Support for Food is Love is provided by Wild Alaska Salmon and Seafood.

100% fisherman family owned independent seafood sourcing catching processing and delivering seafood directly to the consumers front door.

from caught to bought, wild salmon direct from the fisherman information at WildAlaskaSalmonandSeafood.com "Veteran Master pastry Chef Gert Sorensen has over a long career worked at the Savoy Hotel in London and the Atlantic Hotel in Hamburg.

He has taught pastry for 28 years at a Copenhagen hotel and restaurant school as well as being caterer for the Royal Family".. growing up, my father was a renowned pastry chef known all over Europe for confectionary feats, like the Guinness Book of Records 'tallest wedding cake', or being the pastry chef to the Royal Family.

In the sea of amazing dishes and wonderful conversations that we've been apart of, it occurred to me we haven't really stretched into the territory of pastries.

Having spent the first part of my life in the pastry shop, cakes and sweets hold a special place in my heart.

Waking up early in the morning to roll out the dough, almond paste and cake batter..

They all bring me back in time.

Ultimately.

I chose the hot kitchen over the life of a pastry chef, but the lessons I learned making them made it inevitable that I would find myself looking for that old connection here in St. Louis.

As a chef, I need to stay curious in order to evolve.

For me that means looking beyond a great meal to learn more about who made it and what inspires them to cook.

Every great city has great food.

I'm going on a journey around the world right here in St. Louis to find good food and experience other cultures.

I'm on a quest to find passionate chefs who cooks from the heart, because Food is Love.

Food is love, love your food.

All around the world cultures shares the morning tradition of coffee, coffee and some sort of pastry.

In Denmark, we ate Berliners,.. in New Orleans they have beignet.

If you're in Paris, it could be a croissant.

I can go on all day.

Generally speaking, doughnuts are crowd favorite in America.

..but where do they fall in the scheme of things?

Are they not a pastry as well?

For the sake of argument and differentiation I'm visiting Vincent Van Doughnut to learn more about where donuts come from.

This is Vincent Marston, his obsession with donuts has led him into a life of stretching dough and the boundaries of donut flavors.

He has agreed to condenses knowledge into a quick lesson in donut making.

I grew up, you know in a little town where we went to the baker and we got doughnuts in the morning.

They were called berliners.

Yeah sure you two of us.

If we were eating a donut the idea is you try to eat that doughnut without out licking your lips your brain automatically want to swipe the sugar off your lips.

That's just that's the test of that if you have total control over your body.

It sounds like a good challenge.

Yeah, it's right donut challenge.

Sounds good.

My dad had a pastry shop.

We had like seven hundred people every day and they made all different kinds of patiently couch.

I mean, I'm sure you've made donuts.

No,.

this is why we're here.. of all the things I've ever learned I've never learned how to make donuts.

I've never made donuts.

We never had a fryer.

So this we don't we don't crack our eggs either we use liquid eggs.

Okay.

So so that's the liquid base of a doughnut is eggs and water?

there is water.

Yeah, granulated sugar the same stuff that's on your berliners a milk replacer, which is basically whey protein for a warm spice we do add nutmeg.

The fat we use is an all-purpose shortening.

So it's a vegetable shortening.

The idea for donuts is you have to put enough fat inside the donut so when you drop it in the oil, it rejects the fat on the outside.

That's why temperature is very important.

And so is your fat content.

Salt, we use just a regular old table salt.

This is bread flour.

It's a higher protein bread flour.

We'll go ahead and we'll add this dry ingredient with the fat here and then our yeast.

So I use a sap instant.

We started with the 1960 Grumman Olson Step Van my brother had a restaurant at the time too, so I was able to use his restaurant as a commissary.

Okay, and I figured that was recoupable investment if it didn't work, yeah kind of a market test type thing but it did work.

The one thing that I wanted to do was be unique and do something different.

So we do everything from scratch and that was, we had purveyors that tried to sell us on bag mixes and that type of stuff to make it easy and that's tempting but that's honestly what everyone else is doing, but if we can make it, lemon curds, a lot of the fillings the doughs, we do a chocolate sour cream old-fashioned vanilla sour cream old-fashioned, we do our yeast dough, we do our vegan dough all that stuff is from scratch and that's what we pride ourselves on.

Yeah, and what separates us and we do 20 different flavors a day in this display up here and once those are gone they're gone.

So it's almost like what you're doing is craft doughnut because 20, 30 years ago a donut was just a donut but it was nothing there and now everybody is getting excited about donuts because we are mixing all these different flares and flavors.

And so it's fun, pastry stuff like your father and you the artistry behind it.

I mean it's an experience to eat a donut.

It's not just a donut with your coffee.

Absolutely, and you can still have that there's nothing wrong with those classics either those very traditional original just a vanilla glazed or even some people even request just a plain old sour cream old-fashioned with no glaze cake donut.

Those are the the old schoolers who like to dunk it in their coffee and they don't want the sugar they don't want all that stuff.

So that's when it becomes..

I've been vertically challenged my whole life and getting that thing up on the on the bench.

So there's our dough.

I don't mess with it when it comes out.

Sometimes you'll see people kneeding it and needing it and needing it.

It's already done that for 15 minutes.

Yeah, so I try not to disturb it too much.

So once it gets on the bench, I just dump it out and then I'll start rolling and then what we do, I mean you're stretching your not wanting to push from one side because then you're pushing everything one way you're pulling the dough.

So we always go from the center out like this.

I'll use the heavy pin and I'll get on top of it, again for being you know, 5-7 my whole life, but you can try it.

Push out from the centers and then roll sideways.

I always liked take the dough like this to make sure so you saw a little stick in there.

And so we've got our flour if you want to roll back at the see because it'll crease like that.

Yeah, and you won't ya.. about half an inch is what you're looking for all around.

Stretch it out, and then let air underneath it and let it pull back just kind of get used to it.

But you've got it.

That was pretty much perfect.

Not bad for a first time donut maker.

Absolutely.

You've probably used something similar to this before yet, which is usually for caramels and whatnot.

We do it to where it's three and a quarter inches apart.

We're just kind of scouring the top but this gives us a nice square.

But what we do is we use the holes too, we sell these holes which is what you had, which are quite literally the hole from from the donut there.

Yeah, these look great.

Im getting better.

They're going to be uhh you'll see from the ones that we already have in there they're going to be big.

Well, I want to earn a spot on the donut team.

You know what I mean?

Hey after this if we ever have an employee called off, I may give you a call and see if you can cover a shift.

We do kids classes too, which is great.

My son is Vincent Van.

Okay.

So it's named after the van, Vincent Van Gogh.

So we do because we do artisanal style donuts and Vincent Van Marsden is my now eleven-year-old.

Okay, so it's kind of a triple play on words, we get to feed people with like, you know, fondness, smiles, happiness that type of thing.. food is love right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's easy to overlook the intricacies in donut making, we grab a dozen and they disappear so quickly that we never even pause to think about how much effort went into them.

But a good way to look as you can see right there.

These are actually just a hair too long, but that's it, one stick steadies, one stick flips.

There's that skunk line.

And that means that they proofed properly that's it.

That's got the skunk line.

So, you know, you've got perfect proofing.

Wow.

And you see how it just sticks, it seems simple, but that's part of the beauty of it.

Although we didn't make donuts in my father's shop what I learned there made me feel right at home here, you know, I think back now at as an older person, I'm 53 years old and when I was in my late 20s early 30s, you know, there was a some point where I thought my dad was nuts.

Yes, he would say stuff and I'm like this guy is crazy sure and all of a sudden I start saying the same things Sure, my dad told me and I'm like what's going on here and I realized as I got a little bit older that you know, that was the most important thing.

I got from my parents was all of those things that gave me the ability to do the things I do today and adapt to changes now, you've got doughnuts in your rep.

I know I mean and that makes you stronger your dad would, is your dad still alive?

No, unfortunately not.

He's proud of you.

I'm sure he would have loved to have stood here next to me today.

And interacted with us and all this stuff.

It's already time for Vincent to begin to prepping for tomorrow's donuts.

And I'm sure I've been in his way enough for one day.

It's awesome.

And it's really rewarding to be able to see the smiles it brings in.

I mean that's like even our sign like all you need is love and maybe a doughnut.

All I really want to see is you know, the smiles from people coming in.

Well, thank you very much.

Oh, it's my pleasure.

Do you want to take these with you?

Absolutely.

Another essential component of morning nourishment that is undoubtedly a part of my everyday and something that's played an integral role in the production of this show is of course coffee.

As essential as we all can agree that it is, the journey that coffee beans must go on before becoming what we mindlessly seek out to guzzle every morning is somewhat of a complex thing.

To get a better idea what that entails.

I'm here at Kaldi Coffee Roasters to demystify the coffee bean.

This place looks more like a lab than the relaxed coffee shop atmosphere you tend to think of, that's because it is a lab and the research that goes on here is all to make sure you get the best cup possible.

You know, there's something personal about coffee because oh yeah and also said a lot says a lot about you as a person, you know, how you take your coffee and how you make it.

What I'm doing right here is a just a hand brew drip method.

So obviously you a coffee geek.

I would say it's pretty fair to put me in that wheelhouse.

Ive been with Kaldi for about 15 years.

There's a lot of hard work that goes into a cup of coffee at the farm hand picking the coffee beans or the coffee cherry, processing the coffee in the best way possible and then, you know shipping the coffee in a ergonomical way that's going to make sense for that origin.

So when you say cherry you're referring to the bean.

Yeah, so coffee is the seed of a fruit.

It's not necessarily just like a bean.

It is a seed of a fruit and inside that fruit are two seeds typically and then throughout the process of picking and harvesting that coffee and then depending on what kind of wash, natural semi washed honey process that it goes through in order to get that fruit off the coffee.

You're left with two seeds.

And its that, it's those two seeds that we as Roasters are roasting and that you as a consumer are drinking.

Then what about maybe have a doughnut or pastry with your coffee?

I am not above a donut with coffee.

Have you ever had the chocolate croissant at La Choquette?

No, I have not had the chocolate croissant at La Choquette.

Yeah, you know, I've heard a lot about it and at some point I'm going to try it.

I love a chocolate croissant.

I might pair it with a nice espresso rather than just a cup of coffee.

So Kaldi, is is that the name of the original family that had it or.. actually Kaldi is the name of the fabled Ethiopian goat herder that discovered coffee.

The Ethiopian goat herder of that was herding his goats fell asleep as goat herders do and woke up and could not find this goats.

He climbed a mountain to see them dancing and not so much the lazy goats that he was used to and he was wondering what had happened.

He saw that they were eating these red cherries off of a tree and it gave them a burst of life that He hadn't seen in those goats before and then he himself was like well, what's good for the goats is good for the goat herder.

And from there coffee was essentially discovered.

Now, we don't know how true that story is, but in the 6th Century coffees discovered and brought to different countries like Yemen and then transferred over to Central and South America and grown pretty muchin, we like to refer to it as is the bean belt, It wasn't until about I believe the 12th century that we even began to roast coffee and consume coffee the way we do today.

The roasting process takes anywhere from 9 to 15 minutes and we do it manually here.

So everything that we're doing is based off of what we're what we're seeing and what we're smelling in the roasting process.

This is coffee trier.

So as we're going to the roasting process, we're actually pulling this guy out and we're seeing the coffee as it develops from green to yellow to gold to brown.

You smell the coffee as it comes off because as it like like anything like mmm as its developing as it goes through that myart effect.

It starts to like take on these like rich, sweet kind of notes.

I liken it to like if you've ever walked around carnival and you get that intense smell of like a fresh waffle cone being produced, like that is like the peak point when I'm like, oh this coffee is going to be really sweet at the end.

This roaster was also built in 1937.

Wow.

It is one of only two models I know of that are still producing coffee today.

So its good quality.

We roasted last year Our first million pounds in a year on it.

Delicious, thank you.

Now that I've had my caffeine fix I still need to satisfy my taste for a more traditional pastry.

But where can I find that here in St. Louis?

Sitting here in a room in St. Louis and I just so happen to see this book.

It was up here, Culinaria.

That's a great book by the way, a great cookbook.

This story is about Denmark and this is my past.

I'm looking at this picture and it's my dad in the book.

And I mean, what's the chances of finding this book on this very shelf in St. Louis next to this book 'St.

Louis Then and Now' I mean here I am exploring all this wonderful food.

It keeps teaching me things, how we are forever connected to the past, you know, I don't know.

Is it an omen or is it a lesson?

We're here in Botanical Heights.

This is such a great neighborhood.

Olio, Indo, a lot of things happening right here in this corner.

So we are visiting Las Patisserie Choquette Choquette seems to be the next natural place to explore.

Of course I'm initially drawn by the French name but the reputation of Choquette precedes my arrival.

The French named shop specializes in the decadent and whimsical side of desserts and is known for specialties like the ever-popular macaron or the fabled, darkness, a layered chocolate croissant but La Choquette is also known for its cakes.

Simone is waiting for us.

Hello good to see you!

Walking into the shop brings a flood of memories back to life for me.

This is Simone owner of La Choquette and talent behind the desserts that it's become known for.

Alone in her process, Simone is a consummate artist and treats her craft as such keeping the hallowed ground of her workspace sacred by keeping it private.

Perhaps to even be here while she works is an intrusion of her creative process.

But still she welcomes me inside for the morning, to compare notes and talk about our shared love for choux paste and sugar.

So we're making macaroons.

Yes, making macaron.

Yeah in Danish.

It's macaron say that again,..Macaron say it slowly,..Macaron.

Yes.

How's that spelled?

I have to remember it's been a long time..

But but it's the Almond version?

That's that's the only kind I know the almond kind, yeah..

It's almost like it's gotten a renaissance because I don't ever remember putting any food color in any of the macaron, macaroons we used to make in my dads pastry shop.

It was more like fillings and everything and then I can see now everywhere in the world, Now that people are putting colors on it, so it must have gotten some kind of renaissance and I'm thinking are you the one that started all that?

It wasn't me.

Wasn't you?

Okay.

Although I will gladly take credit.

I can't imagine not having colorful macaron.

Like that's a part of the fantasy of it.

Like they're colorful and they're fun.

It's a part of their personality, you know, so is this your favorite pastry to cook you think?

I think of every single thing that we make, this is where you have the most room for creativity.

It can be whatever you want it to be.

Did you always wanted to be a pastry chef and..?

Oh God no,..

I wanted to marry well.

Yeah, settle into that lifestyle.

I did not grow up in the kitchen.

Like, you know, you'll hear stories about people who their moms and Grandmom's were great cooks and my mother was phenomenal.

My grandmother was great with desserts not so much with savory foods, but we were not allowed in the kitchen.

It just, it didn't happen unless you were doing dishes if you were doing dishes.

Hang out all day.

Yeah, so this is the part where it you know, it gets a little noisy just to kind of knock a few bubbles.

I always feel bad for the people who live upstairs.

What is that you put on top.

Now, these are candied hazelnuts or as the French would say, quatre.

quatre.

And so it's just another way to give some texture and personality and then the inside of this will be filled with a delicious.

Chai tea filling.

How did you end up in St. Louis?

So I was looking for a change of pace.

I'd been in New Orleans.

I'd been working at The Ritz in Naples and then back to New Orleans again.

And I mean I can tell you a little bit of a Francophile right?

I mean a little, I am from New Orleans.

Yeah, so there's a connection that is there.

Yeah without having to nurture it, it's just sort of its natural, right?

Yeah.

It's part of it down there.

The biggest one would be the name of the shop.

Is Choquette Okay choux pastry at choux pastry with sugar on it.

Right?

It has, it has rock sugar Yeah on top and when we first opened the shop, and we made them.

Everybody said this there's no cream in this.

I wanted to change.

My husband was working at The Ritz Carlton in the Grand Caymans at the time.

So we tried to figure out you know, we're married, how can we be in the same country at the same time?

St. Louis opened up one day and it was just there in front of me and I was like Ive never been to St. Louis before and my husband said, oh, it sounds French.

Yeah, and so I applied and the next day I had a contract in front of me and I was like, well sure why not.. like St. Louis has this French history, but I don't, I feel more of a German vibe here, I would say more than a French vibe, although the street names are nearly identical to the names in New Orleans, but pronounced completely differently.

Yeah, I mean it confuses me because I know French and when I say it everybody looks at me, like he doesn't know what he's talking about.

I refuse to say Gravois.

I'm like there's there's an s in that we are talking about that clearly says Gravois.

Ah, yeah.

Exactly.

Even Siri is somehow convinced that it's Gravois.

Why I'm like, how much do they have to pay her?

Well, I mean, what do Siri know?!

I remember when we first when I was leaving the Ritz and it was aren't you scared like what if the business fails, you know thought about it for a second and I'm like, I'm more afraid of not trying.. like if we open on the first day if those doors opened and the first customer walks in, it worked, you know.

t The quality of what you're doing is what drives the business and that's the whole thing.

You know, there's love behind it.

I agree a hundred percent.

I don't know if you ever heard the term food is love.

I've heard it someplace.

Yeah, and that's why.

.. but I love the fact that I can call Nathaniel over at Nathaniel Reeds, Christie over at Pint Sized Bakery, She and I work together at the you know in the kitchen at the Ritz in New Orleans like yeah, it's just it's awesome or the phone will ring and it'll be someone who wants something that we don't make and I'll say oh you know where you can get this is not too far from here, Rein over at Sweetart makes a wonderful version of this.. the same thing happens the other way, like they refer people to us.

It's great like and I have never seen that any place else.

So that's love.

ya.

Like that is love.. and then we all sit together and cry in January when business dries up because everybody is on a diet, you know.

We are that certain breed of people in the restaurant business.

You know, you have to be a certain kind of person or personality.

I think that something went wrong when we were created because we're all little crazy or maybe it went.

Well, maybe went well.

Yeah, I like that version better..and something is wrong with everyone else.

I wish my dad was still alive and he was with me today.

He would he would love you.

Ah,.. he was just the pastry chef of all pastry chefs.

I mean he was thinking about cakes 24/7.

"cake",.. even though my visit here was planned, It has been special to me personally.

The conversation the process and the taste all reminders of where I'm from, it demonstrates.

that if you stop to pay attention, the common fibers that hold people together are the same everywhere.

It may look different or have a different taste or method but hot coffee with a flaky pastry or warm doughnut, feels the same regardless of where you have it in the world.

Food has the ability to reconnect us with past experiences and feelings.

"It's very important.

that the chocolate is warm",.. the moment that I walked into Choquette, I was 18 again and working beside my father.

There may be oceans and decades between now and then but to meet people like Vincent who create with their hands in the dough every day, really brings me back.. "the pastry stuff like your father and you, the artistry behind it."

It's good for my soul.

I think of the things I learned in the kitchen with my father That ended up being more than just cooking lessons.

They were life lessons.

The pastry kitchen I learned that food can convey feelings memories and emotions as simple as it can seem it's not just a cup of coffee or a donut.. someone cared enough about the process and took the time to make it.. for you.

Patachoux Swans with a mocha cream.

I think that says it all and proves food is love.

The cake is finished with whipped cream almond in the bottom orange chocolate mousse and a pie culminate in orange liqueur.

Support for Food is Love is provided by Wild Alaska salmon and Seafood.

100% fisherman family owned independent seafood sourcing catching processing and delivering Seafood directly to the consumers front door.

from caught to bought, wild salmon direct from the fisherman information at Wild AlaskaSalmonandSeafood.com