My name is Philippe, and I have been a pastry chef and baker now for 46 years, thus having learnt back in the days when products were made from scratch and premixes didn’t exist “at least in Australia anyway”.
I went to East Sydney Technical College in 1980, doing my pastry chefs and bakers course at the same time, as back then they were separate courses, and finished my courses in the top 3, having won best icing cake decorator 2 years in a row and coming 3rd in my first year completing them when I turned 18. Having worked with my father since I was 12 years old in the kitchen making recipes and finishing small cakes and sweets did give me somewhat of an unfair advantage over my older classmates who only started the trade in their 20s.
I did my apprenticeship with my father, who is a fully qualified pastry chef, baker and chef from France, and he was one of the first 2 French pastry chefs to open a patisserie in Sydney in the early 70s back in the days when Australians didn’t know what continental sweets were unless you came from there, as well as being the first chef alongside Bernard King to start a TV cooking show. Back in the days when spiral mixers, laminators (as they were known as back then, i.e., dough breaks) and many other machines didn’t exist or only just started coming into Australia. Back in the days when workers did as they were told and accepted the consequences of their actions and respected their bosses/employers, employees turned up for work every day. Yes, these were the days us old-timers call the good old days because in today’s world respect has completely vanished to the point that I don’t even think they teach it in schools anymore or even know what the word means.
I have worked as a manager within the wholesale and retail patisserie industry now since I was 20 years old and played a major part in the background production side of creating new developments within the baking industry, like setting up the first McCafé; setting up bakeries in supermarkets like Franklin-Coles and Woolworths; designing and creating recipes for supermarkets to be able to sell packaged cakes and fresh cakes as you know them today; creating the bakery at Paek Lea Markets; and being executive chef in the kitchen that created and did all the OHAS tests to see what and how things would work in a real kitchen environment. I have also created quite a few new product lines which have since become the norm in many bakeries and patisseries today.
As an executive chef, I have, “for employers”, created what has since become a multi-million-dollar business within our wholesale industry as well as being the organiser for the very first bakery franchise, which at the time was called Bakers Bun, which was before the internet days, so even I can’t find records online about them, as they gambled all their takings away and lost everything after owning over 30 stores Australia-wide back then. Unfortunately, I have seen a few successful bosses blow hundreds of thousands of dollars made from their businesses due to gambling or drugs. A pitiful shame, I must say.
