It’s a good rule to never read the online comments. When pastry chef Junelle Casalan looked at the responses after a local food publication posted a video of her West Queen West bakery, Castles and Coal, on Instagram last week, one user wrote in a since-deleted comment they’d rather fly to France than pay $7.50 for her roasted-corn kouign-amann.
The pastry, however, takes three days to make.
The buttery dough is chilled overnight before it’s laminated — the finicky process of rolling and folding layers of butter into dough over and over again so they rise into crisp, flaky layers in the oven. Sweet corn from Welsh Bros. near Brantford is roasted to intensify its flavour before steeping overnight in milk and cream for the pastry cream. Even the moulds that shape the pastry into its signature bloom cost $10 apiece.
Junelle pinned a response on her bakery’s Instagram page the next day, saying pastries and desserts are continually undervalued despite the skills required to make them.
“We love that people want to support local businesses, but supporting local also means recognizing the craftsmanship, quality ingredients, fair wages and rising costs that go into making those products,” she wrote.
Her post resonated with pastry chefs in Toronto and beyond, with some lamenting desserts don’t get the same regard as their savoury counterparts, and others adding desserts are often treated as an afterthought despite being some of the most labour-intensive items on a menu. The debate over one $7.50 pastry exposed a broader question: why are pastries and desserts still expected to be inexpensive as ingredient costs rise and dining budgets tighten?
“There’s a lot of pastry chefs opening their own shop. Maybe it’s because they felt undervalued in the kitchen, because that’s what I did,” said Casalan, who graduated from George Brown College before working at fine-dining restaurants including Scaramouche, Centro and Petit Four.
“I pushed 12-, 15-hour days and I learned a lot. There was one place where I was told I couldn’t make a dessert because it was too complicated; just make a compote, put it on a cake and add ice cream. But they also put out a 15-step salad for $35, so what was my worth there?”
Former pastry chef Logan Prong remembers desserts often being the first thing restaurants gave away. About a third of the desserts sent out at the now-closed Nota Bene were comped for guests, he said, while the kitchen struggled to charge more than $10 for a dessert when pasta dishes cost three times as much.
He later took over a Parkdale bakery in 2018 but closed it at the start of the pandemic after his landlord sought a 40 per cent rent increase, around the same time butter, dairy and labour costs all climbed.
“There are all these layers that impacts the base price of things,” said Prong, who now works in retail management.
For Lyon-born pastry chef Nadège Nourian, the comparison to France only goes so far.
While pastries and viennoiserie are more abundant there — with everything from inexpensive neighbourhood bakeries to luxury patisseries — baked goods are also more deeply woven into everyday culture. Restaurants invest more heavily in pastry programs, customers are more discerning, and better-quality butter is both easier to find and less expensive.
She points out that a plain croissant at her namesake patisserie costs $4.25, less than one from Starbucks, even though she uses higher-fat butter from Stirling Creamery because supermarket butter simply won’t produce the same result.
“We try to support the local economy, even our packaging is made in Canada,” said Nourian. “Places like Castles and Coal are a vital part of the city and what makes Toronto exciting.”
Fellow French-born pastry chef Rodney Alléguède of Goûter says Toronto’s multiculturalism helps spread an appreciation for good pastries. “We have customers who travel a lot to Europe and discover the local neighbourhood bakeries in Paris so they have a higher expectation in Toronto,” he said. “We have pastries better than some places ones in France because we have to step up higher.”
That ambition persists despite shrinking dining budgets.
Daniel Haidida, co-owner of the two-Michelin-starred Restaurant Pearl Morissette and its sister bakery RPM Bakehouse, said bakeries can’t control rent, the cost of butter or the price of chocolate. What they can control is how they explain those costs.
“It sucks to have to be the face of political mismanagement and economic instability,” he said, referring to larger systemic issues affecting food systems and costs of living.
“What we owe our customers is storytelling and an explanation,” he said, adding there’s a disconnect between how much restaurant owners think diners know about their industry and how much the average diner thinks they know about menu pricing. “We have to find a way to fix that. When gas hits $2 a litre, the price of a Danish is going to go up, so let people know that. People are understanding if you talk to them in an honest way.”
He gives the example of a recent post from RPM Bakehouse‘s Instagram account that tracks the 24 hours required to make its house breakfast sandwich, a process that includes butchering whole pigs, collecting eggs from the on-site farm and mixing the dough for the buns the night before.
Back at Castles and Coal, Casalan picks up the pastry that sparked the online debate.
The golden-brown kouign-amann blooms from its mould like a flower, its crisp laminated layers giving way to a soft centre filled with roasted-corn pastry cream. A plain version sells for $5, but the seasonal filling adds another full day of work to an already three-day process.
For Casalan, that’s the point people often miss.
Behind a pastry that can disappear in a few bites are days of preparation, costly ingredients and years spent mastering techniques that are easy to overlook.
