2024-03-25 04:54:25
He amazed the viewers of Czech Television with gold-plated jewels full of exotic flavors. Now, the winner of the third year of the Bake the whole country competition wants to start making ordinary croissants. “You can always save the cake, but you have to put the croissants first,” surprises 22-year-old medical student Vojtěch Vrtiška. In the interview, he talks about a dessert reminiscent of the coronavirus and drinking energy drinks instead of lunch.
Viewers of Czech Television learned about your victory in the Bake the whole country competition last week. But you already won the award for the best amateur confectioner last June, when the show was filmed. What was it like for you to wait three quarters of a year and not burn the happy newspaper anywhere?
It was difficult at first, because as soon as I finished filming the competition, I jumped straight into the rehearsal period. I struggled to find motivation to deny everything that had happened before and forced myself to learn. Of course, I was full of impressions, but I could hardly share them with anyone. Only my closest friends and family knew about my participation in Peč, so no one even asked me about the result. After about a month and a half, I somehow suppressed it in myself, and in the next six months I lived as before.
You originally entered the second year of the competition, which was held when you were still in high school. But you made it to the third one, which started filming just before the exam period. Did you hesitate to participate while studying medicine?
Yes, it was a huge dilemma. For one thing, I risked embarrassing myself in the competition by not putting as much into it as I could have, and at the same time I was risking my university existence. In the end, I’m glad that I went all the way to Peč after all. Even though the competition interfered with my exam period, I managed to make up for all the absences. I admit that I was extremely lucky, and especially my classmates helped me. It is thanks to them that I am still studying.
So they willingly shared their exam transcripts with you and did the hard work for you.
Exactly. They have been a huge support to me. My exams lasted from June to mid-September and I only had three days off during the whole time, so I experienced a really intense summer. When everything went well at school in the end, I was incredibly relieved.
“I was full of impressions, but I could hardly share them with anyone. Only my closest friends and family knew about my participation in Peč,” admits Vrtiška. | Photo: Czech Television
It is said that you brought a dessert that looked like a covid molecule to the casting that preceded the competition itself. What ingredients did you use to make it?
The base was a basil mousse with a raspberry centre. I sat it on a pâte sablée cookie with basil seeds and then added a visual touch to it with chocolate spikes. Finally, I sprayed the virus with velvet spray so that it had a pearly red color all over.
How did the judges react to the sweet coronavirus? Coming barely two years after the pandemic with such a dessert was quite bold, one might even say incorrect.
You’re right. However, since I entered the competition quite unplanned, as a substitute from the second year, a small provocation seemed appropriate. Of course, the judges were surprised when I opened the box with the coronavirus. In the end, I think I surprised them in a positive way.
Did you choose the covid molecule also to naturally connect your love of baking with your field of study?
Of course, three years at the medical school leave a mark on a person. When you’re surrounded by medicine twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it willy-nilly make its way into your desserts. This year for Valentine’s Day, for example, I baked a cake that looked like a human heart, last year for New Year’s Sacher in the shape of a skull and similar ideas will surely be added.
I assume that studying medicine can sometimes be so demanding that one does not have time to eat regularly and, above all, well. How are you doing with your lifestyle? Don’t you occasionally indulge in junk food out of necessity?
I’m doing quite well during the exam period, because I no longer have lessons, and I can move back from Prague to my parents, where I enjoy a full fridge and home-cooked meals. During the semester, however, I tend to be much worse. In freshman year, I sometimes only had an energy drink for lunch. When you have a five-minute break between two autopsies, you can’t do anything else. Fortunately, my schedule is a bit more relaxed now, so I also have time to cook. But I’m taking a little time off anyway, because cooking for one is not that much fun. Recently, I even learned that I glorify a poor lifestyle and lack of sleep. Therefore, I would like to point out that it always depends on your priorities. What you make of it is what you get.
You like to say that you study during the day and bake at night. Aren’t you on the best path to burnout?
I’m certainly not saying that it’s the ideal path or that I can function this way in the long term. For now, however, there is nothing else left for me, because I am not yet decided on which side I will lean in the future – whether I will devote myself to medicine or confectionery.
Does it mean that success in Peč all over the country enticed you to become a professional confectioner?
I think I would be attracted to her even if I didn’t win the competition. I have been baking intensively for about four or five years now and I cannot imagine my life without it. It doesn’t mean I want to quit medicine now, but it will be a big dilemma.
I can imagine that when your classmates saw the desserts you managed to conjure up in the competition, they might start asking you to bake them too. How often do you bring them some kind of dessert to school, so that they don’t have to snack only on energy drinks?
Just today I went to school to write a pathophysiology test and the professor who was supervising us immediately asked me where I had the cake. When I was preparing for Peč the whole country, I actually brought a large part of my products to school. What else to do with a cake that has a kilo of butter on it, than to cut it among forty people. But only now do my classmates see that I wasn’t crazy then. They no longer think that I decided to supply the 1st medical school, and they realized that the competition was behind everything.
Do you think the teachers at the medical school would be bribed by sweets?
I think not. And I’d rather not even try.
“My classmates no longer think that I decided to supply the 1st medical faculty, and they realized that the competition was behind everything,” says the newly minted winner of Bake the whole country. | Photo: Czech Television
It is often said that confectionery is a science. At least compared to cooking, where one can add individual ingredients by eye. Does your experience require the same precision as medicine?
Any activity can be science, it depends on how you approach it. From my point of view, confectionery is still more of a craft. Once you’ve mastered its basic principles, you can build on them quite well, without even knowing the molecular nature of chocolate. I actually struggled quite a bit with accuracy myself. I am a person who has trouble following recipes and especially accurate weights, which was my difficulty during the technical challenges in Peč, the whole country. However, the competition taught me precision because it is built on it. And as for medicine, it depends on what field you choose. A number of medical fields are also more of a craft.
You admit that as a medic you have only cut into corpses so far. Can you be as meticulous as you are when you measure the ingredients for a cake, or play with the decorations?
First of all, I would avoid the word corpse. We were always lynched for him in medicine. We cut into donors, and that was in the first year, when we learned anatomy from them. Precision played an important role there as we dissected nerves, blood vessels, muscles and eventually organs. Now I’m in the third year, where we have pathology and we meet a dissected body, on which we demonstrate individual diseases. It’s true that an eye for detail comes in handy in both dissection and patisserie, and I’d say I have it in me. But sometimes it can be a little harmful.
Because you are too much of a perfectionist?
Yes, when I bake a cake, I already have a final idea in my head of how it should look, and I can’t always get close to it. Sometimes I spend the whole day on the cake, but then it just gets eaten and I don’t present it anywhere, because I’m not satisfied with its visual form. I bake it again in two days. At school, on the other hand, I’m more of an average student. I didn’t go to medicine for the red diploma.
In addition to baking, you have another great hobby – you do calligraphy. Calligraphy probably goes well with confectionary and eventually medicine too.
Certainly. Both medicine and calligraphy require patience, you won’t get far without it. In turn, I brought one element from calligraphy to the confectionary, by which the viewers of the competition remember me a lot, and that is gold. From calligraphy, I was used to gilding some initials or miniatures, which is why I also liked to use gold to decorate my products. This was evident, for example, in the penultimate round, when I used a spatula to finish painting the cake based on Monet’s painting Impression, sunrise.
Vrtiška got his penchant for gold decoration from calligraphy. In the penultimate round of Bake the Whole Earth, he created a cake based on Monet’s Impression, Sunrise. | Photo: Czech Television
In Peč all over the country, you have earned a reputation as an experimenter who likes to surprise, not only with artistic processing, but especially with unusual flavor combinations. Were you bursting with creativity when you started with confectionery?
Yes, from the very beginning I asked myself what I would like to have in a pastry shop and what they would not offer me there. Despite all the experimentation, I ended up going back to the complete classics in a detour. I will never disdain buns with plums and poppy seeds, and at Christmas I bake both more innovative types of sweets and traditional ones based on family recipes. I like balance.
Are you now preparing for a challenge that you didn’t get in Peč all over the country?
I’m looking forward to it warming up because I plan to try the puff pastry dough to make French croissants or chocorolles. Many confectioners will certainly agree with me that we often appreciate a drier piece of pastry, without an excessive amount of cream. Unfortunately, it’s still too cold in my apartment because the heating doesn’t work there, so I have to wait. Otherwise, the puff pastry wouldn’t rise properly. I haven’t explored the bakery that much yet, mainly because I’ve never found enough time for it. I would like to try to bake something with sourdough, which is so popular now. However, since I regularly travel between Prague and Tábor, where my family lives, I have so far managed to kill all yeasts before I baked anything from them.
At the same time, the impressionistic cake mentioned above seems much more demanding to an ordinary mortal than an ordinary croissant.
The icing on the cake is that you can always save yourself. Even if you don’t succeed, its preparation involves so many actions that you can usually retouch mistakes somehow. With croissants, on the other hand, you roll out the dough once, roll it up, and then all you have to do is pray that everything turns out as it should. You have to keep an eye on it, be precise and put it first.
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