Green girl power and Peruvian powerhouse
Last weekend, Omnivore food festival 2021 in Paris provided us with a great sample of the best Latin American cuisine.
From green girl power with Brazilian Chef Alessandra Montagne to the Peruvian powerhouse Pìa Leòn, this year’s portfolio of chefs displayed a feminine yet raw vision of healthy southern cuisine.
Genuine and enthusiastic, both chefs spoke about the beauty and bounty of the natural resources their respective countries have to offer and about the values they have learned from them. Their shared vision of excellence does not focus on innovative equipment or perfect technique; for them the product is the star and even if this rhetoric is not new they incarnate it with authenticity and bravura.
Alessandra is the queen of corn, which she prepares in all possible forms to illustrate the importance of avoiding food waste while cooking. She goes as far to remove bins in her kitchen because the product is too valuable to be thrown out. And when speaking of valuable, we are not talking about fancy lobster or caviar but about “simple” vegetables which she deems just as interesting as any piece of meat or fish. In addition, proximity and seasonality are important to her. So, Alessandra sources all her vegetables from the farm Zone Sensible in Saint-Denis, which blends permaculture and arts to the perfection.
Vegetables in their purest form are also what Pìa showcased with her two festival recipes – one was all about different varieties of corn and the other included different types of potatoes. This is her way of celebrating the delicious diversity of her country’s soils. With over 3,000 varieties of potatoes there is just no way to get bored with the starchy tuber. In her recipe she cooks the potatoes in a kind of dough made of clay which reproduces the most primal form of an oven. Always surprising, Pìa’s cuisine is rough and highly emotional at the same time.
Both chefs are totally connected to their cultures and their countries, which results in a very anchored form of cooking – if we could we would coin this cooking approach “New Naturality.”
What an inspiration for all of us.
Stéphane Bellon, founder, Studionomie, Geneva
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