: Alain Ducasse
: Good Taste
: Pushkin Press
: 9781805334071
: 1
: CHF 5.20
:
: Biographien, Autobiographien
: English
: 192
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
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.

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