This paper aims to demystify the creative experiences of an extraordinary group of pastry chefs – The Malaysian World Pastry Team, champions of the 2019 World Pastry Cup. The authors adopted an expressionist theoretical lens informed by two aesthetic philosophers – John Dewey and Wassily Kandinsky.,A two-year portraiture was conducted – a qualitative methodology that draws features from phenomenology and narrative inquiry, rendering artistically and empirically written “portraits” that reflect themes and patterns of participants’ experiences. In-depth interviews, observations and material artifacts were collected amid a journey alongside nine extraordinary Malaysian pastry chefs.,Presented in story structures, the authors offer three “portraits” of culinary creativity, each representing a core essence of the creative phenomenon: creative harmony in the form of sensorial and symbolic poetry; imaginative episodes as a hypnotic state of inspiration and incubation; and the creative duality of scientific rationalism and artistic fashion. The authors delineated the intricacies of each theme by presenting them as individual narratives.,The portraits indicated that culinary creativity reflects an organic and emancipating aesthetic experience that is unbounded by formative structures or sequential processes. This provides a novel theoretical view that moves beyond conventional studies’ capitalistic frameworks, and toward the intimate viewpoints of the chef-creators. Specific contributions are discussed.,Through a unique qualitative approach and an aesthetic theoretical framework, this study provided a novel perspective on the culinary creative process. The aesthetic view captures culinary creativity through the eyes of the creator, a viewpoint less considered, yet imperative to the culinary profession.

中文翻译：

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非凡的糕点师傅的创造力：美学表达的综合理论–肖像研究

本文旨在揭露非凡的糕点师傅团队的创意体验-马来西亚世界糕点师团队，2019年世界糕点杯冠军。作者采用了由两位美学哲学家约翰·杜威和瓦西里·康定斯基所知的表现主义理论视角。进行了为期两年的肖像画创作-一种定性方法论，该方法论从现象学和叙事探究中汲取了特征，并从艺术和经验上再现了反映出艺术和经验的“肖像”参与者体验的主题和模式。在与9位杰出的马来西亚糕点厨师一起旅行的过程中，收集了深入的采访，观察和材料人工制品。作者以故事结构形式呈现，提供了烹饪创造力的三个“肖像”，每个代表了创造力现象的核心要素：感官和象征诗形式的创造和谐；富有想象力的情节作为催眠和孵化的催眠状态；以及科学理性主义和艺术时尚的创造性对偶。作者通过将它们作为单独的叙事呈现来描绘每个主题的复杂性。肖像表明烹饪创意反映了有机的和解放性的审美体验，不受形成结构或顺序过程的束缚。这提供了一种新颖的理论观点，超越了传统研究的资本主义框架，而转向了厨师创造者的亲密观点。通过独特的定性方法和美学理论框架，本研究为烹饪创新过程提供了新颖的视角。