When vegetables become the stars of our plates. Or how to move towards an increasingly vegetable cuisine.
Nearly one in two French people would like to consume more vegetables, and at the last International Food Show in Paris, substitutes and vegetarian products represented a quarter of the new products. Admittedly, the first soybean steaks date back twenty years, but young companies are not lacking in imagination to make vegetables, or even legumes, attractive, such as the start-up Hari&Co.
Its co-founder Emmanuel Bréhier confirms this: “People are asking for more vegetables on their plates. We therefore see the interest of legumes as a real solution for good vegetable cuisine. Moreover, in the world, traditional cuisine in many countries is a cereal mixture – legumes, such as couscous from the Maghreb, with chickpeas and semolina, or dal in India, with rice and lentils.”
Let’s also mention Soon plant-based desserts made from spelled or hemp, Umiami poultry substitutes and Zalg, a French company that offers squares of seaweed for pan-frying.
One vegetarian meal per week compulsory at school
The Egalim law of 2022 obliges to serve one vegetarian meal per week in school canteens. But at home too, the vegetable can become the star of the plate, as long as you know how to cook it and enhance it. A dedicated training course has just opened at L’Atelier des Chefs, run by the former chef of the Ritz, Jean-Sébastien Bompoil:
“We didn’t try to make a fake sausage or a trompe-l’oeil bourguignon, but rather tried to find everything that a vegetable can bring to make a complete plate: starter, main course, dessert. And for that we use traditional cooking techniques (poaching, boiling or roasting) as well as new ways of working such as sous vide cooking or the return of lactofermentation.”
Techniques that can be applied at home, to give back to the vegetable its letters of nobility, as the chefs Roger Vergé or Alain Chapel did in their time.