celebrity chef
Darren’s sweet success
TOO SWEET TO EAT Chef Darren Purchese has a knack for recreating childhood scenes and figures, including a full edible garden on display at his flagship shop.
Pastry Chef Darren Purchese has a flair for pairing unique flavours and turning them into masterpieces. He shares his favourite coffee treats and why he thinks Melbourne is on the world culinary map.
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n 1971, the film adaptation to Roald Dahl’s novel Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory had audiences intrigued by The Chocolate Room – a fantasy world in which everything was edible, including the pavement, the trees and the chocolate river. On Melbourne’s Chapel Street in South Yarra, a version of The Chocolate Room has become a reality. “Everything you see you can eat,” says Chef Darren Purchese, in reference to his edible chocolate garden on display at his acclaimed Burch & Purchese Sweet Studio. Everything – from the finely grounded dirt, flower petals, caterpillars, butterflies, mushrooms and weltered leaves – is 100 per cent chocolate. “It’s a wonderful expansion of my love for chocolate mixed with childhood nostalgia and fantasy,” he says. Over the past 10 years, Darren has developed a reputation for creating desserts and sweets with a complex array of flavours and textures using scientific applications. “I like to experiment. For instance, I’ve just filmed an episode of [TV show] Masterchef where I used freeze-dried coffee to make a banana and coffee parfait,” he says. “I find coffee and banana go really well [together]. A little bit of coffee helps to balance the sweetness of the banana and levels the bitterness.” Darren says that despite negative perceptions of freeze-dried coffee, it’s the magic ingredient to many of his coffee desserts. “Instant coffee tends to get a bad wrap at times, but as a chef I think coffee is more than just a delicious drink, it’s a fantastic versatile product to cook with. The options for pairing coffee in desserts are endless,” he says. Of note is Darren’s coffee crunch ice cream. This involves a cold infusion of coffee beans for 36 hours, which are then added to an ice cream base. Freeze-dried coffee is then added to milk chocolate and moulded into little coffee bean shapes and
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by Sarah Baker scattered throughout the ice cream. But there’s more. Darren’s coffee pièce de résistance is his own version of a coffee éclair, something he used to make hundreds of at the Savoy Hotel in London for afternoon tea. “My interpretation is an eight-layered cake that consists of smoked white chocolate ganache with coffee sponge, coffee cream, almond meringue, and coffee, cardamom and lemon cheesecake,” he says. “One thing that’s always guaranteed to be on our menu is a coffee dessert. I know our Melbourne customers love their coffee, but coffee is also a familiar favour to people. If you walk into most established pastry shops
would have little espresso shots while I was working in the bakery.” Fuelling his new coffee addiction, each morning on his way to work at the Savoy Hotel, Darren would stop at a small espresso shop at Waterloo station. “In hindsight the coffee wasn’t that good, but it was a step up from instant back then. At the time I didn’t know about the versatility of coffee. I didn’t know where coffee came from, or that you could get different favours and different beans. I only knew that it kept me awake,” he says. “I’m no coffee snob, but now I have a greater appreciation for the finer details of what’s involved in the production of coffee.”
“I like to experiment. For instance, I’ve just filmed an episode of [TV show] Masterchef where I used freezedried coffee to make a banana and coffee parfait.” in Europe you’ll find coffee desserts are a classic menu item, like Opéra gateau or a coffee éclair.” Thankfully, Darren is a coffee lover, but it wasn’t always the case. “Growing up in Guildford in the South East of England, my first impression of coffee was a tin of [instant] Nescafé. I remember thinking, ‘what’s all the fuss about?’ To me it tasted horrible,” Darren recalls. “It wasn’t until I moved to London in 1998 to work as a chef at the Savoy Hotel that I realised people’s obsession with coffee. All of sudden the staff started making cups of coffee to get through their shifts. I used to drink copious amounts of terrible coffee when I was a young apprentice chef working long hours, training hard, going out, and not getting much sleep. Coffee kept me going. I
Darren says he frequented the Waterloo espresso shop until an Australian taught him how to make “proper coffee”. Ever since, he’s succumb to two long macchiatos each day for the past 14 years. “When I go back to my mum and dad’s [in Guildford] they ask me if I want a coffee and I say ‘sure’. But I forget where I am and the sort of coffee they’re going to serve is out of a tin. Now I say, ‘actually I’ll just have a cup of tea.’” Darren says Australians are leading the revitalisation of the London coffee culture. However, on his last visit back in 2012, he says he saw evidence that there is still a long way to go. “I remember going to a show and getting a drink at the interval. I asked the waitress if I could have a long macchiato. She said ‘No, do you want your coffee milk or black?’ I saw this ugly percolator-thing
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celebrity chef
An edible chocolate garden at the Burch & Purchese Sweet Studio.
that had probably been lying there for hours. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t in Melbourne,” says Darren. Melbourne’s discerning coffee culture is just one of the reasons Darren says he’s opted not to introduce coffee to his Sweet Studio. However, if he was to serve coffee, Darren says he’d be keen to introduce a capsule offering. “Serving pod coffee in European pastry shops is a huge trend overseas. I went to this famous pastry shop in Barcelona called Bubo. I walked in, bought some dessert and asked if they did coffee. They said ‘yes’ – and they chucked a Nespresso pod in the capsule machine. Unlike Melbourne, in European pastry shops coffee isn’t the main focus, it’s an addition to the shop experience,” says Darren. Aside from Melbourne’s top-notch coffee, Darren says the city is equally matched with London’s quality restaurants. “Melbourne blows me away. I really do think Melbourne cafés, restaurants and food concepts are at the forefront of the most innovative food cities around the world,” he says. “I feel really lucky. When I left England 10 years ago I had no idea where my career was going or if there was a decent food culture [in Melbourne]. Thankfully, I quickly found that food and coffee was at the heart of this city. I think it’s because Melbournians like to experiment and they appreciate quality.” When Darren first arrived in Australia in 2005, he bought a copy of The Good Food Guide. His plan was to see what the number one restaurant was in Melbourne, go there and ask for a job. “The guide said Vue de Monde, so I went down there, had an interview with [chef] Shannon Bennett and I started work there the next day,” he says. “Now Shannon comes into my shop for dessert, something I still can’t get use to.”
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Darren’s career has been built on hard work and discipline. His first taste of life as a chef was washing dishes at a resort restaurant. “I watched lots of chefs leave the job, so I learned the menu back to front. I started to cook it even though I had never cooked before and I really liked it. Cooking food is an amazing feeling,” he says. “I considered myself a proper chef by the end of the summer and I started telling mum how to cook dinner, which she didn’t appreciate at all.” With his newfound passion, Darren left school in 1997 and landed himself a job at the Savoy Hotel in the pastry section. “Being a chef wasn’t considered the most glamorous of jobs. It was for guys who were a little bit behind,” he says. “When I told mum and dad I was going to be a chef, they said: ‘Are you serious what are you doing that for? You’ve got fairly average intelligence Darren you don’t need to be doing this.’ But I knew it was something I wanted to do.” Darren says his recipe to success has been knowing what he wants and working hard to achieve it. “I made it my goal to be the best at what I do and work hard to get to where I want to be. I cooked in my spare time and made everything I did about cooking,” he says. That discipline has led to amazing job opportunities in Australia and overseas, including working as pastry chef at Benneloong Restaurant at the Sydney Opera House, and as executive pastry chef with Shannon Bennett at Vue De Monde. But his dream was always to open his own business. That dream came true in 2011 when Darren opened the Burch & Purchese Sweet Studio with his partner and fellow chef Cath Claringbold. To set the scene, a background soundtrack plays 183 songs, each with a reference to sweets. The shop produces intricate cakes and desserts, and caters for
corporate functions, events and high teas. Twice a month the venue also hosts dessert nights, which sell out in 10 minutes each time dates are released. “This sort of shop and concept wouldn’t fit in my home town in England, but it definitely works in Melbourne. We’re thriving and constantly busy,” says Darren. “We could serve up to 600 individual desserts on a Saturday, but in my hometown people would say: ‘I can’t believe people would spent so much money on a dessert.’” The unique thing about Darren’s sweet studio is his creativity. “All my desserts are completely different to what you’ll find anywhere else. If you see a dessert that looks familiar, it’s never the norm. I take familiar flavours like raspberry and chocolate and find a unique way to pair them with other flavours and textures. For example, I’ve got a lamington on the menu – an Australian favourite – but it’s not a traditional tasting lamington.” Darren says his creativity is largely thanks to his mother. “Growing up she grew loads of things in her garden, like strawberries and raspberries, then made all these wonderful fruit desserts like crumbles, rhubarbs, custards, and trifles. Even now she still makes fuchsia jams and her own champagne,” he says. Darren says it was an easy decision to carve his niche in desserts. “I’ve always liked the procedure and routine of creating desserts, and the scientific reasoning why something works,” he says. “Plus, girls like pastry chefs. It always smelt better in the pastry kitchen then it did in the fish section.” From his salted caramel choco pops, milk chocolate and hazelnut cream and 40 unique ice cream flavours, Darren says new inventions come from experimenting. “I just keep adding to what I know and developing new concepts. The flavours I use have a nod to childhood, tradition and nostalgia. I pride myself on the construction of desserts and the flavours being unique,’ he says. “But it’s more than just pairing flavours, it’s a mixture of techniques and textures, and the assembly of the product.” With a list of cake orders sky high, and even a Christmas catalogue of sweets to complete, Darren says the shop is his life seven days a week. But he wouldn’t have it any other way. “I love that every day is different. One day I’m filming Masterchef, the next I’m doing an interview for BeanScene, finishing my new cookbook, making a wedding cake, catering for a corporate function or serving high tea at the Langham hotel,” he says. “Each day I get to see people walk in with a smile on their face and leave with an even bigger smile – after the chocolate and sugar have taken affect.”
Raising the espresso bar
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