My personal highlight: Experiencing the Chefs on the stage not only as creative minds but as mentors. Taking home the message of living passionate and be playful.

This year’s edition of Chef Alps – The International Cooking Summit in Zurich – showed once more how strongly Chefs can motivate the gastronomy world by touching the right buttons. It’s not only about creating esthetically perfectly arranged plates, it’s about how to get to a result. Every Chef on the stage in my opinion confirmed on his own way, that no matter if in the kitchen or not, crucial ingredients of a complete recipe are passion combined with fun. If you never attended this gastronomic Swiss highlight you should consider planning it for 2019 right now! On one hand you get inspiration from various cultures for the preparation of  creative plates. On the other hand you get introduced to life philosophies to be used inside and outside a kitchen! Further there is the chance to exchange knowledge with same minded people and explore product novelties from gastronomic companies in a lovely arranged market hall.

My delights from Chef Alps – Day 1

Chef Ryan Clift & Head Bartender Joe Schofield, Restaurant Tippling Club, Singapore – www.tipplingclub.com

Ever heard about a restaurant where cocktails are paired with food and exceptional progressive concepts are created from Food Specialists Physicians, Chemists, Doctors, Psychologist and Parfumer working all together? Welcome to Tippling Club in Singapore. A  place that offers modern, fun and fresh gastronomy.

Here you get gummy bears that are created with flavors and odors related to feelings as love, happiness, success or peace for example. The gummy bears all made with different ingredients incl. alcohol extracts as champagne, gin, whiskey or rum is what we got as a surprise under our chair. These gummy bears paired with sophisticated cocktails fulfills the dream of every guest that seeks the extraordinary.

Did you know how space smells like in theory?

We are all fascinated about the stripes handed over that indicate how space smells! An extract of the odor of a spacesuit. If you sniff the spaceship on your card, you’ll find out what space smells like,” said Clift, adding that he was once commissioned by NASA to take a space-worn astronaut’s suit and put it through a mass spectrometer used to analyze scents for perfumes. That is how he could determine the scent of space. So viral how relaxed and amused Ryan and Joe explain all of these stories to us. I get the point that here much fun is paired with hours of experiments. It is a pleasure to feel the lust and durst for such progressive avant-garde cuisine and equally inventive cocktails.
Mentally I drift away to another sphere. Can’t wait to travel to Singapore and experience more of this! Or maybe we will soon have Tippling Club in Zurich, who knows!

Chef Titti Qvarnström, Sweden

A woman Chef from Sweden with a humble and humorous personality. I start to laugh of course when she makes a joke that the souvenir she brought home from her time living in Germany is her husband. He supports her in the kitchen and works with her on the stage!

She introduces a simple rustic dish typically from the South of Sweden. Her husband prepares fried hasselback potatoes and combined with an elegant elements as Roggen caviar and a Crème fraîche. While Titti shares with us plenty of stories of her childhood and challenging career situations as a woman Chef her husband is active on the stage in preparing the delicacies.

We all smile when she gives into the plenary a jar containing fresh cream and asks one person to start shaking it and hand it over until we get fresh butter! This butter is used for the fresh rye bread with sour milk, malt and the home made anise herb mix she prepares herself. The passion for an experimental natural cuisine Titti follows in her restaurant is based on her childhood memories of forest visits with her father. He is the person that showed her which natural treasures are suitable for consumption.

Chef Nicolai Nørregaard – Restaurant Kadeau Bornholm & Kopenhagen (DK) – www.kadeau.dk

The program continuous with some more nordic Cuisine. Coming from a country where you spent most of the time outside, it is essential to work with every element given. He uses fir seedlings in a dish for example. On the stage with his sous Chef he prepared 6 different dishes with a admirable elegance and tranquility. Observing Chef Nicolai during his preparations comes over as a meditation.

A dish presented is a pickled & grilled pumpkin glazed with a quince sirop decorated with some fried rose petals and red ants that give sourness to the plate. Another plate: a smoked salmon where combined with figs that grow even in a climate as the island of Bornholm. The island of Borholm is located 180 kilometers from the coast nearby the Baltic Sea. A paradise for nature lover. We all fall into the silence and enjoy the show!

Dominique Persoone – The Chocolate Line, Brügge/Belgium – thechocolateline.be

I am happy that the end of day 1 was solved by passionate Michelin Star Chocolatier! Very impatient holding a wonderful purple box in my hands I waited the instructions of Dominique Persoone to open it! A gift for him to the attendees of Chef Alps. Persoone cultivates his own criollo varieties. They use best ingredients and also care about sustainable projects as bee keeping. They harvest liquid gold to incorporate it in their fabulous assortment.

Chocolate wouldn’t be rock and roll if we didn’t try something out of the ordinary.

I experience the Chocolate Master as a showman, actor and life motivator. No wonder he is also called shock-o-latier. More than his craziness, its his way of approaching tasks that impresses me. What made me smirk was the way he always looked had his wife during the show mentioning her support and influence in plenty of the realized ideas.

How to properly taste chocolate

Take the piece of chocolate in your hand, temper it, nose at it and than slowly let it melt on your tongue (Obviously I put it directly in my mouth and swallowed it whole). Switzerland has lovely chocolate, tough Swiss Chocolatier should try to roast the beans less, the aroma of the cocoa can get much more complexity if it gets less roasted.

Some projects I love to link to that come of his kitchen are the chocolate lip stick, and the chocolate shooter. Even the Queen Rania from Jordan asked for that gadget while she was visiting the Chocolate Shop of Persoone in Belgium. You get cocoa power shot directly into your nares with that machine. Check that Youtube Movie to see more!

I look very much forward to the 2019 Edition of Chef Alps and would like to thank you the team of Woehlre Pirola for the excellent organization and possibility given to attend this unique Summit. Don’t miss the Chef Alps Youtube Channel to see all shows in full length.

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