Vegetronic

When Alexis Gauthier started his cooking apprenticeship, he was told that he should know by heart every single classic dish that made up French gastronomy. He was told he should know his Sauce Choron from his Hollandaise, that he should know what a Bercy garnish adds to a filet of Sole, that he should be reverential to everything Escoffier had ever said and done. So he learnt it, and without realising he became just another recipe follower.

Then in 1993 he entered the three star Michelin starred kitchen of Alain Ducasse, and for the next two years he slowly rediscovered the fundamentals of cooking by trusting his instincts and intuition rather than following a written recipe.

Soon he had completely embraced the idea that cooking was all about the original ingredients, something Escoffier had forgotten to mention. There would be no good Lamb Navarin without the right fatty lamb neck. Touching and feeling the ingredients was vital to understand how, once cooked, they were going to be transformed into something soft and delicious. But vitally he realised that the most important ‘ingredient’ of all is trusting his instincts.

Gauthier is a one off. A unique character and chef, a man with passion and humour, a man who cooks with joie de vivre. In this new book Vegetronic Gauthier shows how to make vegetables the centre of the dish. This is not a vegetarian book. It is a book about how to create fabulous dishes with fabulous vegetables even if this means cooking them in meat or chicken stock.