What It Takes to Make Those Little Chocolate Oscars
Photo credit: Andrea Bricco
See these little gold guys? Everyone who attends the Oscars this Sunday will go home with one—they’re all winners!—as will some members of the press and some Los Angeles-area restaurants. They were made by chef Wolfgang Puck’s pastry team, with Kamel Guechida at the helm.
Guechida’s official title is Corporate Director of Pastry for the Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining Group (phew!), and he is responsible for the pastry and bread programs at Puck’s 21 restaurants around the world. He’s also creating pastry programs for new properties in Dubai, the Arab Emirates and Asia. And then there’s Oscars prep—there will be “three, eight-feet tables with chocolate fountains, truffles, marshmallows, mendiants, and more”—for which he told us he spent 18-19-hour days in his whites.
But back to the sweets. Here are the Oscars, in chocolate, by the numbers.
It takes:
1000 pounds of chocolate
10 pounds of edible gold dust
250 polycarbonate molds (each makes two Oscars)
2 weeks
6 full-time pastry chefs
1 Corporate Director of Pastry for the Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining Group
To produce:
6,500 chocolate Oscars
Good luck, guys! Photo credit: Carin Krasner
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