From fashion to pastry
After fifteen years spent in the fashion world as a stylist and model maker, Linda created the Chou pastry shop, a plant-based pastry laboratory where she tests and develops new plant-based recipes.
Linda already enjoyed baking and cake design in her personal life. And it was the cake she made for her wedding that hit the nail on the head, as from then on, people around her started ordering from her.
In 2014, she trained as a Pastry Chef and has since devoted herself to her new passion.
Her work in fashion helped her to retrain in pastry making. After all, between these two rather technical professions, only the creative medium changes. Today Linda makes pastries with the meticulousness of an artist and, as in fashion, it requires a good knowledge of raw materials to obtain the best finished product.
But it was when her first child was born that Linda became vegan, and from then on, she wanted to offer a whole different form of pastry. In 2016, she created Chou, her plant-based pastry shop.
The Chou project
Her ambition is to create and promote a new generation of high-end pastries adapted to restricted diets (gluten-free, lactose-free and free from animal products).
Linda wants to bring concrete solutions for everyday life and help people create good, healthy and tasty pastries.
She, therefore, offers several activities:
Chou is first and foremost a brand of plant-based pastry. It is therefore possible to order pastries for personal events (birthdays, weddings, etc.). The cake design being Linda’s specialty, you will have the good and the beautiful at the same time.
For any catalogue or quote request, simply send an e-mail to info@chouchouchou.paris.
For Linda, what is taught in cooking schools has become obsolete. She, therefore, decided to think about the creation of a plant-based pastry school to offer alternative way of teaching pastry.
In the meantime, she devotes part of her activity to online professional training. Linda has partnered with the distance culinary training center (CFCAD) to offer training to adults in retraining, Restaurateurs, Pastry Chefs and amateurs.
In particular, you can learn how to make pear-speculoos, raspberry macaroons and cupcakes with strawberry and pistachio butter.
She also offers courses at home or by video conference and workshops for children. To find out more and to register for one of her courses, click HERE.
Linda also works on product development for the food industry. New brands are interested in the concept of plant-based pastry and are thinking about how to make it available to the general public. So keep an eye out for what’s coming to the shops soon.
And a book!
In her first book, Le Grand Livre de la Pâtisserie Végétale, Linda talks about the basics of plant-based pastry and techniques that everyone can re-appropriate.
She tells us about the red fruit dessert, the mango tree with vanilla and the cracker, a soft steamed cake available in a thousand different ways.
Whether you are a professional or an amateur, you can, thanks to Linda, reproduce plant-based pastries with confidence.
The pastry of tomorrow
Linda likes to break the codes of classic pastry. The idea is not to imitate what we know or to recreate existing pastries, but to start from scratch and use all the potential of plant ingredients to work them differently.
Use the elements present in fruits such as pectins, or work with herbs, flowers, vegetables, spices… this is a nice way to make pastry unique and innovative.
Linda likes to research, create, pass on… and to make plant-based pastry accessible to as many people as possible. Thanks to her work, and in all discretion, she is undoubtedly one of those who prepare the solutions of tomorrow.
Translated by Malvika Kathpal
