Overview
Let out your belt buckle a notch for this one. The mastermind pastry chef behind Agathe Patisserie — whose buttery, inventive croissants and pastries have been filtering into cafes around the city in recent times and popped up at Prahran Market last year — is opening a permanent stall at South Melbourne Market on Friday 31 July.
Parisian expatriate Agathe Kerr will make all her pastries fresh in an exposed pastry kitchen behind the market counter, so you can eat with your eyes before you eat them with your mouth.
“In France, pastries are always fresh because they are baked throughout the day, and we wanted Melbournians to have that experience, too,” says Kerr. “Our customers will be able to see us preparing the pastries, baking them and adding the finishing touches.”
Kerr does danishes, creme brulee, millefeuille and peanut-salted caramel Paris-Brest choux. But she makes her best magic with croissants — infusing them with matcha, pandan or cafe au lait; adding brie and sour cherry for a decadent, uber instagrammable sandwich; or filling each one with salted caramel, nutella or peanut caramel custard and baking them in muffin trays. The resulting tower of gooey croissanty goodness from that last one is called the ‘cruffin’.
“What makes our cruffins different is that we fill them on demand, in front of the customer, or ‘a la minute’ as it is known in France,” Kerr says.
The Agathe menu will change continuously. Kerr, who has a professional pastry chef qualification from the prestigious Ecole de Boulangerie et Patisserie de Paris, seems to have a thing for experimentation.
“The chemistry of baking is a revelation,” she says. “I love seeing the transformation from the raw product to the final product.”
So do we, Agathe. So do we. And then we love that other transformation as we pick it up, sink in our teeth, and melt.
Agathe Patisserie will be housed in stalls 63 and 64 at South Melbourne Market, which is open every Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.