King of confections

Famed pastry chef makes perfect pairings out of odd couplings

What do blue cheese, pretzels and garlic potato chips have in common? For classically trained pastry chef Sadruddin Abdullah, they’re all fillings he’s begun infusing inside new lines of his handcrafted chocolates. Rather than arbitrarily putting together desserts and wines, Abdullah, co-owner of Dessert Specialists, delivers palette-surprising combinations that are perfectly paired – starting with the wine.

“It’s not common to take the wine, taste the wine and then create the chocolates that match the flavor profiles, so that’s number one, which distinguishes our chocolate and wine pairings from what you commonly get,” Abdullah explains.

Whether it’s putting goat cheese inside white chocolate or champagne-and-pretzel-stuffed truffles, over-the-top desserts have been synonymous with Abdullah’s sweet success. Upon graduating from Johnston & Wales University in Rhode Island, he became a professor at the Charlotte campus while perfecting his sugar blowing and pastry techniques for competitions.

“We literally practiced for a full year under competition conditions … we got the floor plans of the competition and we set the room up as close to the way the competition was going to be, as we could possibly get it,” Abdullah recalls.

Hard work led to winning two national pastry and bread championships, and appearances on The Food Network. One of Abdullah’s most memorable on-air masterpieces was a 5-foot-tall blown sugar piece of a Pegasus fighting a dragon, a feat he recalls more than doubled the height of previous submissions.

Sadruddin & Mahmuda Abdullah

Abdullah is looking to open an intimate dessert-and-wine lounge in town this year. In the meantime, he’s busy mixing up out-of-the box chocolate, cookie and cake recipes to meet the growing needs of his online company. Abdullah and his wife, Mahmuda, have operated Dessert Specialists for more than 3 ½ years.

“She does a lot of the scaling, the measuring and I’ll do the design and presentation, and then we both crisscross. I would say our artistic ability and our previous food experience, I think putting that together with our relationship, makes us a formidable team.

“I think that the biggest thing that’s led to our success,” he adds, “is the opportunity to participate in the world of pastry, the global world of pastry.”

In addition to collaborating with nonprofits to host chocolate-themed events, Dessert Specialists worked with Hype Entertainment Group for the fifth year in a row, providing a pastry buffet at a day party for this year’s CIAA tournament that ends March 2.