When I catch up with Khoury—who is London-based, Australian-born, and of Lebanese descent—he’s just returned from a trip to Paris. “Paris is the home of patisserie, and holds a very special place in my heart,” says Khoury. After his final year of college, he sat down in front of a Paris cathedral to eat a pastry—a 2000 Feuilles from the legendary Pierre Herme—and that inspired him to pursue his own career as a chef. In 2023, he was honored with the La Liste Pastry Award for Innovation in Paris. I tell him that this past weekend, when I visited his pop-up at North London bakery favorite Fink’s, his hazelnut toasted vanilla bean and dark chocolate cookie gave me my own celestially sweet experience.
“I love a cookie that’s a little thick, but not so thick that you taste that unbaked flour. It has to be crisp on the outside, freshly baked. There’s good caramelization of sugar, fat, and flour, and there’s some chew in the middle,” he says. Khoury shouts out plant-based Manifold Bakery in Los Angeles for their excellent chocolate chip cookie, as well as Librae Bakery in New York. (He hosted pop-ups in both.) Nigella Lawson has sung the praises of Khoury’s peanut butter cookie, and his book also features delectable fig newtons, spiced macadamia shortbread biscuits, and stuffed almond croissant cookies.
“These cookie recipes are all based on different ways to extract flavor from nuts,” says Khoury. Nut butters are used in lieu of butter as a rich, flavorful fat base in some, while others grind whole nuts directly into the flour to allow their natural oils to release and enrich the dough as they mix and bake. “These subtle differences create unique textures and flavor profiles, offering something special in every bite,” Khoury says. Crispy-edged, soft-and-gooey-in-the-middle cookies tend to use less fat overall, keep well, and highlight deeper and more varied flavors. Khoury shouts out Buddy Buddy, the nut butter brand soon to make its foray into the U.S. with an outpost on the Bowery, just around the corner from Librae—particularly for its cinnamon roll butter.
From his travels, has Khoury noticed major differences in the pastry penchants of various countries and cultures? Quite the opposite. “People’s tastes are actually quite similar—even in France,” he says. “It’s strange, for a country with such a rich gastronomic history, that they have a strange obsession with American things like cookies and smash burgers. I was in Lille not too long ago, and one place that had a queue and consistent buzz was an American-style cookie shop. I think we’re seeing this homogenization of tastes.” Maybe it’s because we’re all on the same algorithm, getting the same recommendations from the same food influencers, I posit. But with Khoury and Beyond Baking, there’s a push to get more curious when it comes to your sweet treats.