Adriano Zumbo — pastries inspired by local products

We decided to go for breakfast at Adriano Zumbo. To our dismay, we found out that the cafe was still being renovated…meaning…no real breakfast meals and no refrigerated items like cakes. So we were limited to a few baked sweets, macaroons and some cake. This is one of the best pastry chefs here in Australia. And we actually saw him come into his open kitchen and show this cameraman around. He was young and was just wearing a t-shirt, while his team, all clad in whites and aprons were hard at work making all sorts of desserts and preparations.

I went for the typical sticky bun…something like a raisin cinnamon roll. I don’t really remember the name but it was pretty good. The bread was flaky, crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. The outside was sticky and dotted with nuts and sticky raisins.

But what I really like the most was the one my friend got, a flaky bread with dark chocolate in the middle. It was slightly bitter because of the dark chocolate but pleasantly sweet when you bite into the bread. It was really flaky outside and has a nice chocolate sauce inside.

But of course, what really caught my eye were the super creative macarons on display. I took some on take-out and decided to eat it at home for snacks:

The meringues in all his macarons are crunchy on the outside, but quite light and fluffy. All the richness comes from the butter cream mixtures in the middle.

Vegemite and Sourdough. The macaron smelled like sourdough. When you bite into it, it has a wonderful savory-sweet flavor. I’ve been telling Ana that I think vegemite is much like soy sauce and gravy and might work on other things other than toast (which she doesn’t like in the first place) and now it seems that Zumbo has found a good use for it. It was delightful and almost chocolatey.
Raspberry and Dark Chocolate. The raspberry was subtle in the meringue. Dark chocolate and raspberry flavor was evident in the butter cream, especially when you get to the middle.

Raspberry and Beetroot. The butter cream was fragrant. I could taste the beetroot in the first few bites but the raspberry wasn’t that present until you get to the center of the macaron. It was light, fluffy and delicious. You can really taste the butter and sugar too!

Oatmeal and Ylangylang. I wondered why the color was pink and beige. Ylangylang is green oatmeal flavor is very strong. Not sure if I tasted the Ylangylang at all or if any it was very slight..it didn’t even smell like ylangylang. It was not really sweet but the oatmeal flavor was pretty evident. It was really chewy.

Overall I loved these macarons because they were the perfect balance for a non-sweet tooth like me. I guess if a sweet tooth ate it, they would probably need a lot of these to get a sugar fix…which is great too for business! I hope next time I could finally come over to his cafe to sample out the other stuff as well.