Mood for Food with chef Pavel Pavlov

From 14-th to 16-th of September we spent 3 awesome festive days as a participant at the first edition of Mood for Food street food festival in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Food for all senses, that was the festival moto and all expectations were met completely!

With no doubt, the climax of the festival came on Saturday afternoon, when chef Pavel Pavlov got on stage accompanied by Ina from Rosey’s mark.

But let’s start from the beginning. Ina has won the privilege to cook on stage with Pavel Pavlov in a competition organized by TV channel 24Kitchen Bulgaria and Mood for Food festival. By the way, you can find here the recipe for panna cotta with white chocolate and roses which was selected as the winning recipe by chef Pavel Pavlov himself.

Chef Pavel Pavlov

He lives in Stavanger, Norway from 2010 and he has worked for a number of restaurants, including the Michelin-starred “Renaa”. He discovered his passion for pastry and desserts while working for the prestigious “Tango” restaurant where he spent 3 and a half years. Member of the national culinary team of Norway, at the moment chef Pavel Pavlov successfully develops his own chocolates brand, “La Feve by Pavel Pavlov”. To our delight, lately Pavel is turning sight back to Bulgaria more often, and from this September we are following with great interest what kind of pastry secrets he reveals from the TV screen in his show “Something Sweet with Pavel Pavlov” on 24Kitchen Bulgaria.

For the live cooking show at Mood for Food festival, Pavel had prepared a recipe for hot chocolate foam with salted caramel ice cream. While preparing desserts for everyone in the audience, Pavel and Ina had a chat about cooking techniques, favorite flavors and the place of roses in the world of high-end culinary art.

On stage chef Pavel Pavlov shared some tips on roses and combining them with other flavors:

There is a classical combination that includes rose, raspberry and lychee. Lychee is not very popular here in Bulgaria but in Southern countries we can find it, and combining it with rose and raspberry is amazing. Whatever you make with those 3 ingredients, you can’t be mistaken.

And also…

Sometimes it’s difficult to make people bond to rose flavor because it has a particularly strong aroma, but if you add the rose in small quantities and in the right proportion for the dessert you’re making, I believe that rose flavor can be truly amazing. I am even planning to launch rose-flavored chocolates soon.

Well, we call that news! We are already impatient to see Pavel Pavlov’s new chocolates collection because we know that rose will find its place in his 6-place chocolates box, too.

Few words more about Mood for Food festival

During the 3 festive days we witnessed a great selection of participants, including many small and boutique food and drink brands you can’t easily find in every supermarket. Craft chocolate, craft beer, fruit chips – that’s what we saw on the neighboring stands. For those who came hungry and thirsty there was a real risk to over-dose with gourmet burgers, BBQ, sweet temptations, cocktails and many more.

With its promise for food for all senses, Mood for food festival offered a rich accompanying program of tastings, lectures, workshops and live evening concerts. Being a festival participant, we couldn’t visit even half of the events we spotted on the 3-days program. Still, we had great fun and we found of great use the food photography workshop we have visited. Thanks to Yana from Salted Figs we are in the know of few more trick that could lead us to the Instagram-perfect photo (check out what we have to show you on our Instagram profile here).