‘Croissants are moving on’: the vegan chefs reinventing French pâtisserie

theguardian.com:

Rodolphe Landemaine stood in his pâtisserie inspecting the rows of traditional lemon meringue tarts and cream pavlovas. “In France, cakes have to be visual,” he said. “I had to produce something that didn’t just taste amazing but looked elegant.”

The display – from apple tarts to almond-chocolate croissants – resembled any other sumptuous Paris bakery, with one difference: it was all vegan.

France is experiencing a surprise boom in vegan artisan pâtisserie. The meat-heavy nation, whose centuries-old pastry tradition was built on eggs, butter and cream, has been shaken by a new generation of pastry chefs reinventing classics without animal products.

But the crucial twist to this high-end French vegan pâtisserie is that it is not marketed simply at vegans. By aiming to recreate classics that taste better than the original dairy-based versions, and setting up traditional boutiques that meld almost imperceptibly into city streets, the vegan pioneers are winning over an unsuspecting general public, making profits and looking to expand internationally. They see it as subtly changing the world through strawberry tarts.

France is not an easy market to crack. According to an Ifop poll in 2020, fewer than 1% of the population is vegan, and the word “vegan” itself had become laden with negative political associations amid rows over activism against butcher shops. France is the European country with the highest beef and veal consumption per inhabitant. But, crucially, 24% of French people identify as flexitarian and are cutting down on meat.

Landemaine, 45, describes himself as a “pure product of French gastronomy”, a classically trained pastry chef from Normandy who worked in Paris’s top pâtisserie houses then opened his own group of