Pleine
Terre, Pleine Mer
The new menu of Alain Passard
An Impressionist Chef
For thirty years, like
an impressionist painter, Alain Passard adds the little touches,
searching for and using the best products. He respects produce,
interpreting flavors with absolute authenticity, preserving color, aroma
and keeping the purity of product.
Passard has to date
been refining the essence of his menu by looking at the mirror between
the earth and sea. The original character of produce is like a musical
cord. Within this range, Alain plays with aroma, herbs, spices,
those items which liberate the expression of the earth and sea.
He now seeks to begin
exploring a new and unrecognized range of vegetables, a painstaking
process that provokes within him an enthusiasm to create above
expectations. Passard follows his inspiration, a means for
deepening his art in the discovery of a palette of extraordinary flavors
within a vegetable that can be supremely satisfying. For the last year,
he has been seeking to make the vegetable a novel product, by creating
and bringing out the finest quality in the produce, by keeping the
cooking process simple. In this inexhaustible register he invents a
combination of vegetables with herbs, spices, flowers, dairy and
shellfish…
Passard desires to
contribute the development of a cuisine which has not yet been
explored. Working the vegetable creates encouragement to replant the
earth and work with a new language, a new vocabulary.
Amazingly, it is the
art of fire which allows Passard to work with vegetables, where work
with fire is crucial for their cooking. Passard has rediscovered the
pleasure of the alchemist. “Knowing how to make use of a sauté pan on
the flame, to not rush the process. It is the manner in which to hold
the pan on a journey that will not damage the vegetal tissue, working
the flame to avoid evaporation of essences, playing with fire in order
to not subdue the color, a dance to keep the luminosity and
transparency”. Attempting to preserve the essences of cooked white
onions with salty butter is a passionate research for Alain Passard.
The cooking of
vegetables has not traditionally been seen as very exciting, and for
some has been inconceivable. However it is important for this cuisine
to find its own place in the same fashion as cooking methods for seafood
and meats.
Perceived as containing
insufficient nutrients and lacking depth of taste, vegetables have been
restricted to side dishes and accompaniments. Pursuing this research is
for Passard the joy of escaping clichés and the freedom of inventing a
new universe.
The raw product has an
origin and identity, a source which should be revealed. In any type of
craftsmanship, whether creative or industrial, the raw materials are the
most important tools with which to practice your craft. You cannot work
blind with a product that remains silent. “A Chef can only create
cuisine when he has knowledge of the raw ingredients”.
“I believe I have come
far in the areas of poultry and meat based cuisine. Today I aspire to
another exploration based in vegetables.
I voluntarily erase,
without regret, twelve signature dishes of the house with real
reassessment. I sense a fabulous adventure in exploring the depths of
my passion.”
Pleine terre, plein
mer, a new menu, a new journey.”
Offering nourishing and
appetizing dishes with flamboyant colors, entrancing aromas and
unexpected flavors.
Like painters depicting
the joy of living, who abandoned their studios and placed their easels
on a riverbank or the middle of a country field, who knows if Alain
Passard, Chef of his time, will forge the new nutritional style of
tomorrow…
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DININGINPARIS.COM
