Chloé Charles Darphin apples: “The house, I prepare them with my 2 year old daughter”

Candidate “Top Chef” in 2021, Chloé Charles launched, at the end of 2022, in Paris, Lago, an atypical place, between the restaurant and the private fair. She has also just signed, with Tiphaine de Cointet, well, task! (First, 2022), a comic to make you want to cook at home.

“When I told my loved ones that I had to choose a favorite dish for this column, they all replied:” Ah yes, you are going to talk about the Darphin. “” Obviously! Darphin is the French name for hashbrown or rösti, that is to say a pancake of grated potatoes.

The fairly simple recipe requires only three ingredients: potatoes, fat, salt. We grate the potatoes, we do not rinse them so as not to lose the starch that will serve as a binder. We season, we add a lot of butter and cooked them in the pan or in the oven. In principle, it’s very simple, but it takes time to find all the waves so that the pancake is perfect. Like reducing the edges well and tasser before cooking it to avoid roughness and that it crisits more.

It’s been ten years since I cook. I learned to do it when I was at Septime, in Paris, with Chef Bertrand Grébaut, who, I think, held Alain Passard’s recipe. At the time, I was a young cook, it was one of the rare dishes that I mastered to the point of being able to reproduce them at home! At first, it was a party dish that I was doing at Christmas for my family. Then it became a daily meal and, above all, a basic of my professional cuisine.

unifying element

At home, I prepare her with my 2 year old daughter, who loves putting her hands in the bowl to mix, and it’s a full -fledged meal, that I use her with a small green salad and a sauce at yogurt. When I was a traveling chef, I was doing a lot, because I never knew what kitchen material I was going to dispose of, but I was sure I would always have a pan and an induction plate to cook the darphin. Now, in Lago, where I have real professional cuisine that allows me to have fun, I serve it with a capon and an algae garlic puree for example. Darphin is the unifying element that brings comfort and puts everyone in agreement.

Chloé Charles, in the Lago restaurant, January 11, 2023. Claire Payen for “Le Monde” It is all the more important since customers who reserve the restaurant for a meal do not choose the menu. LAGO has a particular format: it is a place where you can organize drinking and eating events, open by reservation only. I did not want to repeat the models I had known younger, chefs who work fifteen hours a day from Monday to Friday and manage the administrative on weekends. Those who said during the first confinement that they were happy to have discovered their 15 -year -old children, it completely freaks out! I want to have free time, to show that it is possible to be a business chief, mother, to have fun, to earn money. All that was not done in a day: I have been putting the right formula for seven years to make it work. And that I refine the recipe for my Darphin according to my adventures. ”

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