France

Saturne, Paris

Saturne, Paris, France

Bread is important. It’s the most fundamental of foods, loaded with symbolism, heavy with tradition, commanding its own rituals and reverence. Often, you can take one look at the bread that a restaurant serves and work out precisely how good or bad your meal will be. If a kitchen cares not for the bread it [...]

Eating out

French Regional Food, by Joël Robuchon and Loïc Bienassis

French Regional Food, by Joël Robuchon and Loïc Bienassis

I’m going to go out on a limb here – a very, very short limb, I accept – and state that French food is the best in the world. It’s the mothership of cuisines, the place that anybody with any interest whatsoever in food or eating eventually comes back to. There’s good reason for this, [...]

Books

Pain au Levain, or a basic French-style sourdough

French sourdough

I used to think that sourdough had to be, well, sour … that it had to have a deep, acidic taste that almost made you wince. The more sourness, the better, and my trick was to let the dough rise for extraordinarily long periods of time, to let the acidity that’s a by-product of fermentation [...]

Food & drink

How to bake French-style brioche bread

French brioche bread

Baking bread. It sneaks up on you. It starts slowly, just a little experiment, maybe a curious attempt at a simple loaf. Nothing out of the ordinary, just flour, salt, yeast, water and time. You find that it works. It works better than you could ever dare believe it’d work. Your bread tastes real, substantial, [...]

Food & drink

Rabbit with mustard

Rabbit with mustard, or lapin a la moutarde

Rabbit is vastly under-rated. It’s cheap, tasty, plentiful and versatile, but not very widely eaten. This should change. Rabbit is a superb meat, and it deserves a wider audience because it fits well with the needs of the modern cook – it’s lean and healthy, it cooks quickly and doesn’t take a lot of preparation, [...]

Food & drink