Ocala pastry chef competes again on TV

Judges Jozef Youssef and Carla Hall, in front of the Hogwarts Express, check out the creation made by Yohann Le Bescond and Kayla Giddings for the first episode of the Food Network’s “Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking” series. [Photo courtesy Food Network]

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Posted November 4, 2024 | By Susan Smiley-Height, [email protected]

With a wave of a magic wand, Ocala chef Yohann Le Bescond is appearing on the Food Network’s new series “Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking,” which will premiere on Nov. 14.

Perhaps the connection was fate as Le Bescond said his favorite character from the popular books and movies was the wizard Dumbledore, headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

“I’ve always been drawn to him as a very secretive but knowledgeable person and I’m always gravitating toward the people I can learn from. I always felt he would have been a mentor if I had been in that world,” Le Bescond said.

Le Bescond, the executive pastry chef at the World Equestrian Center in Ocala, has had plenty of mentors in his storied career. The young Frenchman started baking at the age of 13 in his mother’s kitchen. By the time he was 20, he had completed the Brevet Technique des Métiers Pâtissier program. By the age of 22, he held his first executive pastry chef title. In 2023, he competed in the Food Network’s Summer Baking Championship and made it to the season finale. Restaurant Hospitality named him to its Power List of notable chefs around the world in 2023.

For the “Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking” show, he was reunited with Carla Hall, one of the judges on the summer baking series.

“Seeing her again on ‘Wizards of Baking’ was super cool; she’s almost like family,” he said.

The “Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking” show is hosted by James and Oliver Phelps, the English actors who played twins Fred and George Weasley in all eight Harry Potter films.

The pastry chefs and cake artists on the baking show are competing to receive the first ever Wizards of Baking Cup and the opportunity to be included in a new Harry Potter cookbook. The show was filmed at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden in England, on the original movie sets where Harry Potter’s magical journey was brought to life.

“It was a great experience and I’m very happy to be able to represent Ocala again on national TV,” Le Bescond said during a recent phone interview.

He said he was happy to be back in Europe for a short time as he had “missed the food and the older cities.”

“It felt great to be back in Europe for a little bit. To be back in London was almost like going home. I couldn’t see my parents, even though they live two hours away from London, but it was definitely super cool to go back to Europe,” he shared.

He said the first episode of the series involved a “very long day of filming” and that the “whole experience was fantastic.” He said that not filming in front of a live audience “took a bit of pressure off.”

“This was my first time working with Warner Bros. and the brand of Harry Potter. The amount of investment, from the culinary side to the equipment, was top-notch. I remember walking onto the set and the size was double what I was used to. I filmed in New York and Los Angeles, so seeing the real Warner Bros. set was mind blowing, as was how so many departments worked together to make this happen,” he noted.

“Meeting the twins, who were the hosts, was very cool. You remember them as being the red-haired twins and now they are not red headed, so that was the first thing I noticed. You know it’s been 20 years since the last movie, so everybody ages a little bit,” he added.

Le Bescond said the theme of the first episode was our common connection to the Harry Potter movies. In that episode, he was paired with Kayla Giddings.

“My partner and I kind of went back to what was very special about the first movie, which is how we all fell in love with the series, really, and we wanted to recreate a showpiece that was our love letter to Harry Potter and the series as a whole,” he said of their creation.

Throughout the competition, special guests from the films, including Warwick Davis (Professor Flitwick), Evanna Lynch (Luna Lovegood) and Bonnie Wright (Ginny Weasley), will join judges Hall and Jozef Youssef and share their experiences.

While Le Bescond could not reveal additional details about the series, he said that it was “a very transformative adventure.”

“I made lifelong friends and great connections for the future. I’m very happy and can’t wait to see it,” he stated.

To learn more, including the schedule and ways to watch, go to foodnetwork.com/shows/harry-potter-wizards-of-baking