Floral waters : freshness & wellbeing
Floral waters, also known as hydrolats, are produced by distilling flowers, just after extracting their essential oils. They are widely used in cosmetics and have been used for culinary purposes since time immemorial.
Used cold to preserve their subtle taste, they flavour water or infusions, add a tasty, exotic touch to vegetable carpaccios or salads, add their aromas to a fruit salad juice or spice up a salad dressing. The most well-known are orange and rose blossom water, which are widely-used in Middle-Eastern cuisine (Lebanese flan, gazelle’s horns, Turkish delight, etc.), as well as Western fare (pancake batter and cakes - including the celebrated Ispahan cake by famous French pastry chef Pierre Hermé).
Christophe Michalak, pastry chef for the Alain Ducasse restaurant at the Plaza Athénée in Paris, admits that he is “a real devotee of orange blossom water used with wild strawberries or combined with milk chocolate.”
That being said, there is an infinite variety of floral waters (cinnamon, lavender, rosemary, thyme, linden and verbena to name but a few). Valérie Cupillard, the French culinary inventor, has written a whole book about them, in which she explains how to be creative with their flavours, be they refined, refreshing, floral or strong.
She also took part in the creation of the Seven Colours Energy Cuisine at the Heritage Golf & Spa Hotel in Mauritius, a restaurant based on a completely new concept where the chef, Philippe Rozel, produces cuisine, which is flavoured with hydrolats (such as beetroot jelly with rose water and shrimps with cinnamon mist).
Finally, in a sign of its undisputed success, a bar has been dedicated to it in Paris: the Artisan Nature, where Jean Charles Sommerard, from a family of distillers in France and Madagascar, makes wellness cocktails – “floradrinks” – in which strawberries, kiwi fruit, papayas and more are voluptuously blended with floral waters made from geranium leaves, sweet orange and so on.
