“In my workshops, we make lactofermentations of pepper, garlic and honey”

“I undoubtedly get my sweet tooth from my maternal grandmother. She was a woman who loved to eat. During my childhood, she lived very close to us, in the Paris suburbs, and my two brothers and I spent a lot of time with her.

She sometimes fed us strange things, from the time when she lived in Sweden with her second Swedish husband and my teenage mother: pickled herring, meatballs, caramel-chocolate tartlets, a bit of everything we had. found in Ikea cafeterias. Her guilty pleasure was melted Kiri toast with lumpfish roe, which she snacked on at all hours. This fascinated me.

She loved cakes and was so greedy that, when she offered me a piece of pie or flan, she stayed very close to me when I was eating, to make sure she got a piece. She often prepared what she called “Romanian dish”, even if there is nothing Romanian about it. It’s a savory pancake cake with tomato sauce, which she got from her father-in-law, I think. You need good height, ham and grated cheese that you like, Emmental or Comté, for example, plenty of tomato sauce. My grandmother served this as a big savory cake. It’s an ultra-comforting dish that hits the mark every time.

Korean syrups and homemade miso

My parents liked to eat like me and cooked very well, but I had a difficult brother, who was sometimes forced to stay at the table for an hour after us because he hadn’t finished his zucchini. It was a big part of my childhood meals. My father’s family had been producing jams and compotes since the beginning of the 20th century.^e century, and I also have memories of going to play in the factory, in the smells of overripe fruit, of rollerblading in the aisles, between crates of apples and cans of chestnut cream.

I started cooking very early, around 12 or 13 years old. I had requisitioned a cupboard in the kitchen to store my spices and condiments. I loved – and I still love – experimenting with spicy dishes, exotic recipes, tastes from elsewhere… I went to a fairly boring business school, I started writing for a music magazine, then I met Julie Mathieu, co-founder of the magazines Crazy about baking And Crazy about cooking, and gradually immersed myself in culinary and pastry journalism.

In doing so, I wrote four books around French pastry and started publishing recipes on the networks. On a daily basis, I cook a lot and I have fun crossing genres, like these recipes that I make today with my drag-queen friend Clémence Trü. Once or twice a year, I organize fermentation workshops at home, where we do all kinds of experiments, lactofermentations of chili, garlic and honey, Korean syrups (cheongs), homemade miso… But, When it’s time to please, especially all my little nephews and nieces, it’s grandma’s pancake cake that I come back to. »