When it comes to cooking competition shows, there are few things more terrifying than pastry. It’s delicate, difficult, and easy to mess up horrifically, which is what makes it one of the most nerve-wracking (and mouthwatering) MasterChef Canada challenges yet.
This clip from the Canadian adaptation of the famous American cooking show is centered on the mille-feuille, a delicious French pastry named for the “thousand sheets” of pastry required to make it. The dessert usually has three layers of puff pastry, with two layers of pastry cream in between, topped with some kind of fondant glaze. The flavor palate is typically vanilla, sometimes with a chocolate or hazelnut switch, but always relatively conservative on the spice side.
These MasterChef mille-feuille, however, are not your typical pâtisserie fare. One chef produced a lemon and almond cream concoction with blackberries, while another went with Caribbean-inspired flavors like pineapple and coconut. But while almost all were pretty stunning, for anyone who’s ever actually eaten a mille-feuille, the most impressive part of the video is watching the judges expertly cut clean slices of pastry without forcing the entire thing to crumble in front of them.
