“Croissants move”: vegan chefs are reinventing French pastry

Rodolphe Landemaine, standing in his pastry shop, inspected the rows of traditional lemon meringue pies and cream pavlovas. "In France, cakes have to be visual," he said. "I had to produce something that not only tasted amazing, but looked elegant."

The display - from apple pies to croissants to almonds and chocolate - was like any other lavish Parisian bakery, with one difference: everything was vegan.

France is experiencing a surprising boom in artisanal vegan patisserie . The meat-rich nation, whose centuries-old baking tradition was based on eggs, butter and cream, has been shaken up by a new generation of pastry chefs reinventing classics without animal products.

But the crucial particularity of this high-end French vegan pastry is that it is not only marketed to vegans. By aiming to recreate classics that taste better than the original dairy-based versions and setting up traditional shops that blend almost imperceptibly into city streets, vegan pioneers are winning over an unsuspecting mainstream, making profits and seek to expand internationally. They see it as a subtle world shift through strawberry pies.

France is not an easy market to break into. According to a 2020 Ifop survey, less than 1% of the population is vegan, and the word "vegan" itself has taken on negative political associations amid the squabbles over activism against butcher shops.France is the European country with the highest per capita consumption of beef. Importantly, 24% of French people identify as flexitarians and reduce their meat consumption.

Landemaine, 45, describes himself as a " pure product of French gastronomy", a classic training The Norman pastry chef who worked in the biggest Parisian pastry houses then opened his own group of classic bakeries. "When I then became vegan myself, people thought I was joining a sect, really in France they looked at me and said: the boss is weird, he's gone crazy," he says. .

Landemaine decided that more people in France would go vegan if there were "more absolutely delicious, easy...