BeanScene Magazine

At the talk of sweets, Adriano Zumbo is like a big kid set loose in a candy store. His eyes light up as he recalls his favourite childhood lollies one by one – bubble gum, sherbet fountains, Top Taste lamingtons and caramels.

But when it comes to coffee, Adriano is happy to leave the sugar behind.

“My way of identifying a good coffee is if I like it or I don’t,” Adriano says. “I drink piccolo, but I’m very fussy with my milk, the milk is the key – you can pour a good shot but you can stuff it up easily with milk.”

Adriano’s day starts early and that first espresso has to hit the spot. The iconic pastry chef makes himself a coffee at work or gets one at his local café Little Ethel’s, across the road from where he lives in Balmain, Sydney. He warns, however, that he can feel the effects of drinking too much during the day. “I only have two to three coffees maximum a day, depending on what I’m doing,” he says. “I sometimes get a bit jittery from drinking too much coffee and it hits my nervous system; I’ll be shaking and it sends jolts down my neck, depending on what type of mood I’m in.”

Growing up with Calabrese-Italian parents, Adriano says he’s always been around coffee, whether it be in his mother’s kitchen or at a little tabacchi in Italy: “I spent a lot of time in Italy in my early years and they only really drink espresso. So it was either that or growing up with my mum, she’d only drink coffee out of a percolator.”

Adriano or ‘Zumbo’ as he is known in the culinary world, became a household name Australia-wide after appearing on hit TV show Masterchef Australia as a guest judge in 2009. Carrying a croquembouche tower for contestants to replicate, decorated with spin toffee and violets; this giant stack of profiteroles is Zumbo’s claim to fame.

Dubbed the “sweet assassin” by the press for his technically challenging desserts, Adriano has appeared on the 2010 and 2011 seasons of Masterchef presenting complicated deserts for contestants to recreate, each more extravagant than the last.

In his off-screen life, Adriano owns three Sydney patisseries that carry his name in Balmain, Manly and Rozelle. With a fourth shop opening in Star City on 15 October and his debut book, Zumbo hitting shelves 28 September, this dessert master is wrapping up a sweet and successful year.

In what may come as a surprise, Adriano sums himself up as “simple” and “uncomplicated”, contrary to his skilled and lavish pastry creations.

“My type of cooking is comfortable, it’s quite basic and it’s quite simple,” he says. “There are sometimes a lot of elements in my cooking, but it’s actually really simple and the look of it is simple. I’m not one for fancy sparkles on my cakes, I prefer my cakes sprayed with glaze and the flavours have to talk for themselves.”

Adriano’s culinary inspiration all began in his hometown of Coonamble, 164 kilometres northwest of Dubbo, New South Wales. Adriano’s parents owned the local IGA supermarket and for a kid with a sweet tooth this was heaven at his fingertips – literally. At a young age Adriano developed a distinct palette for sweets and a keen eye for business.

“At six o’clock in the morning I’d open the shop and while my parents were in the office getting ready, I was downstairs filling my bag with lollies and whatever else was available,” he recalls. “Then I’d go to school and give them out in class – it was just addictive. So then I started to sell them.”

Adriano admits he was a rebellious child, his mind constantly wondering far from his schoolbooks and into more creative activities. “I hated school, I had no interest in it,” he says. “Not that I was bad at it, but I failed a lot of things because I was mucking around in class. That might have been due to the amount of sugar I’d consume.”

Despite his Italian blood and ability to speak fluent Italian until the age of four, Adriano says growing up, he struggled to find a strong connection to his cultural heritage and – oddly enough – with food.
“I was such a fussy eater as a kid,” he says. “My mum would cook Italian style food but I wouldn’t eat it, I was bulked up on lollies. I went to school in a country town with a very small multicultural population. It wasn’t cool to speak Italian when I went to school, I used to get embarrassed when my mum talked to me in Calabrese dialect in front of mates, now I find it really sad that I did that.”

Adriano’s childhood cravings for lollies eventually led him into a career that would combine his love for all things sweet. After finishing school at Year 10 and dismissing his parent’s hopes for him to take over the family business, he moved to Sydney to start his pastry chef apprenticeship in 1997. He then trained and worked in Australia and France with culinary icons including Ramon Morato and Pierre Herme.

Adriano started his working career supplying food to a local café in Sydney, baking tarts, muffins, brownies and banana bread at home. He then sold his goods at growers’ markets before setting up his first patisserie, Adriano Zumbo in Balmain in 2007, a 28-square metre shop.

Adriano’s business had only been open eight months when he was asked to assist on the first Masterchef series. “I was naive as to what was going to happen,” he recalls. “When I first went on [Masterchef], it was the first time they’d had a guest chef in the celebrity challenge. I wasn’t interested in TV, it came from nowhere, then they said, ‘We have a few other ideas we’d like to run past you’. I appeared on a few more episodes and then I just became part of the Masterchef family.”

Adriano says the show has successfully raised the profile of pastry chefs and attracted attention to what was becoming a forgotten industry. “I don’t think there was as much interest to go out and buy a good cake or macaron. Now more people splurge on it and it’s become a cool thing.”

A highlight of Adriano’s Masterchef appearances was this year when he presented his fairytale gingerbread house. Adriano admits this was one pressure-test that would stump any amateur chef. “It’s simple for me because that’s my profession, but for anyone else… it’s tough,” he says.

With designs that spark the imagination and bring fantasies to life, Adriano says his concepts are inspired by everyday life and put into a sweet form. “Childhood, supermarkets, food fads, eating out, even going to the theatre – it’s just life experience,” he says.

So what’s next for Zumbo? “They always want something bigger and better,” he says of whether he can continue to create desserts that surprise and awe TV viewers. “Who knows, if I get another crack at [appearing on Masterchef], maybe I’d do something simple – that would really shock them. Once you get to a certain point, you need to go backwards. For me, I’d try to go back to more basic things flavour-wise: simple and tasty.”

Adriano is not one to follow trends, he says he’d rather be unpredictable. “I think life’s about excitement,” he says. “Everybody looks at me and says you can’t do this, you can’t do that, but why not? Everybody else is following the same path, why do I have to follow it? I want to keep changing wherever I go – create the unexpected.”

Much like his straightforward idea on a good coffee, Adriano adopts a similar philosophy to life. “One of the greatest things about this job is the reward from hearing positive remarks about my desserts… you get the bad with the good but you can’t be perfect in life,” he says. “Sometimes you start to forget what you’re doing but you have to remember what’s important in life, remember what you used to do, go back to it and keep going.”

On the subject of food, Adriano says he’s always keen to have a coffee inspired item in his offerings. Currently, customers can salivate over a coffee crème brûlée macaron and a coffee tart, called Toby’s Got Ed’s Ball. This is Adriano’s version of tiramisu in a tart, consisting of pâte sucrée, flourless chocolate biscuit, mascarpone crème légère, coffee brûlée, baked hazelnut crème and a chocolate ball with an espresso shot in the middle.

While there is not an abundance of coffee-inspired desserts on Zumbo’s menu, in contrast, he notes the choice of coffee in Sydney has rapidly expanded since he first moved to Balmain seven years ago.

“Everyone drinks and loves coffee to the point that everyone is now critical of the coffee they buy,” he says. “Everyone is getting off the International Roast and Nescafé and into specialty coffee.”
Travelling regularly to Melbourne, Adriano admits the coffee culture is very different between the two cities. “There’s a lot of passion in Sydney, but it’s a bit funkier in Melbourne,” he says. “Sydney caters for the masses but Melbourne has cool, unique boutiques. It’s something you don’t see that much of in Sydney.”

With the opportunity to meet people from all corners of the culinary world, Adriano says this is an industry he likes. “It’s a good lifestyle, if you love it. If you don’t love it, you get trapped and you can’t get a away from it. You’ve got to love the lifestyle.”