Nightline Platelist: Jacques Torres

Dec. 19, 2007 — -- Chef Jacques Torres' journey began when he was a teenager, washing dishes in a pastry shop in his hometown of Bandol, France.

It wasn't long before he learned how to make pastries himself.

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"My dad was a carpenter and I consider myself a craftsman," Torres said. "So I start pastry about 30 years ago in that little town and over the years of making pastry, chocolate became a passion ; almost an obsession."

"In France, eating is very important, every lunch, every dinner we all eat together so my mom was a very good home chef and I think that give me the desire to become a chef one day," said Torres.

Nearly two decades ago, after making pastries for many years, he left France for the United States and spent 12 years working at the famous Le Cirque restaurant in New York city.

"That was a long position there, but great," Torres said. "I made desserts for the world there, the president of the country, a lot of celebrities, the pope. It's unbelievable who went to Le Cirque and what's happened in that restaurant."

While in the United States, he took note of America's limited pastry selection.

"In France, you have a pastry shop in every corner and most of what you buy at the pastry shop is things you cannot make at home; the pate a choux, tarts, the little cake. They are so in a way complicated that you cannot make that stuff at home."

"In U.S., you don't find many pastry shops," Torres said. "And the pastry you're going to find I think come from the home kitchen, the pastry that people do at home. Especially the cookies."

But Torres was intrigued by American cookies. He said they were ugly by French standards, but he liked the soft texture. So one day he decided to make some of his own. His experiments eventually led to the Mudslide, a chocolate cookie that is one of Martha Stewart's favorites.

"I saw that people love to eat raw dough and also I saw that at the supermarket you can buy some kind of raw dough to eat," Torres said. "I still don't get that. I get the cookies. I love the cookies. The raw dough? Not yet. I'm in America for only 20 years, I think in another 20 perhaps I will start to eat the dough, but not yet."