Chef Marc Thuet gets to source of ingredients

By Natalie Armstrong

TORONTO (Reuters Life!) - Fourth-generation Alsatian chef Marc Thuet may be an ocean away from his family's boulangerie but locals in Toronto bang on his restaurant door early in the morning for his sourdough bread.

Thuet, 44, uses some of his family's 200-year-old sourdough from France to make bread at his restaurant, Bistro Bakery Thuet.

Customers had often pleaded to take a loaf home, so he built a boulangerie in a corner of his restaurant and began supplying shops in the city. Later he opened his own Atelier Thuet Fine Food Store, with an adjoining but more casual dining room, Le Caveau.

Thuet spoke to Reuters about creating Alsatian-French menus with a Canadian influence of natural foods and why chefs should get to know farmers personally.

Q: How is your restaurant different from before?

A: "The new menu is going to be more organic. I'm going to work with more organic food, Alsatian bread. When I say organic, it's also natural. I don't like the name organic because it works for vegetables but for me, for meats it's very important to have naturally grazed beef -- on barley and some grains -- but no corn, no soya."

Q: Organic seems to be such a buzz word right now -- do you think the label has a shelf-life?

A: "Organic, or a way of better eating, is here to stay ... At first, the best vegetable was the perfect vegetable. I think if you see the farmers who don't use pesticides, who really follow Mother Earth. Their vegetables are not perfect but definitely like everybody always says, you are what you eat, and I think more and more you hear that now. "I think definitely we have to go that step further. Everything that I'm using right now, I want to know the farmer, I want to know the farm. I want to see the birds before they are killed. I think we became very, very lazy. We were buying with the eye, not with our head. It is a lot of work. You cannot always do it but I think more and more we're going to have to do it. Customers are going to want to know."

Q: It sounds like you're redefining the term organic ...

A: "It's not really redefining, it's just trying to protect these little guys out there who actually have the same passion as we do. They don't have the money to get that organic label. Each country has it's own laws about what's organic. I don't want to say I'm redefining organic but I definitely want to get to the point when people are going to come to Thuet, the milk in their coffee will be organic milk, the butter in the sauce will be organic."

Q: It sounds very much like your idea behind your breads?

A: "I was brought up in a bakery, I always wanted to do that, but when you're a chef, you can't be a chef and a baker and everything, you need people around you who have the same vision, have the same passion because bread is a passion. "There is no money in bread. It's an old way to do the bread, so we decided all our breads will be yeast free. It's a little bit the same with what I try to do in the kitchen. We're still small for us to actually be able to deliver a product, a romantic product, a sexy product, a passionate product side -- and passion on both sides -- not only us but the guy who grows it for us, the guy who actually breeds for us, that's very important."

Q: Why do you like being a chef in Toronto?

A: "There's a great movement right now where suppliers, farmers are really becoming a part of us. When you live in Toronto, when you see all the ethnic products that we can use -- paradise. I don't think there's any other place that you can get that, than Toronto. I have a great client of mine who just went to Pakistan, his own country, and he just sent me some beautiful black cumin. It's fantastic. The ethnic groups are so big, living together, sharing foods. We go for Indian cuisine. You go for Chinese cuisine. We go for Japanese cuisine. It's crazy. In France, you've got French cuisine, that's it.

Q: Do you have a word to describe your cuisine style?

A: "It's very hard to say what my cuisine style is. I like to work definitely with the freshest ingredients. I like game meats. I like everything that's forbidden to be served. It's what the season brings me. You bring me something and I'm going to find a way to use it, I'm going to find a way to make it taste good.

Q: Why did you become a chef?

A: "My first bath was in a kitchen sink between services. It was between lunch and dinner. They'd throw us in the kitchen sink. By the age of six or nine I was working in a kitchen already. I really liked the atmosphere, I liked the people. By the age of 14, 15, I knew that's what I wanted to do. By the age of 12 or 13 I could hold one station in the kitchen without any problem.

Egg with Truffle

2 tbsp organic butter

4 organic eggs

30 ml (2 tbsp) organic 35% cream

Freshly ground, toasted white pepper Truffle, preferably white as they work best with this dish

1. Beat eggs lightly in a bowl with a little cream.

2. Add ground pepper if desired, but no salt.

3. Scramble over medium heat in lightly browned butter.

4. At the very last minute of cooking and off the heat, shave eight slices of truffle into the eggs and toss once or twice to incorporate the truffle.

5. Add freshly ground black pepper and salt to taste after cooking. Serve with a few slices of toasted Alsatian sour dough.