Food

All you need to know about Kirsten Tibballs

Plus the ultimate winter dessert dish from Australia's Queen of Chocolate.

Chatting with Kirsten Tibballs, it’s hard not to come away from the conversation feeling a little lazy and underachieving. Australia’s Queen of Chocolate would undoubtedly be mortified if she thought you were feeling that way, given that her vibe is unfailingly positive, warm and encouraging in a way that reads as entirely genuine.

Still, as her accomplishments begin to stack up around you - books and TV shows, an internationally renowned chocolate and patisserie school in Melbourne, a trophy cabinet stuffed with awards, including a Gold medal from the ‘pastry Olympics’, judge for some of the world’s most prestigious patisserie and chocolate competitions, a renowned teacher and successful businesswoman with a life that also encompasses charity work and a family - it’s difficult to avoid looking at your own life and surmising you’ve been slacking off. Did I mention she started a business selling cakes when she was 12? The drive is remarkable.

Kirsten Tibballs working away at Savour chocolate and patisserie school.

Create Kirsten Tibballs' Botrytis and vanilla truffles recipe at home here.

“I’ve always been very, very driven,” agrees Tibballs. “I started a cake business very young but I was also unwell as an adolescent and was hospitalised for a time and so did very little schooling from the ages of 12 to 15. I didn’t have a lot of education but I think that gave me a drive to succeed, particularly because I had such a passion for food and cooking from very early on and knew what I wanted to do. I started a chef apprenticeship as soon as I was physically able but quickly realised that I was more drawn to the creativity and artistry of patisserie, so I changed my apprenticeship to pastry and have not looked back.”

Hearing about the working conditions in the suburban business where she started as a baby pastry apprentice, it’s hard not to view Kirsten Tibballs in a kind of Dickensian light. She worked ridiculously long hours, starting at 2am (not being able to drive herself, her father would drop her at work every morning) working until about 4pm when her mother, a full-time teacher, could pick her up. She often napped on the concrete floor of the office for an hour or two before returning “deliriously” to the kitchen to continue work.

“People hear about this and think it’s really harsh and it’s true, it was,” says Tibballs. “It obviously wouldn’t happen today but it really fast-tracked what I know and what I learned. It was tough, but in terms of who I worked with and the products I was working with, it was one of the best educations you could have in my field.”

After five years, she finished her Dickensian apprenticeship position and began working at the then brand-new Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne under classically-trained German pastry chef Markus Bohm. It was, she says “like a whole other apprenticeship that opened a whole new set of skills and possibilities.”

It was where she was first introduced to the world of chocolate and also where she started to get serious - and strategic - about cooking competitions. She got successful too. “I’d started competing when I was an apprentice and would enter anything that I saw - Easter egg competitions, a trans-Tasman bake-off against New Zealand - and I found I really liked doing those regardless of the outcome because it made you push yourself. Rather than going home each day and catching up with friends or whatever, I would stay at work and learn a new skill, try to push my boundaries and that was really appealing to me.”

It also turned out to be crucial for her career. After she won an Australia-wide competition - with the first prize a trip to an enormous patisserie and chocolate trade show in Germany - she witnessed people demonstrating techniques with chocolate that she “couldn’t even comprehend.”

“It was the most magical experience to think you’ve conquered patisserie and then realise you have so much more to learn. There was no social media back then, constantly showing you how much is out there and all the amazing things people are creating. Back then I was in my little bubble which was suddenly burst in the most amazing way.”

Tibballs says she “hassled” people demonstrating at the German trade show to give her a job. She must have been a convincing hassler, because she landed stages in patisseries and restaurants in France and Belgium (including one where she was the only woman in a kitchen of 40 men), and for the next 18 months she worked these stints in Europe while 'commuting' back and forth to her job in Australia, all the while soaking up as much knowledge of both technique and business as she could.

She then landed a job at Le Cordon Bleu’s first patisserie in Melbourne which, to her delight, included the Paris-based cooking school sending out European-based chefs every three months to train the staff in new techniques. It also led her to one of those storied lightbulb moments when she realised that there was a gap in the market for a local specialist chocolate and patisserie school. So, in 2002 she opened her own, Savour, in the inner Melbourne suburb of Brunswick.

Try Kirsten Tibballs' poached pears with Sparkling Shiraz recipe for yourself here.

Australia's Queen of Chocolate, Kirsten Tibballs, doing what she does best.

SAVOUR: KIRSTEN TIBBALLS SCHOOL OF CHOCOLATE

Savour is perhaps the best expression of Kirsten Tibballs’ democratic philosophy on spreading the word, the technique and the joy of chocolate and patisserie. Unlike many specialty schools, Savour has classes, both in-person and online, aimed at all levels, from absolute beginners to credentialed professionals. And the reason it has been so successful for over two decades is that she is apparently hardwired to balance the pragmatic with the creative.

Tibballs saw that her enjoyment of competing, for example, could also translate to business success which is why, after opening Savour, she competed for and was chosen to represent Australia in the World Pastry Championships in Las Vegas in 2004. She came first in the world for her chocolates and, later the same year, took out a Gold medal for Australia in the aforementioned pastry Olympics, known as the International Federation of Pastry, Gelato and Chocolate World Trophy.

The success attracted attention which, in her case, translated not only into sold-out classes at Savour but publishing deals (she now has three cookbooks under her belt) and TV shows, including appearances on MasterChef Australia and her own show The Chocolate Queen, currently shooting its third season.

“I always keep in mind the business reality of what I do,” she says. “I have to sell what I do in order to keep doing it and the best way to do that is to run classes and create recipes that are seamless, with no barriers. People invest their time in you - buying ingredients and spending time recreating the recipe - so the recipes you give them need to work every time. That’s the most important thing. I like making people happy and knowing that my recipes aren’t going to leave people disappointed is vital to that. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about something basic like the best banana cake you’ve ever tasted or something more complex like one of the desserts I took to MasterChef it’s equally important for both ends of the recipe scale to work.”

So how does the Queen of Chocolate go about creating a new recipe? “I usually start by drawing,” she says. “What I do has to be visually engaging and appealing and so I draw an image and a concept with coloured pencils before I even start thinking about the flavours. But obviously you have to be blown away when you eat it and with this you have to consider both texture and taste. Texture has become absolutely crucial in drawing people to a dish so I always want the texture to be expressed visually.

“So with a chocolate, for example, people now like to see the textures rather than just a smooth, shiny jewel and so you want to show them that there are nuts or fruit or whatever under the surface of the chocolate. I want to make it semi-refined so it displays technique, but it also has to have rustic elements in it too. It’s like with a pastry like a Portuguese tart that lures you in with that particular visual texture that invites you to bite into it.”

Tibballs is constantly experimenting but loves classic flavours and is not a fan of including deliberately challenging ingredients like artichokes or truffles.

“I’m always scanning the horizon for new ingredients and ideas - I really like using yuzu at the moment - but people like nostalgic things, familiar things. Some people like to push boundaries and experiment but I think sometimes chefs and pastry chefs who are highly creative are creating combinations to impress other chefs more than the customer. For me, rather than dried ants covered in 80 per cent chocolate from Bolivia or something, I’m always trying to take elements of what has already been done and turn it into something new and playful, pair ingredients together in ways that haven’t been done before.”

It sounds a little like Tibballs’ career itself, particularly when you think of the trajectory from ambitious 12-year-old selling wedding and birthday cakes out of her father’s kitchen to the multi-tasking she has to do managing a business that not only runs cooking classes, but also a visiting chefs program that brings in acclaimed pastry chefs and chocolatiers from around the world, and a shop that supplies hard-to-get kitchen equipment but also employs a full-time videographer and copywriter alongside kitchen, marketing and admin staff.

But the thrill of creating and the joy of seeing her students proud and satisfied remains the main energy behind her incredible, and slightly intimidating, drive.

“I just want to keep growing creatively and professionally,” she says. “I never like to make the same thing twice, which is the bar I like to set for myself, to keep myself exploring and learning. I love classic combinations - white chocolate and raspberry, salty peanuts and milk chocolate, tropical mixes of mangoes and passionfruit, the decadence of chocolate and caramel - so my challenge is always how to express those flavours in new and exciting ways.”

Judging by her remarkable success, Kirsten Tibballs doesn’t need to worry about meeting her own goals.