Some flavours don’t need a calendar. They just need to appear for everyone to know what time of year it is. In Catalonia, and much of Europe, chestnuts are exactly that: the sensory marker of autumn, the aroma that announces shorter days and the approach of Christmas.

This Chestnut and Pear Flower is the work of Jean Sivieude, developed for issue 517 of DPAS Magazine. A gluten-free dessert, formulated for 10 servings, which takes that autumnal imagery and constructs it with technical precision in three interconnected preparations.

“It is made with lightly toasted chestnut flour, accompanied by a 100% pear fruit crémeux and a crispy gavotte with pure cane sugar. A comforting, mellow, refreshing, balanced, and elegant dessert, perfect for an afternoon snack.” – Jean Sivieude

Chestnuts in Catalonia: far more than an ingredient

Chestnuts hold a special place in Catalan gastronomic culture. Its season marks the transition into winter and is experienced collectively, in the streets, around the unmistakable aroma of roasted chestnuts. It’s a flavor not associated with sophisticated indulgence, but with something deeper: memory, home, gathering.

Bringing that flavor to a pastry dessert means respecting that comforting character without falling into rusticity. And that’s where technique becomes essential.

Savoyard chestnut sponge cake: lightness with gluten-free flour

The base of the dessert is a Savoyard sponge cake made with lightly toasted chestnut flour. The prior toasting of the flour is a technical decision with direct aromatic consequences: it enhances the toasted and sweet notes of the chestnut, reduces its earthy character, and provides a depth that raw flour cannot achieve.

The Savoyard, for its part, is an intelligent structural choice. This classic sponge cake, very airy and with an extremely light crumb, compensates for the natural density of chestnut flour, which, lacking gluten, does not create an elastic network. The result is a spongy and light base that requires no wheat at all, making this dessert a naturally gluten-free option.

100% Pear Crémeux with Gracila Gel

The fresh counterpoint comes with a pear crémeux made exclusively from fruit, textured with Gracila Gel.

Pear is the natural companion to chestnut: it shares its sweet and autumnal profile, but provides juiciness, mild acidity, and a freshness that prevents the overall dish from being heavy. The technical challenge of a 100% fruit crémeux is to achieve body and creaminess without resorting to dairy fats or egg.

Gracila Gel solves this challenge by providing a creamy, silky, and stable texture from the fruit itself, without masking its flavor or modifying its aromatic profile. The crémeux thus maintains the full identity of the pear—clean, fresh, recognizable—with the enveloping texture the dessert needs.

Crispy Gavotte: the star of the assembly

If there is one element that defines the architecture of this dessert, it is the gavotte. And therein lies its greatest technical singularity.

Made with pure cane sugar and constructed with Gelcrem Cold and Maltosec, this gavotte is baked to achieve that extremely thin, brittle, and caramelized-flavored sheet that gives the preparation its name and visually structures the dessert in the shape of a flower.

Gelcrem Cold allows the necessary viscosity of the dough to develop directly cold, without prior cooking, ensuring uniform spreading and controlled thickness before baking.

Maltosec, our low-hygroscopicity maltodextrin, is the key to the crisp’s durability. It adds body to the dough without excessive sweetness and, above all, reduces the absorption of environmental moisture, allowing the gavotte to maintain its brittle texture for much longer—a decisive factor when it coexists on the same plate with a fruit crémeux.

Together, both ingredients make possible a gavotte that is not only crispy when it comes out of the oven, but remains so at the time of serving.

Three preparations, ten servings, and a flavor that, especially in Catalonia, means much more than just chestnut.