Dominique Crenn’s Food Philosophy Is Sustainable and Creative

Chef Dominique Crenn is an award-winning chef and advocate for sustainability and equity in the culinary world. Growing up in the Brittany region in northwest France, Chef Crenn spent many hours working in her grandmother’s potato fields, foraging for mushrooms with her father and brother, and partaking in her family’s Sunday dinners.

These experiences sparked her imagination and taught the chef to think of cooking as a form of storytelling. All of these memories, and the familial and communal love they evoked, would become touchstones in her cooking. They would also provide the foundation of Domnique’s developing food philosophy: creating food that’s visually, texturally, and conceptually exciting, with a deep emotional center.

A cooking philosophy, or food philosophy, is a set of guiding principles that influence your approach to making food. A cooking philosophy shapes your food choices, such as preferring real foods over those jam-packed with preservatives. It may include, but is not limited to, convictions about food production, eating habits, and living a healthy lifestyle. You can implement your cooking philosophy in your home or the arena of food politics, where ideas about healthy eating and the people who grow food transcend theory and take on real-life applications. Read on to learn about Chef Crenn’s cooking philosophy.

For Chef Crenn, cooking is a process that starts on the farm, with the cultivation of ingredients from the soil. Her farm, Bleu Belle, creates a deep connection with the produce served in her restaurants, but she still loves visiting farmers’ markets and recommends that you connect with the locals who grow your food.

Seek out organic producers and ask them what’s in season, which varieties they love best, and if you can taste a sample. You won’t just get the best-tasting produce; you’ll also support your regional economy, reduce packaging and transportation, and invest your ingredients with memories and meaning.

Every morning at Atelier Crenn, prep cooks start chopping vegetables and simmering stocks. But even if you don’t have a full kitchen staff, you can create layers of flavor in your own vegetable stock. Keep a container in the door of your freezer and add scraps to it while you’re cooking through the week; when it’s convenient, throw them in a pot for a base that’ll amplify and elevate your next vegetable dish.

Scraps from one meal become fodder for another, contributing depth and building richness through layers of flavor that evoke memories and tell a story. Once the stock is ready, the vegetables strained out can be transformed into compost and returned to the soil, where they will nourish a new generation of flavors.

By casting vegetables in the starring role at the center of the plate, Chef Crenn invites you to recognize subtle distinctions and possibilities within familiar ingredients. Peel, seeds, flesh, and juice each receive thoughtful attention, amplifying sweetness here and acidity there, until all flavors are brought back together into a harmonious arrangement that reveals a sum greater than its parts. Chef Crenn’s tomato salad recipe celebrates the tomato in all its forms: confit cherry tomatoes, marinated heirloom tomatoes, a tomato vinaigrette, and dehydrated tomato petals.

Before Chef Crenn even picks up a knife, she admires her ingredients. “The fragrance is amazing,” she says as she inhales the perfume of a ripe melon. “Beautiful!” she murmurs to the tomatoes.

Even the danger of the mandoline slicer is an invitation to mindfulness in Chef Crenn’s kitchen. As she reminds us, “Be thoughtful and conscious. Cooking is about paying attention.”

“Often, vegetables have been treated as secondary…,” she says. “It’s never been a star on the plate.” We all know that vegetables are healthy, and many people choose plant-based diets for environmental or ethical reasons. But too often, vegetables feel like an obligation rather than a joy.

Chef Crenn’s modern culinary techniques inspire us to see vegetables in a new way, to lavish the attention on vegetables that many cooks reserve for meat. Her beet tartare recipe is the perfect example of this philosophy.

“When you can create dishes that represent a part of you, your psyche, and your memory,” she says, “it’s the best way to be able to interact with and be vulnerable with others.” Many of Chef Crenn’s recipes take inspiration from her childhood, especially meals with her grandmother in Brittany.

When Chef Crenn was a child, her family enjoyed Hachis Parmentier (French beef and potato casserole) as a Sunday dinner. Her parmentier recipe is a vegetarian spin on the classic dish she now enjoys making with her daughters. Instead of ground beef, the potatoes blanket a layer of glazed seasonal vegetables.

Put Chef Crenn’s cooking philosophy into practice with these six creative, vegetable-forward recipes:

1. 1. Cheese salad: In France, dinner guests enjoy their salad at the end of a meal, rather than as an appetizer or side dish. For dessert, you might enjoy a selection of cheeses. Chef Crenn combines those two traditions into a beautiful finale in this cheese salad recipe.
2. 2. Confit leeks with béarnaise sauce: This recipe showcases the full range of allium flavors, from the natural sweetness of leeks to the pungency of garlic to the freshness of chives. Learn how to confit leeks, then serve them with a beautiful béarnaise sauce.
3. 3. Essence of Mushroom: Chef Crenn says that “we can use everything” in the kitchen. In this recipe, she uses oft-discarded mushroom stems to make a flavorful stock that serves as the base for her mushroom foam and gel. Confit cold-smoked egg yolks add richness to a dish she calls Essence of Mushroom.
4. 4. Grilled asparagus with crème fraîche: This grilled asparagus recipe begins with court bouillon vegetable stock, a cornerstone of French home cooking made from whatever vegetables are available to you. Chef Crenn recommends starting the stock first and adding the vegetable trim (discarded parts like stems, seeds, and rinds) as you prepare your mise en place so that the liquid absorbs the flavors of asparagus.
5. 5. Pommes purée with leeks and beurre blanc: This isn’t your typical mashed potatoes recipe. Chef Crenn’s pommes purée rests on a leek “fondue” and features a garnish of crispy fried leeks.
6. 6. Roasted cabbage: “Cabbage is one of the most underestimated ingredients,” Chef Crenn says. “It’s one of the staple ingredients in Brittany where I grew up, and I love it.” Chef Crenn’s elevated roasted cabbage features sauerkraut, pickled mustard seeds, and a parsley cream sauce.

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