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Bakes & Cakes
episode • The Cook Up with Adam Liaw • cooking • 25m
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episode • The Cook Up with Adam Liaw • cooking • 25m
G
Despite earning a degree in psychology, Christopher Thé always knew his heart belonged in a kitchen.
“I just fell in love with the buzz of service. When you're in a very busy place and the dockets are flying at you and you have to work very fast. I just loved that,” he recalls.
After completing an apprenticeship and spending a decade in fine dining restaurants, he founded in 2008, home to the famous watermelon cake. Ten years later, he sold the business and opened artisan cake shop and café in Stanmore.
Christopher Thé with Adam Liaw on the set of The Cook Up Season 8. Credit: Jiwon Kim
Think like a facilitator
Thé has this theory that to make good dough or good pastry, you have to think like a counsellor.
“If you think about what happens in baking before it goes in the oven, often there are two elements, flour and butter, and they are very different. And then you add water or eggs, and that’s also very different. Your job as a baker or pâtissier is to make two things that don't want to go together actually run together as one,” he muses.
“Like a marriage counsellor, you have to be a good listener; you need to understand the character of what you're working with and allow those characteristics to determine your baking technique. You can only force things so much, but it will never work as good as if you listen very well and just facilitate.”
Learn the rules so you can break them
Thé’s meticulous nature made him well-suited for pastry. “You need to be quite exact and precise, and you have to get things right from the first step to the last step. Otherwise, everything just collapses,” he explains. “I like classic technique and classic dishes. One of my favourite dishes is and it just has to be right. But at the same time, I think you have to know when to break the rules.”
This philosophy led him to create his signature watermelon cake, a combination of almond dacquoise, rose cream, fresh watermelon, and strawberries.
“Adding watermelon to a cake, it made sense on texture and on flavour. It's just that no one really had done that before,” he says.
And does he ever tire of making it? “It has staying power for a good reason. It’s delicious. And it has a lot of meaning for a lot of people now too, who’ve had it as their wedding cake or for their anniversaries, birthdays, Valentine’s Day. It's more than just a cake now. It's really part of people's lives,” he replies.
Embrace mistakes
Thé makes pastry look effortless, but he assures that mastery takes time.
“I love the part of baking where it's flowing, and you almost turn off your brain and it all happens. That's the lovely part. But to get to that part, you have to spend years of meticulous work where you're learning what works and what doesn't, what makes cakes flats and what makes them fluffy,” he says.
Even now, every cake and pastry at Hearthe is tweaked and refined many times before it reaches customers.
Recently, someone (possibly him, he admits!) put baking soda instead of baking powder in the mise en place at Hearthe. The cake he made with it turned up even better; softer and darker, a happy accident.
“You don't learn anything when everything works perfectly. You only learn when you have a problem and then you have to think about how to fix it, and you try a few times, a few different things, and you fix it. And then by doing that, you learn,” he says.
Surround yourself with what makes you happy
While Thé applies principles from his psychology studies to communication and motivation, he has never regretted swapping a therapist’s couch for a baker’s bench.
“Bakeries, cafes and restaurants, at their core, are happy places. Dealing with psychological problems is often not a very happy place. So, I think my optimistic nature just wanted to deal with more of the light and enjoyable parts of living, as opposed to fixing people's problems, which is very important, but different,” he reflects.
The future is local and Indigenous
At Hearthe, Thé highlights , featuring dishes like Geraldton wax cheesecake, avocado toast with , and blue gum caramel chocolate tart.
“We, as Australian people, should really be looking at what grows on our land. And especially because it’s often better suited to our environment than some of the foods that we import,” he says.
“I believe that just like ordinary ingredients.”
