Ducasse Good Taste

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-407-1
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

A memoir and manifesto from the world's most Michelin starred chef, Alain Ducasse, with introductions by internationally renowned writer Jay McInerney and chef Clare Smyth. At twelve years old, Alain Ducasse had never been to a restaurant. Less than fifteen years later, he received his first Michelin star. Today he is one of just two chefs to have been awarded twenty-one stars. Now, for the very first time, Ducasse shares a lifetime of culinary inspirations and passions in a book that is part memoir and part manifesto. Good Taste takes us on a journey from his childhood, where he picked mushrooms with his grandfather on a farm in Les Landes, to setting up groundbreaking schools and restaurants across the world. He is now taking off his chef's whites and passing on what he knows to the next generation. Ducasse writes a poignant ode to the humble vegetables that have inspired his entire cuisine and to the masters that guided him along the way, from Paris to New York to Tokyo. As he looks to the future, he reflects on just what 'good taste' means.

Alain Ducasse is one of the world's most celebrated chefs. Born in 1956 on a farm in Les Landes, France, he went on to train with great chefs including Michel Guérard, Gaston Lenôtre, Alain Chapel and Roger Vergé. He received his first three Michelin stars in 1990 at the Louis XV restaurant in Monaco. Since then, he has set up schools, created artisan factories and opened restaurants across the world, most notably in Japan, the United States and London. He is based in Monaco.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ducasse, Alain

Weitere Mitwirkende

Mackintosh, Polly

Leseproben

FOREWORD

by Jay McInerney

I was lucky enough to spend a few days with Chef Ducasse more than a decade ago, exploring Provence with him and visiting his two properties there, and I was struck over and over again by his exquisite sense of taste, not just at the table, but at the antique stores and art galleries and bookstores we visited – his finely tuned and joyful aesthetic sensibility, the pleasure that he took in a carved antique wooden door or a piece of rustic pottery. He collects antique doors, luggage, cars, books, art and much more. Sharing five successive meals with him over the course of those days, I could see that he truly enjoyed eating and he had a wonderful facility in explaining and sharing his enthusiasm at the table.

Dining at Noma in Copenhagen with some friends recently, I heard a story which confirmed the extraordinary acuity of his sense of taste, in the most literal way – his ability to detect and parse flavours and nuances. The story comes from Dan Barber, the celebrated American chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, situated on a bucolic property in Westchester where much of the restaurant’s produce is grown. A few years back, he heard from Ducasse’s office that the chef was coming to the property for a sunrise photo shoot: the chef only had twenty minutes in his schedule to devote to eating.

Barber, boldly, decided to serve bread and butter. ‘I was particularly excited about the butter because it’s from the farm my brother David and I took over from our grandmother and reconfigured into an all-pasture dairy. Since we had done so much work to improve the pasture, I thought the quality of the butter was better than ever.’ Arriving promptly at 7 a.m., Ducasse took several minutes to eat the bread and butter. ‘It was clear,’ Barber said, ‘that he did not find the butter to be the best butter of his life. He said “I have a question. Has it been raining recently?”’ In fact, Hurricane Irene had just doused the area. ‘He was suggesting that the butter was washed out. Dude could taste the weather. Then he said, “I have another question for you. Was the butter made by hand or in an electric mixer?” I said, “By hand.” “And was the butter from cows pasturing near the barn or far away from the barn?” he asked. I said, “Near the barn.” Because I always see them near the barn.’

‘A week later I saw my pastry intern making butter in an electric mixer.’ Barber asked him what he was doing. ‘The intern turned to me and said, “Chef, I’ve discovered I can make the butter a lot faster in an electric mixer.”’ Score two for Ducasse’s palate. A week and a half later Barber was up at the dairy farm and he didn’t see any cows. ‘And I turned to Sean the farmer and asked, “Where are the cows?” He said, “I’ve been trying an experiment for the past month. I’m pasturing them in Field seven, the field farthest away from the barn. It’s in bad shape, it’s all weeds, it needs manure and I want to bring it back to the shape that the pasture right here next to the barn is in.” It’s human nature if you’re a dairy farmer that at five in the morning you are least inclined to walk your cows out a mile and a half to Field Seven. You keep them close to the barn. So the fields closest to the barn are the most fertilised, the most diverse, the healthiest, resulting in the fattiest milk and cream and the most delicious butter. Ducasse could taste Field Seven.’

His feel for ingredients was cultivated as a child growing up near Castel-Sarrazin in the south-west of France; he was mesmerised by the smells coming from his grandmother’s kitchen directly below his bedroom; of ceps sautéing with garlic, of braised veal cooking with peas and spring onions. ‘My grandmother didn’t care to teach me to cook,’ he told me over lunch at his inn in Moustiers. His constant questions and criticisms annoyed her, not least when he pronounced her food to be overcooked. But he was allowed to gather produce from the garden, which is where he developed his famous ability to pick the tastiest and the freshest ingredients. After working at a truck stop restaurant in nearby Mont-de-Marsan he had a brief stint at the Lycée Hôtelier de Bordeaux-Talence before talking his way into some of the best kitchens in France, including Michel Guérard’s in Eugénie-les-Bains and Roger Vergé’s Le Moulin de Mougins, where he fell in love with the Mediterranean landscape and cuisine.

The apprenticeship he describes as the most influential took place at Alain Chapel’s restaurant outside Lyon. Ducasse credits Chapel with teaching him the supreme importance of fresh ingredients. While it may be a cliché now, forty years ago the idea that a meal was only as good as its raw materials was radical, even in France, or especially in France, where heavy sauces could cover a multitude of sins. The concept dovetailed with Ducasse’s passion for sunny Provence and the Côte d’Azur’s bounty of fresh vegetables and seafood. After two years with Chapel he returned to the south, working first as head chef at La Terrasse in Juan-les-Pins. Putting Chapel’s lesson into practice, he told me, ‘I got to know the fisherman and the farmers, and I went to the market every day at five in the morning for seven years – apparently an unusual practice for a head chef in those days.’ A few years later, at the behest of Prince Rainier, he moved down the coast to the Louis XV in Monaco, the restaurant that sealed his reputation as the greatest French chef of his generation. He promised the prince that he would garner three Michelin stars and less than three years later he achieved that goal.

In these pages Ducasse describes receiving a phone call at the restaurant of the Hotel Okura in Japan informing him that Michelin had awarded him that third star. ‘I can remember the feeling of delight and success,’ he writes, ‘of having achieved an aim I had set myself and had promised Prince Rainier thirty-three months previously – an aim that I had promised myself several years before that, even. But as soon as I hung up, the delight, celebrations and fulfilled promises were offset by questions. Now what? And what about after that?’

Serendipitously enough, Joël Robuchon had received a similar phone call at the exact same location six years previously, informing him that his restaurant in Paris had been awarded three stars. And it would be Robuchon who would provide Ducasse with the answer to ‘Now what?’

In 1996 Robuchon called to say he was thinking of retiring, and Ducasse, on an impulse, offered to take over. A crazy suggestion, since he was intending to remain at the helm of the Louis XV. But take over he did, in August 1996. It was here, a year later, that I first tasted Ducasse’s cooking and became a fan. I can still conjure the taste and texture of the Bresse chicken breast with white truffles in Albufera sauce – a cream-based concoction turbocharged with foie gras and port. For all its luxury, the dish is actually fairly straightforward, based on the perfect provenance of the humblest of fowl, highlighted by, rather than smothered in, a perfect sauce. This for me is the signature of Ducasse’s cooking: the freshness of ingredients and the relative simplicity of presentation (if not preparation). As Walt Whitman remarked, it’s incredibly difficult to achieve the appearance of effortless simplicity. Ducasse’s clean cuisine rests on a solid foundation of classical technique. (The chicken was poached in a pig’s bladder, a traditional method that helps keep it moist.)

Ducasse was greeted with some scepticism in Paris; in those days the idea that a chef could operate two different major restaurants in two different cities was considered absurd. When Michelin gave him three stars in Paris, it initially stripped a star from the Louis XV, as if out of spite. But that star was eventually restored, making Ducasse, at the age of forty, the first chef to simultaneously helm two separate three-star establishments. When I was travelling with him in Provence in 2005, the chef told me a story I’d never heard or read before, which he talks about in these pages; in 1984 he was the sole survivor of a plane crash which left him severely injured. For more than a year he was unable to stand or walk. ‘Intellectually I was still working,’ he told me. ‘But it was impossible for me to go back to the kitchen. It was necessary for me to do the job in a different way. From that time I had to start cooking in my head.’ Which may explain how, with the help of extraordinary collaborators, he was able to essentially be in two places at once. Or thirty-six at once, which is the number of restaurants he is currently overseeing, in France and around the globe.

But as he has continued to expand, he has also been engaged in a kind of paring back, a search for simplicity. This was noticeable in the menu at the Plaza Athénée, where he moved to from the 59 Poincaré in 2000, and where he sought, as he writes, ‘to dare to create a natural kind of cuisine, to make something great out of something simple, to pare down the preparation process and to put technique back where it belonged so that the real flavours of nature could shine...