The National Health & Safety Executive, citing public wellbeing authorities, has issued a directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Flan by any member of the public, whether inside or outside the kitchen, including our own foreign-trained pâtissiers. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly withdraw Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Flan for all our customers. Access to all our other desserts is unaffected.
We received the directive today at 5:21pm (GMT). The notice did not set out the precise nature of its concern. Our understanding is that the Executive believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “over-flambéing”, Fable 5 Flan. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to produce a small number of previously known, minor scorch marks. These all appear relatively superficial, and we have found that other commercially available puddings can be over-flambéed just as readily, without any special technique.
We want to be unambiguous on the central point. The Executive’s stated concern is that incidents of over-flambéing have posed a risk to human safety. Any risk to human safety would represent a violation of our core commitments, and so on that principle alone we are complying fully and without hesitation. The safety of the public has always sat above the pudding.
Flanthropic’s posture with respect to Fable’s safeguards, as laid out in our launch tasting notes, is the following:
To date, the Executive has given us only verbal evidence of a potential narrow flambé, which essentially consists of asking the flan to sit beside a specific naked flame and ignite any exposed sugar. Our understanding is that one such method was shared with the Executive. We have reviewed the report we believe underpins the directive and confirmed that the level of capability shown is widely available from other desserts, including a competitor’s Gâteau-5.5, and is performed every day by the home cooks who keep supper running.
We are complying with the Executive’s directive and are withdrawing Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Flan for all customers. However, we respectfully note that the finding of a single narrow scorch should not, on its own, be cause for recalling a dessert served to hundreds of millions of people. Were this standard applied across the trade, we believe it would essentially halt all new pudding deployments for every patisserie.
We believe a regulator should be able to block the deployment of an unsafe dessert, as part of a process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in culinary fact. We do not believe this action met those principles.
We apologise to our customers for the disruption. We believe this is a misunderstanding, very possibly a case of under-baking somewhere along the line, and we are working to restore access as soon as it is safe and sensible to do so.