P i s t a c h i o

Foodservice & Hospitality, Aug, 2007

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“Hi. I’m Charlie Trotter,” he said.

“We know who you are,” said Richmond, B.C. native Cindy Duby, probably with a grin. Who didn’t know Trotter, especially here at the 2000 World Gourmet Summit in Singapore? This was where she and her husband, Dominique, first met the famous Chicago chef. Trotter had come to meet the Dubys in person. His pastry chefs had been raving about their work.

Cindy and Dominique Duby are chocolatiers and pastry chefs nonpareil. Their sweets are miniature artworks that evoke gasps of astonishment. Their flavour combinations are highly original, and they are practitioners of molecular gastronomy.

Don’t tackle the subject of molecular gastronomy lightly with Dominique, who takes an extremely passionate view. He even has his own definition: the application of scientific principles and techniques to the understanding and improvement of small-scale artisan food production.

That’s so we won’t think that anyone wielding a foam canister qualifies as a molecular gastronomist, and so that we’ll see what’s at the heart of what the Dubys do. They make high quality food items by hand, using science to find new ways to handle their ingredients and to heighten the taste experience of their flavours.

The scientific aspect of their work and the development of some of their products and techniques are joint projects undertaken with professors and students of the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Food Science. Each academic term, the Dubys submit their proposals for study, and if accepted, their projects become the students’ projects, too.

Cindy and Dominique first met in the late 1980s in the pastry kitchen at Vancouver’s CP Hotel. They went to Europe together, first to Paris to study with Gaston Lenôtre, considered to be the leader of Le Nouveau Patisserie movement, and then to Brussels (Dominique is a Belgian native) to learn from Wittamer, the great house of chocolate and pastry.

Returning to Vancouver, they were ready to ply the city with newly learned artistry, but got a wakeup call instead. “We were way, way, too early,” says Dominique. They opened a shop, but found no market. They shifted gears and started selling cakes to restaurants and hotels, which made them financially successful, but left them creatively starved.

“Each summer we’d come up with new flavour combinations,” says Cindy, but their customers weren’t interested. After 14 years, they called it quits.

“I think it was a mid-life crisis,” surmises Cindy, but in 2004, the duo’s next venture emerged: Wild Sweets, a “virtual boutique” where they would sell handmade chocolates, and ideas about food and science.

The Dubys have packaged and merchandize their ideas true to their vision — to conduct their molecular research and make its results available to everyone.

They devised the Science Kit (which comes in two versions), containing all the ingredients and instructions to give a party of eight people a unique and memorable chocolate-tasting experience — complete with DVD. For something savoury, a curious cook can browse the CuliScience line of molecular cooking ingredients, for use in the Dubys’ own recipes.

The duo is equally innovative with savoury as they are with sweet. Their new book has some eye-popping treatments for crab (white chocolate hollandaise, potato brulé, hot celery and crab gelée) and shrimp (capers, mincemeat chocolate jam, mango carpaccio and cucumber gelée). The photography is exquisite. They do all of it themselves, too.

Next, the couple would like to do something they call theatre, a kind of agro-gastro-tourism in a place like the Okanagan, where visitors are already prone to appreciate food. “We could do something on the side,” proposes Dominique, “where they could learn a little bit about chocolate and cooking, and then taste some amazing things.”

For now, the Dubys give their new book its final touches. Like their first, the second book also has a foreword by the influential Trotter. “He’s a great person,” says Dominique, “a great chef, a great entrepreneur and a fantastic marketing individual.”

Here, too, the Dubys are no slouches. They do all their own marketing and promotion, and their press and TV appearances are top-drawer. “They work incredibly well together,” says their publisher Robert McCullough. “They’re well educated, very entertaining, and I don’t know if you can say this, but they’re two one-of-a-kinds.”

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