KITCHEN SECRETS
www.veldkeuken.nl
The Field Kitchen Restaurant was recently chosen as purest restaurant in the Netherlands. Field Kitchen-founder René van der Veer reveals his kitchen secrets in Naturelle. ‘One of my great passions is baking bread. Bread baking is done with very simple ingredients - flour, water and salt - and by an ingenious process a rich product is created. It is a natural way of chemistry. I have been baking bread professionally for twelve years, but I started baking when I was a boy, just like my mother. It is in my genes. ‘Over twenty years ago I became a vegetarian. I had trouble with the heaps of unrecognizable animal wrapped in plastic in the supermarket. In our restaurant in Culemborg we do serve meat and fish, but added to a dish in which vegetables also play a leading role. The meat and fish come from selected farms where the animals have had a good life and we enjoy telling this to our customers.’ 80
Naturelle
TOOL
‘In our bakery we all use a scraper, a plastic hemisphere thingy with which you can easily scrape out your cymbals and mixing bowls. It is a kind of spatula without a handle. Even for cooking it is functional, for example, to get every last bit of soup out from your pot. It costs one euro and if you don’t accidentally drop it in a hot pan, it will last a long time.’ ESSENTIAL
‘Eggs are fantastic, there is so much you can do with them. Egg yolk acts as a binder for fats and liquids and is useful for making mayonnaise, cakes, savory and sweet soufles and quiches. If you want to give a dish a nice and fluffy texture, beaten eggs are much better suited to the job than baking powder.’