Ravneet Gill, Pastry Chef
PUFF & COUNTERTALK
roaming pop-up, london
Puff, the pop-up bakery founded by Ravneet and fellow pastry chef Nicola Lamb, is an ode to sweet things. When it opened its doors in Old Street, London, earlier this year, queues snaked around the block for a bit of their salted chocolate-chip cookies, brioche cubes and rice pudding with rhubarb and custard (to name just a few). Ravneet is also the founder of Countertalk, a hub connecting chefs and championing healthy working environments, and her first book, The Pastry Chef’s Guide, was released this year.
”I’m obsessed with sugar. Growing up, I was chocolate bar and biscuit mad – on a Saturday morning my brother and I would eat an entire packet of Maryland cookies in front of the TV. We didn’t have a lot of desserts, apart from the odd steamed pudding from Sainsbury’s – Mum [Jaswinder] didn’t bake; she was useless at it.
I didn’t get involved in the cooking until I was a teenager, although I’m barely allowed in the kitchen now. It’s the source of many arguments with three women – my nan [Jit], Mum and I – in the house. I would dream of working in food but never really knew how that would happen. I did a psychology degree and was going to do a PhD, but then something clicked in my head and I thought I’d go and try to be a chef instead. I can’t really say I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and my parents were quite annoyed.
After two terms at Le Cordon Bleu (basic and intermediate) I ran out of funds, so I jumped around from one kitchen to another. I was about four or five jobs in and hating it – the long hours, earning virtually nothing – when I arrived at St John. There I realised that the reason I had previously hated it was not because of the work but because of the environment. I started Countertalk because I wanted to highlight the places treating people properly, and the number of great women working in the industry who were not being spoken about. I wanted to find a way to shout about people more evenly.
“I wanted to highlight the number of great women working in the industry”
Ravneet Gill
It’s so important for pastry chefs to understand savoury food, too. When I arrived at St John, I didn’t. There were some ingredients they were using that I hadn’t heard of or seen before, like quince – I grew up in an Indian household, eating roast dinner covered in chillies or a shepherd’s pie with loads of chillies buried in it… Every single thing was spicy. A chef at the restaurant would always say ‘add salt, add salt, add salt,’ and I thought she was crazy. As soon as I started to listen to her and try the dishes the head chef, Jonathan [Woolway], would bring me tasters of, I slowly understood the savoury side of food more, and my cooking got 100 per cent better.
The language around pastry – that everything has to be pristine and cutesy – and the idea that you have to have all of this equipment, such as a thermometer, is daunting. Really, it will be absolutely fine. You should always, always weigh your ingredients because you can’t get away with not doing that, but with technique you can just figure it out. When I teach people, I always say: ‘Relax, it’s fine. If it fucks up, we’ll fix it.’
There are so many more bakeries now, which is great, but baking culture in a lot of ways hasn’t shifted in terms of what British people like to eat. For example, whenever fine French patisseries you’d find in Paris open in London, I think they’re gorgeous and I admire the skill, but I think British people just don’t want them. I don’t – I’ll buy something like that once every year to try it, but I’ll be craving a doughnut, Eccles cake, brownie or cookie.
Nicola and I had been talking about doing something together for ages, then, after eating madeleines from St John at Christmas, we were walking around Spitalfields and talking about what we craved – rice pudding, flatbread, cookies, a pastry – and why a place for all these things didn’t exist in London. I had been given a pop-up space in Passo, so over Christmas we put a plan together and just hoped people would turn up.
“We still find it funny how people lost their minds over the brioche cubes”
The first two weeks we were open, there were storms; my dad turned around and said, ‘No one is going to come because of the weather, so be prepared to bring home leftovers.’ Our mate Terri [Mercieca, founder of Happy Endings, purveyor of ice-cream sandwiches], made a queue of just herself outside as a joke. A few other people joined and then this rumour of a mini queue just carried on. It wasn’t intentional, it was just silly.
We worked on the basis of what good, seasonal ingredients we could get hold of and what we could make from them. We’d make up the menu for the following weekend on the drive home on Sundays. It was done on a rolling basis, and our friends thought we were mad for doing 15 new things every week.
Flatbreads [Passo has a pizza oven] and rice pudding were key, and the laminated brioche with chocolate. We still find it funny how people lost their minds over the cubes – they are just brioche made in a cube mould. They came about from a really stupid text conversation between Nicola and I: I saw a cube mould in Little Bread Peddlar and said we should make a cube of brioche and shove it full of custard – I love custard. The next day, Nicola made it happen. We put a video up on Instagram of us cutting it and laughing at how ridiculous it was, and everyone lost their minds.
We’re going to continue doing pop-ups for now. We’ve had offers of places to open in, but our business model would have to change. As a pop-up, we can keep it really fun and don’t have to pay huge rents or overheads. That’s why everything tastes so delicious, because we’re using the best of the best ingredients as we can afford to, and we don’t have to charge people loads of money for them.”
To find out where Puff will pop-up next, or to subscribe to their online pastry course, visit puffthebakery.co.uk
Photography: @ravneeteats (baked goods), Sophie E Davidson (portrait)
@ravneeteats
