Kitchen Secrets by Raymond Blanc

Author:Raymond Blanc
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408822111
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Spring & Summer Vegetables

At Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, as the name implies, each season defines the vegetables which are served to our guests. My gastronomy is essentially rooted in the soil and season. What I love about spring are the delicate colours and young, fresh flavours – barely formed. Summer brings with it an abundance of sweet, full-flavoured vegetables, and our vegetable garden changes almost weekly – as a new palette of colours and textures comes to its prime.

Le Manoir has not one garden but seven: the seventeenth-century water gardens; the Japanese tea house garden; a wild mushroom valley; a Southeast Asian garden; a Victorian herb garden; a wild flower garden; and last, but not least, my beloved French potager – the veg patch. We grow about seventy varieties of vegetables at any one time and they are subject to tasting trials – a democratic process, though I confess I do influence them a little!

Our lovely head vegetable gardener, Jo, and her team provide magnificent vegetables for the kitchens. I like to think that they inspire visitors to grow their own vegetables and herbs at home – even though that might be restricted to a window box.

I would like to share with you a great little secret for cooking vegetables; one that has served me well for many years. Place 200g vegetables, 10g butter, 50ml water, 2 pinches of sea salt and 1 pinch of pepper in a pot, ready to cook. When you are reaching the moment to serve your main course, simply heat the pot to the highest temperature and seal with a tight-fitting lid. Cooking time varies between 30 seconds and 5 minutes, depending on the vegetables you have chosen.

This technique will revolutionise your vegetable cooking. Due to the speed of the process, the vegetables will retain their colour, flavour and the majority of their nutritional content. The cooking water, butter and vegetable juices will form a light emulsion, lending a delicate sheen and taste. It is a much better cooking technique than steaming, and infinitely better than boiling, where both flavour and colour are lost, and the vitamins are destroyed by the prolonged heat.

Some vegetables, such as onions, benefit from gentle cooking, or ‘sweating’, which transforms starch into sugar and removes the bitterness. Contrast the sweetness of gently cooked onions with the harshness of a raw onion, for example, or cooked and raw garlic.

Of course, garlic plays an important role in my cooking. Apart from its flavour-enhancing qualities, it also has impressive health-giving properties. So, I’m delighted that in Britain we now seem to be eating almost as much of it as my compatriots across La Manche.

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