and methods.

Now he is pleased with his products and the wholesale world is beckoning. But he can't do much with his small space and two ovens he has out the back. So he has plans to expand. When he does, the lights are bound to be much brighter on Broadway.

Sydney Morning Herald "Metropolitan"

February 24, 2001

A newcomer to the Sydney patisserie scene, Jean-Marc Masset blames butter substitutes for the tasteless croissants he encountered when he first came to Sydney about a year ago.

He also suspects that croissants are often proved too much (imagine, "overproof" croissant!) with the result that they dry out too quickly and are very pale in colour. Texture is a delicate thing. The outer layers should be crispy and golden and the inside slightly chewy, "not like a sponge". Masset likes to eat croissants fresh from the oven, unadorned, but adds that a popular in France is Nutella.