Gaston Lenôtre
Gaston Albert Celestin Lenôtre ( born May 28, 1920 in Saint -Nicolas -du -Bosc in the Eure in the Haute -Normandie, † January 8, 2009 in Sennely in Sologne ) was a French pastry chef, chocolatier, entrepreneur and author of several books back.
Professionals and media worthy Lenôtre as a fundamental innovator of pastry being. In his " École Lenôtre " near Paris, he formed with his fine and confectionery from several generations of pastry chefs and cooks. He freed the pastry incriminating fat and sugar and replaced it with lighter ingredients and fresh fruit.
Life and work
Gaston Lenôtre and his brother Marcel were the sons of Gaston Lenôtre, a chef saucier at the Grand Hôtel de Paris, and his wife Éléonore (born Beauvais ), as one of the first French Chef cooks for the banker Baron Pereire and for the family the banker Baron Rothschild worked at their residences in Paris and Bordeaux.
1918 married his parents and settled in Normandy on a farm with about fifty acres down. From his mother he was familiar with the craft of fine bakery, which was also the beginning of his teaching. For because of serious illness of his father in 1930 had to give up the farm and could not fund training him. Lenôtre felt later this emergency as a fluke. As a commis ( assistant ) he went to work at a good pastry shop in Pont- Audemer. In the 1930s, Gaston Lenôtre bolstered his pocket money by driving the bike to Paris some 100 kilometers away, and there sold homemade chocolates. Beginning of 1936, in the ongoing global economic crisis, he looked for work in Paris. In the Paris suburb of Pantin he found after many unsuccessful efforts and a warehouse work in the Quartier des Halles finally have a proper professional job because he knew how to make chocolate Easter eggs.
In 1939, his former employer brought him back to the Normandy. After the invasion of the German army in France in 1940 left her hometown ten bakers Pont- Audemer. This allowed him to open a small pastry shop along with his brother Marcel and his mother at the checkout. In 1943 he married Colette Courallet, which provided for a fashionable elegance of the sellers and designed the interior of the shop. His first pastry shop he bought in 1947 in Pont- Audemer, it was his former first job. His loyal customers also scored a lord of the manor in the vicinity of Pont- Audemer, who advised him to settle in Paris, and this offered him his help.
Paris
In 1957, he took with his wife Colette a hitherto poorly continuous Pâtisserie in the bourgeois 16th arrondissement of Paris. Currently taking over the business four were pâtisserie in rue d' Auteuil, after a year there was only Lenôtres patisserie. Besides the good quality of his products he used also as promotional means redirecting the bakery ventilation on the boulevard. From a Norman Farm near Bernay he was fresh daily supply the ingredients like butter and cream. Soon was the enterprising, affable and friendly Lenôtre make contacts in the upscale Parisian society, he supplied among other things, the Dassault family, Hersant and Lagardère.
Expansion
In 1960 he founded a catering service for pastries. He became one of the first caterer through the systematic use of freezing technology from 1964.
Opened in 1968 Lenôtre his kitchen and his test kitchen in Plaisir. In 1971 he expanded his site with a master school, the " Ecole Lenôtre ", in which annually up to 3000 Amateurs, master confectionary and cooks away form, including such famous chefs such as Alain Ducasse and Eckart Witzigmann. From 1982 to 1983 Johann Lafer worked for the Parisian pastry chef.
His first foreign branch established Lenôtre 1975 at the Berlin department store of the west, and shortly thereafter he expanded to Japan, the Middle East, South Korea, in Las Vegas, Bangkok and later in Beijing. In 1982 he opened together with Paul Bocuse and Roger Vergé the " Pavillon de France" with a restaurant and a boulangerie in Disney World, Epcot Center, Orlando ( Florida).
In 1976 he took over the Parisian three-star restaurant " Le Pré Catelan ", a Second Empire building in the Bois de Boulogne and 1985, the "Pavillon Elysée " on the Champs Elysees.
Sales at Accor
In the 1980s, he suffered through the expansion of its Catering Group in Houston, Texas, such high losses that he had to sell 1985 to the Accor hotel chain across the enterprise. Accor, the proliferation further, so that the Lenôtre brand in 2009 counted 52 branches in 13 countries, twelve of them in Paris, working in France alone 1,200. He himself adopted in the early 1990s from the business and moved to Sologne in the Loire Valley with his second wife Catherine. Then he conferred regularly continue with Patrick Scicard ( b. 1955 ), the son of a confectioner and since 1996 the Chairman of the Accor Group, which continues to ensure observance of his recipes and the training of their employees. 2008 Lenôtre Group generated a turnover of 162 million dollars.
From 1991, he bought the Château de Fesles in Bonnezeaux and the Château de la Roulerie Coteaux de Layon and the other vineyards of the Loire. There he produced sweet white wines that go well with desserts. In Clos des Varennes he had tread the dry Savennières. His wife keeps the Château Meyre in the Médoc and other vineyards in Margaux in Bordeaux. Following extensive investment and improvement in 1996 he sold the goods again.
To celebrate its 80th birthday in 2000 created 80 apprentices with their masters of the " École Lenôtre " a ten -meter-high and two -tonne cake that was tasted in the green areas of the Jardins du Trocadero in front of the Eiffel Tower.
Family
Lenôtre was a family man, of great importance was placed on the continuation of the family culinary tradition and his children and relatives also introduced in his company. He is survived by his younger brother Marcel, his second wife Catherine, whom he had married in 1999, and three children, the chefs were also Alain, Sylvie and Annie. Alain Lenôtre directs the cooking school " Culinary Institute " in Houston, Texas. Sylvie Lenôtre wrote 13 of his cookbooks, the total reached a circulation of over one million copies. Daughter Annie is introduced at the Lenôtre Group, Department of gourmet gifts. The culinary art of his nephew Patrick Lenôtre (Le Pré Catalan, L' Étoile ) has now been honored with seven Michelin stars. Gaston Lenôtre was buried in the church of Notre -Dame-de -la- Couture cemetery in Bernay in a family grave.
Importance
Lenôtre is recognized as a fundamental innovator of pastry being, which until then usual fat - and sugar- heavy Zuckerbäckerei he relieved by lighter ingredients such as gelatin, mousse and whipped egg whites. He replaced as the high-calorie butter cream with a light sponge cake and reduced the amount of sugar the hitherto obligatory icing. The taste improved, a consistent mouthfeel form fruits and light creams in his Bavarois, his Charlotte with fruit, its fine bakery products ( viennoiseries ) and his macaroons ( macarons ). Known Classics are about the cake " Opéra " by Cyriaque Gavillon ( Dalloyau ), a succession of sponge cake layers soaked with Grand Marnier and filled with a ganache of chocolate and coffee cream or " Succès " from Makronenteig and Nougatine ( caramelized sugar with almond - or nut mixture ). Above all, he set an accurate and precise observance of the preparations, quantities, baking temperatures and times by default. His friend Paul Bocuse put him equal with the founder of the French Pâtissierie, Marie- Antoine Carême ( 1784-1833 ). How Carême was also Lenôtre that the Feinbäckerei the best exercise for chefs is because it lets very well einübe precision and perfection. As Lenôtres successor shall be the Alsatian Pierre Hermé, who started at the age of 14 years, his apprenticeship with him and learned there for six years.
Quotes
"La pâtisserie, vous savez, on ne fait pas la pour les gens nourrir mais pour leur offrir de la douceur à partager. "
" The fine bakery, you know, makes you not to feed the people, but to offer them to share the sweetness. "
"La pâtisserie m'a le goût de la appris précision, de la mesure de la discipline. Si les choses à fait on Moitié depending hurle. "
" The Feinbäckerei taught me the taste of accuracy of measurement, the discipline. When executing things carelessly, I cry "
" Il avait su, par son talent et sa créativité, par sa rigueur et son exigence, elever la pâtisserie au rang d'art. Il avait à coeur de transmettre son savoir aux générations futures, faisant ainsi perdurer et rayonner un savoir -vivre à la française à travers le monde. Il n'aimait pas le conformisme, il toujours à cherchait Innover dans le respect des traditions et règles de l'art. "
"He had understood it with his talent and creativity, with its rigor and its claim to levy the fine bakery to the rank of art. It was to him a lot because his knowledge to transmit to future generations, so continue the French way of life in the world and rays to be. He liked the conformism not, he always tried to renew in accordance with the traditions and rules of the art. "