Frederic Bau

'If I'm doing a seminar, I wake up about 6.30am and drive to L'Ecole du Grand Chocolate in Tain l'Hermitage, which is 15km away from home. I'll arrive at the school around 7am, check my mail, plan my day and prepare tasks for my assistant. I drink my coffee at the school, most of the time with Freddie Mercury playing. I love Queen. When I drink my coffee in the morning and hear It's a Beautiful Day I feel good.

The seminars begin about 8.30am and we finish at 6.30pm or 7pm. Our customers are passionate; if they come to be trained, it's because they want to be better. I call them customers, not students. It's difficult to think of them as students because about 80 per cent of the time they're older than me. Most of them own their own shops or are already pastry chefs and they come to us to refresh their knowledge and get ideas.

There's pressure on us, like when [eminent French pastry chef] Pierre Herme calls me and says, 'Frederic, I'm sending my chef-chocolatier.' I know I don't have to teach him how to do chocolate bonbons; I know he wants inspiration or answers for technical problems. Most of the school's customers want us to advise them on technical problems or how to work with a machine they don't know how to use.

Because I began so young at Valrhona, I was lucky to work closely with agronomical engineers. My lab was near the research and development lab. When they spoke about pastry it was in technical terms, using words I had never heard before. They don't speak about ganache [a mixture of cream and chocolate]. Ganache is the pastry word. Agronomic engineers never speak about ganache; they know how to make it but they call it emulsion. They don't feel like chocolatiers but they're doing a chocolatier's job.

[From them] I discovered pastry in a different way. Before, I would just put things together and if I had a grainy ganache, I thought it came from bad chocolate or cream. They explained the mistakes come from you. I'd go to them and say, 'This is s***, I made it like this.' They'd say, 'Of course you're getting s***, it's because you made it like this.' I learned a lot from them. I came to understand that a good pastry chef has to be more than just a builder of showpieces. A good pastry chef must understand the how and the why. With the best ingredients in the world, you can still make a cake or dessert that doesn't turn out right.

We break for lunch from 12.30-2pm and eat at the school. I eat with the customers, I really get to know them.