BASTIEN DE CHANGY, THE NOMADIC CHEF

« For me, Better managing resources is the basis of my cooking. »

How would you describe yourself as a Chef ?

My name is Bastien de Changy. I fell in love with cooking three or four years ago and decided to make a career out of my passion.

 

What does better managing resources mean to you?

A major challenge today is not generating any waste, which we integrate in our cooking, but above and beyond integrating this principle, the idea is to be able to speak about it, to make people who come to eat at the restaurant aware. I think it’s important to say that we don’t throw anything out.

 

So, would you say that, as a Chef, you have a role to play in terms of anti-waste in the kitchen?

I think that my role as Chef should be that I talk about it, because today, people go out of their way to come taste my cooking. They come to enjoy themselves and I think that we have to be able to tell them that we work with local producers – we are careful to choose suppliers who know what they are doing – that we throw nothing away, that we use parings to make stocks rather than buy industrial stocks, that we avoid buying processed products, that it doesn’t take all that much more time and that even financially, it doesn’t cost any more to eat responsibly.

 

And how does Excellence Cream fit in with your style of cooking?

If I am connected with Elle & Vire Professionnel®, it’s because of my fundamentals… what I mean is that I know Elle & Vire Professionnel® shares the same values as I have. And a brand like Elle & Vire Professionnel®, their main discourse is, “Our base is our producers, so we take as best care of them as we can”. And it’s this cream that brings us together. We have the same fundamental approach.

In the recipe that I developed for the Paths of Excellence campaign; we used Excellence Cream as a base for the sauce to give this dish its unctuousness. Excellence Cream has the advantage of standing up well to cooking. It will lend unctuousness and absorb the flavours of the leeks extremely well. The cream plays a primordial role in this dish.