Chinese pastry chef wins silver at global culinary competition

More than 2,000 chefs from around 60 countries and regions gathered in Stuttgart, Germany, in February to participate in the IKA/Culinary Olympics. The event is among the world's oldest and biggest international culinary-arts competitions and is held every four years.

"Bigger, better and for the first time in Stuttgart－once again, we have proved that the IKA/Culinary Olympics is the most renowned and important international culinary competition for chefs," Richard Beck, president of the German Chefs' Association, says in a statement. "All participating chefs and pastry chefs were thrilled to represent their country and their profession."

In the culinary category for teams, Norway won the gold medal and China ranked No 16.

Xu Bing, pastry sous chef at Four Seasons Guangzhou, won a silver medal in the category of pastry artistic with a spectacular chocolate show piece titled Don't Let Them Go.

The lifelike sculpture was handcrafted from melted chocolate and skilfully depicts the cruelty of a proud hunter sitting atop an elephant while cutting its tusks, surrounded by a diverse collection of animals, including a dinosaur and a wolf.

"There's a sword in one hand and a tusk piece in another, and the hunter also carries a gun on his back," Xu says.

The 29-year-old chef says he hopes to highlight the ugliness of wildlife hunting through his work. He has been in the pastry business for 10 years. In August, he heard about the competition, signed up and prepared for the display.

He was inspired by a striking poster of the 2015 documentary film, Racing Extinction, that depicts the Earth as a stopwatch－like an environmental doomsday clock－ticking down to zero.

"I like animals, and I want to tell people not to harm wildlife through my work. If we hurt such animals, we humans will have less time on Earth," Xu says.

At the bottom of the chocolate work is a jewelry box and on top of it are a bug, a dinosaur fossil, a baby raptor and a "tree of life", as Xu calls it, saying it connects all animals－on its left is the head of a wolf and on its right a gorilla's head. The whole piece is around 1.2 meters high and weighs 30 kilograms.

The entire work took five months to complete, during which Xu made single pieces one by one and then assembled them together. The wolf head took Xu a week to finish. He changed the facial expressions many times to make it look more real.

"I used all the tools I could get to make the piece, whatever helped me get the effect I wanted, even daily-use items," he adds.

As this was the first large chocolate piece he made, Xu says he learned many things from how to color the chocolate to carving structures on it. He also used techniques from Chinese pastry-making to make the hunter look more real.

After the Spring Festival holiday, Xu packed pieces of his chocolate work and shipped them to Germany. But some broke on the way, so he had to fix them before the final display, he says.

"The good thing about a chocolate work is that you can repair the broken parts by melting and reshaping them, unlike sculptures made from other materials, and people won't be able to tell the difference," he adds.

The final display was on Feb 16 in a large hall where hundreds of chefs had gathered with their pastry presentations. Each chef had two hours to perfect their works before the judges viewed them. The results were out after five hours.

"I've seen and learned a lot through this huge gathering for chefs worldwide," Xu says of his first time at the competition.

Giancarlo Di Francesco, executive chef of Four Seasons Guangzhou, says Xu did well to get the silver medal.

"The IKA/Culinary Olympics is a gathering of the world's finest culinary professionals, and we encourage our talented chefs to attend, compete and learn from high-level competitions such as this," Francesco says.

Xu is already looking at the next competition four years later, when he aims to win the gold.

"I'll continue practicing my skills and bring out a better work," he says.