Oh Oui! - Patisserie for all

Mademoiselle

+Marie Antoinette’s much-quoted remark about her subjects: ‘If they have no bread, let them eat cake!’ was debunked by historians long ago, but if it had been true, they would have been talking about pastry. Because that great nation must be given ungrudging credit for being world champions in the field. It also has something to do with the fact that the French stick to classical raw materials compositions and processes even when working on an industrial scale.

One example of this is the flan line installed this summer at Mademoiselle Desserts in Thenon in the Perigord region. Crème pâtissière, blended from fresh eggs, fresh milk, sugar and starch in two new Ultimix planetary mixers made by VMI, is stirred while being heated to high temperature by the finely adjustable double jacket without any adhering build-up remaining at the edge. Finally a whole block of butter is stirred into it to give the crème its typical smoothness even after being baked. Raw materials are weighed out by hand, although input into the 540-liter mixing tank is currently being automated. The time needed for cleaning is short and efficient due to the shallow headspace in the machine’s interior. Production Manager Jean Michel Pascaud says almost no manual secondary cleaning is needed.

When the crème has been completed, an outlet pipe at the base of the tank releases it into plastic containers, from which a pumping system withdraws it for the filling operation. The molds that are filled with it here in Thenon are mainly large-format, circular and lined with short-crust pastry, and are either frozen immediately or are first of all baked and then go on their way to the customer as frozen goods.

The factory in Thenon with its current workforce of 18 was opened in the spring of 2017, and has space for additional lines. The main factory in Valade, around 60 km away, produces flans: square, round, large, small, pre-cut or not, with and without short-crust pastry – there’s an enormous choice.

The two factories are both part of “Mademoiselle Desserts”, a group whose individual works, although some of them are older, did not begin to take on their current form until after 2009, and are now mostly owned by the Equistone private equity group. The group currently has ten production factories, five in France, four in the UK and one in the Netherlands. The latest new arrival in early 2017 was the “Ministry of Cake”, a British manufacturer of cakes, puddings and desserts. This increased the Group’s revenues to around EUR 220m, and there are around 1,400 employees on the payroll.

The production program comprises 2,800 different products or product variants, and the spectrum is gigantic. It ranges from tarts, flans, cakes, galettes, cookies, cheesecakes, mousses, cream puffs, flaky pastries and specialties such as the famous Christmas “Bûche de Noël” (Yule Log), to English and American cakes and a “gluten-free” assortment. The product range is supplemented with pre-baked bases, decorative strips or complete kits from which a ready-to-serve dessert can be created in an instant as if by magic. This enables even an inexperienced cook to conjure up a traditional dessert from a pre-cut, particularly crisp puff pastry base with pre-portioned crème balls.

That was all previously available as retail brands for the food service, hotels, supermarket counters etc. The Group’s latest coup is their “Oh Oui!” own brand, under which portion-