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WORLD CONFECTIONERY CHAMPIONSHIP
by Lucy GordanThe bi-annual World Confectionery Championship was held on January 17-18, 2004 in Rimini, the birthplace of movie director Federico Fellini and world-famous resort on Italy's Adriatic coast. Teams of pastry chefs from 13 countries - Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland - competed.
The Italian team, Leonardo Di Carlo, the "pastry professor" at Rome's cooking school, "ATavolaconloChef" and his colleague, Roberto Lestani from Udine, together with their coach, the master pastry chef Iginio Massari from Brescia, won the gold in every category of the competition: chocolates, semifreddo , cakes, petit fours, spun-sugar art-works, pastille, and biscuits. Since the championship was held in Italy this year, they named their tour-de-force, an almond semifreddo , " Sognando Venezia" or "Dreaming of Venice. In 2006, the World Confectionery Championship will be held in Stockholm. In the meantime, Di Carlo and Lestani will probably compete in the World Cup.
Besides teaching at "ATavolaconloChef", 29-year-old Di Carlo, a pugliese , who grew up in Rome, where his parents had a pastry shop, and now lives in Conegliano near Treviso, is a "pastry" professor at CastAlimenti in Brescia, Fugar in Rimini, and the recently-opened university ALMA, the only school to offer an International Master in Italian Cuisine, in Colorno just outside Parma. ( Reggia di Colorno, 43052 Colorno (Parma),Italy, tel. 011-39-0521-210779, e-mail: infoalma@mastercucina.it, www.mastercucina.it, www.alma.scuolacucina.it ).
On his business card, Di Carlo calls himself a "pastry consultant." "I no longer own a pastry shop," he told me at a celebration in his honor at "ATavolaconloChef," "but give advice to others about new techniques, new recipes, how to organize the business better, what new equipment to buy... Small family-run artisan shops seek me out as well as large big-name companies in this pastry sector."
Like Di Carlo, 34-year-old Lestani has a curriculum starred with numerous international awards, spent several years perfecting his skills abroad, comes from a family of pastry chefs and is a "pastry consultant". However, as his nearly full-time profession, he still owns his father's Pasticceria Lestani, Via Baldassaria Bassa 108, 33100 Udine, tel/fax 011-39-0432-601073 , with his sister Antonella. Their specialties are Christmas panettoni and pandori , Easter colombe or doves, chocolates, and mignon . As part of his training Lestani spent a year working at the pastry shop of Iginio Massari, Pasticceria Veneta, Via Salvo D'Acquisto 8, 25128 Brescia, tel 011-39-030-392586 , which also specializes in panettoni . Massari is a member of the International Association of Pastry Professors, of "Relais Dessert" and the founder of the Academy of Italian Pastry Professors.