A pastry chef works his chocolatier magic — live | Amaury Guichon

0:07It might be safe to say that most of us have seen the chocolate guy on social media. You know, the one who makes elaborate, gorgeous, intricate, edible structures all out of chocolate? The ones whose videos have amassed literally billions of views over the years? Well, we have a tasty treat for you on today's episode. Amari Gishaw, considered by some as the world's most creative pastry chef, joins Lateef Nasser, co-host of Radiolab and a guest curator at TED 2025, for a talk and demonstration and the important role food plays in the creation of wonder. He shows us how he manages to captivate the entire world with only one ingredient and without ever speaking a word.

0:59Okay, chef, I think it's safe to say that the entire world is obsessed with your elaborate chocolate sculptures. La Liste recognized you as the world's most creative pastry chef. You have billions of views on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, that in addition to your Netflix show. But more important than all of that is that you are part of my four-year-old's bedtime routine. Yes. We watch one of his videos every night. So we all watch your stuff, but none of us know anything about you. So where are you from? How did you get into pastries? Originally, I come from France. I'm French and Swiss. I started in the culinary when I was 14 years old.

1:45I was not great academically speaking, so I was encouraged to go to trades. I picked culinary out of a hat, really. And after my savory training, I drifted away towards the sweet side, and I really fell in love with the transformation of raw ingredients into elaborate products. And so you started in France. How did you get here, to the US? When I was 21, I wanted to learn how to speak English. I was like most French people. We don't speak English very well. So I thought I would take one year to learn how to speak English. I was not too picky on the destination. And I got an opportunity to come to Vegas 12 years ago.

2:28And knowing that I don't party, I don't drink, I didn't think Vegas would be really home for me. But I found that, in reality, the extravagance from Vegas was a perfect pairing with my ability to craft wonders. Right, right, the wow factor. People are always... I've introduced your videos to so many people. There's two waves of wow. The first wow is, wow, look at those sculptures. And then the second wow is, he made that entire thing out of chocolate, the whole thing. Yeah, it's the beauty of the material. Aside from other medium in the field where we rely on wood, metal, wires, chocolate can do everything by itself and is 100 % fully edible.

3:13People sometimes think I even use paint on my product, but it's really edible pigment mixed with the cocoa butter, the fat part of the cocoa bean, that makes the showpiece so beautiful. Do you just walk around, like, pastrifying everything in your head? Do you just, like, I'm like, how do I make that out of chocolate? How do I make that out of chocolate? It may not surprise you, but I do do that. So when we were prepping for this session, you surprised me by saying that as important as the look and the design of your work are to you, you actually care more about the taste. I mean, everybody that understands chocolate can transform it into art.

3:53I think the complexity as a trained pastry chef is how do we not compromise the taste, the texture, and yet craft beauty. And I think this is where it becomes much more complex. That's where the science really kicks in. On taking basic raw ingredients, you take flour by itself, a spoonful of flour is not very pleasing, A spoonful of sugar is too sweet, salt is too salty, bite into a lemon, it's too sour. Making the recipe, having the ingredients collide together to create things that gives you a good taste is really what I like to do. Great. Can you give me an example? Of what I do? By any chance of what you do?

4:37I mean, before all the chocolate showpiece took off, because social media is very visually oriented, so I used to put a special emphasis on it. I own a school. I travel the world and teach pastry, so I have created over the last decade multiple pastries. One of my favorites is the coffee clock. It's coffee, chocolate, a strong espresso paired with a strong 80 percent chocolate that looks like a clock, a little piece of jewelry. What you see on the screen are some of the elements that goes into the composition of the desserts. Hey y 'all, Elise here to give you some context for what you're hearing.

5:18As Amory describes what goes into making the coffee clock and the reasons behind doing the work that he does, there's a video behind him on stage of him working on all of the elements of this delicate edible clock. This is just a few snippets, but in reality, it takes about two days of craft for all the elements to fully rest and have the best textures. And it's true that not a lot of people know that, but when I started my social media channel, it was actually to raise awareness on how much work and power that goes into the making of pastry that justified the price. I often hear people complaining about the price of pastry, $5 for an eclair, it's too expensive.

6:00And it's true, but people go to nightclub and spend$35 on a mojito. And I wanted people, it is true. Those are Vegas prices, I think. Our crafts are so beautiful and so amazing. I think one thing I'm the most proud of is being an ambassador of my industry and being able to display the extent of the beauty that can be achieved in the world of sweets, whether it's bread, pastry, chocolate, ice cream, sugar. and I think it's the most important, it's for people to understand. It was an industry when I got in that was very secretive and I was able to break the secret, show it to the world and I think when I got into the industry, it was considered almost a lame industry, believe it or not.

6:48And now, just like your son, he might be a future chef in the future, he might want to become a chef, not just because he failed academically. And I think that's my proudest achievement. Thank you. Thank you. I hope he won't fail academically. Thanks so much. Thanks so much. I love your faith in me as a father. I think this platform is amazing to be able to express yourself. I don't often speak on my video. I usually let my hand do the work. So I still wanted to give you a little bit of my hand talk on this platform. Great. At this point in Amri's conversation with Latif, someone has wheeled a cart on stage with all of the ingredients needed to make this coffee clock in real time.

7:29A camera is pointed down on the cart so we can see the details of what's on it, and we see intricate tiny pieces of a clock. I'm talking about all of the gears, the clock cans painted in metallic colors. They all look so real, it's truly hard to believe they're made of chocolate. Omri walks us through what would be the final stage of this process, which is putting the clock together. So here you have various chocolate elements that were all crafted out of chocolate. I got an old Swiss cuckoo clock and broke it down and cast silicone mold so I could replicate it in chocolate version. And what I wanted to show you was the final assembly of the clock.

8:10Okay, what are you doing? We're going to start with the gears. I'm flipping them upside down. This is tempered chocolate. So it's what you may consider glue. So using a heat gun, I keep the chocolate liquid, tempered, but not overly warm. Yes, Omri does have a heat gun with him on stage. And that sound you're hearing is him warming up this chocolate glue that he's describing as we continue to watch his hands delicately put together these pieces. Because it hardens that Oh, yeah. Once we're done casting the first part, we can flip over the design. We're going to warm a spatula and glue it to our base.

8:55OK. I think chocolate is all about time, temperature and mechanical action. Once you understand how chocolate works, then you can start having fun with the matter. But it's really... You're doing surgery. I feel like I'm watching surgery here. It's very Swiss, right? Making a clock. Right, of course. Out of chocolate, in gold. One of the requirements of being a chocolatier is the coldness of the hands. If your hands are above 32 degrees Celsius, you melt the chocolate as you're doing it. So my hands are quite cold. Do you ever mess up anything? I do not. No. Okay. The last thing will be putting the gears onto the clock.

9:42Wow. At this point, as you can imagine, Omri has finished. With Latif's wow, we see a gorgeous, glossy, dark chocolate cake with the clock sitting on top. And just like that, Omri cuts into all of his hard work to describe what's inside. And I really won't blame you if you rush to go grab a chocolate bar after this. So inside you have a double chocolate chip cookie, an hazelnut financier, a coffee caramel espresso, and a chocolate mousse. Everybody, thank you guys. Thank you so much. The real life Willy Wonka! Thank you so much, chef.

10:27And that was Omri Gisha and Latif Nasser at 10-2025, leaving us all craving chocolate. If you can, I definitely recommend checking out the video of this talk over at TED.com. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tansika Sungmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo.

11:07I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.