Meet the world’s most creative pastry chef

Yun Eun-young is first Korean and first woman to receive La Liste honor for reinterpreting French pastry through Korean ingredients

Yun Eun-young, owner-chef of dessert boutique Garuharu, poses for a photo before an interview at her shop in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, on July 2. (Yoon Chang-bin/The Korea Herald)

Pastry chef Yun Eun-young, founder of Seoul dessert boutique Garuharu, has become the first Korean to be named the World’s Most Creative Pastry Chef at the La Liste Pastry Special Awards, announced June 15 in Paris.

Last year’s recipient was French pastry chef Maxime Frederic of Cheval Blanc Paris and Cafe Louis Vuitton.

Sponsored by Cacao Barry, the award honors a chef “demonstrating extraordinary creativity, whose technical skill pushes the craft of pastry into an art form.”

The award recognizes more than just Yun’s technical skill. It reflects her fluency in the language of French tradition, and her ability to speak it with a Korean accent. Her desserts combine classical technique with Korean ingredients, flavors and memories in original ways.

Yun builds her desserts around Korea’s seasons. In summer, she uses peaches and plums. She turns fresh herbs into pesto for use throughout the year and dries summer fruit to bring its flavor and texture into other seasons. Her signature desserts are eclairs topped with whatever fruit is at its peak.

She has also learned that the same fruit can behave very differently depending on where it was grown. Korean strawberries, mostly raised hydroponically, are prized across Asia for their sweetness, but European chefs visiting her kitchen found them lacking in aroma.

“When I make jam with Korean strawberries, it is delicious, but it can feel like it is simply sweet, almost like sugar water. With European strawberries, the aroma after cooking is wonderful and it lasts. So I blend the two. The concentrated flavor comes from European strawberries, and for toppings, texture and that direct sweetness on the palate, I use fresh Korean strawberries,” she said in an interview with The Korea Herald.

Asked which Korean ingredient could follow the path of Dubai’s kadaif into the global pastry mainstream, Yun pointed to yuja, the fragrant Korean citrus.

“Yuja is such a Korean ingredient, but many people think of it as Japanese. When I wrote my book during the pandemic, the translator initially rendered it as ‘yuzu.’ It is not an ingredient we brought from Japan, so there was no reason to call it that. Now people all over the world find it appealing, especially in pastry, so I hope it becomes better known as a Korean ingredient,” she said.

She has also been working with gamtae, a Korean seaweed that she says lends a rich, savory depth when paired with creams.

For Yun, creativity does not mean inventing something from nothing. It begins with understanding and respecting a craft that came from elsewhere.

“Pastry is not originally our culture. It is French culture, and I have great respect for their techniques and the way they use ingredients,” Yun said. “Rather than repeating what we learn mechanically, I study why they think this way and why they use a technique the way they do. When I keep working until it becomes completely my own, I eventually reach a point where I think, ‘What if I tried this another way?’ I believe the things that come out of that process are what is new and creative.”

Yun said she does not think of herself as especially creative.

“I don’t necessarily feel that I myself am creative,” she said. “But because I grew up here, I naturally weave in things I saw and experienced in Korea as a child. To people outside, that becomes something new.”

Baked goods made by chef Yun Eun-young at Garuharu in Gangnam-gu, Seoul (Garuharu) Eclairs, chef Yun Eun-young’s signature menu items, at Garuharu in Gangnam-gu, Seoul (Garuharu)

From one-room to the world

Yun, who took up baking in earnest at 17, won competition categories including chocolate and sugar showpieces at vocational school before training at high-end pastry shops and hotels.

Her own business began humbly. Living alone in a small officetel with a loft, she slept upstairs and ran weekend home baking classes in the studio space below while holding down a job.

“There was nothing like it in Korea at the time, so it did really well. After about a year, I went all in. I quit my job. I thought I should try operating a shop, and that is when I opened the store,” she said.

That store was Garuharu, opened in 2012 on Seoul’s Gyeongnidan-gil as a tiny shop selling a single item: eclairs. Koreans had grown up with choux pastry, she reasoned, and she wanted a specialty shop in the style of Europe and Japan rather than a multi-item bakery and cafe common in Korea.

Unlike many of her peers in Europe, Yun did not spend a lot of time training under a single master, a path she credits with shaping the boutique’s philosophy.

“Garuharu’s identity is never setting limits. If I see a technique on my phone that fascinates me, I make it exactly as it is first. Then, as I think about how to do it differently, new and fresh things come out. Because I spent a short time honing my skills under someone, I naturally learned by making things myself, over and over, and finding answers within that,” she said.

The weekend lines outside the small shop caught the eye of French ingredient and equipment companies touring the Korean market, leading to her first overseas workshop invitation in Spain.

Garuharu’s recent relocation to Yeoksam-dong gave her a larger kitchen, where she invites chefs from abroad to teach and learn, and she holds her own workshops in Asia, Europe and the US.

Travel cake created by Chef Yun Eun-young for Accor’s Emblems Collection (Garuharu)

Global collaborations

Yun is now working with French hospitality group Accor on its Emblems Collection, a luxury resort brand, developing travel cakes built around each hotel’s signature local ingredient.

“The first hotel opened in England, near apple orchards, so there is an apple cake. In April this year a hotel opened in Canada, inside the Rocky Mountains, so that one is built around alpine honey and pine needles. Next year hotels will open in Italy and France, so the project continues,” she said.

At home, she partners with art galleries such as the Hoam Museum of Art and takes commissions from luxury brands preparing holiday gifts for VIP clients, with Chuseok projects already on her desk.

Yun sees Korea’s dessert scene changing faster than ever as social media accelerates trends and shops open and close in quick succession.

“Once this transitional period passes, I think pastry will settle into a complete culture, a part of our own culture,” she said.

As for the award, she intends to keep doing what she has always done.

“I am still at a stage where I can keep enjoying the things I love. I want to keep inviting chefs here to share and exchange, and to go abroad and do that work myself,” she said.

yoohong@heraldcorp.com