Q&A with Daan Faber

Together with Maarten and Igor, Daan Faber forms Mister Kitchen. Besides organising the immensely popular Rolling Kitchens every year, they also have their own products on the shelves at Albert Heijn. 

With their sea salt caramel peanut butter (one of their seven flavours), for example, you can make damn delicious cookies.

Which food trend should we put an immediate stop to?
I think we should stop treating food as either medicine or poison. Stop being so spastic about it, as if it cures or prevents everything. If you eat normally and variedly and exercise, things are basically fine.

If things are bad or less good for you, you don’t immediately die from them either; they’re not poisonous substances. Those extremes just fuel each other. Food is great fun and you need it as fuel. If you simply eat normally, there’s nothing to worry about.

Most memorable food experience?

There are so many different things for me. If you’re talking about eating out, for Mister Kitchen’s 11th anniversary we went to Osteria Francescana by Massimo Bottura with all our wives. That was truly amazing. But twelve courses of vegetables at l’Aperge by Alain Passard in Paris was fantastic too, as was having a hungover lunch at Noma with the four of us.

Those are memorable Michelin-starred experiences, but what we do for Delicious (producing culinary travel reports, ed.) is also fantastic. Arriving somewhere and being able to taste everything there. Drinking a cup of sheep’s milk that has just come from the sheep on Terschelling, or picking artichokes near Naples and grilling them with a view of Vesuvius. Those are such special experiences too. It’s difficult to name one specific place; the richness of preparing food or having food prepared for you is immense.

Favourite drink?

It would be easy to name our own Rabarcello. But I genuinely think wine is the absolute best. I find it unique that so many different drinks can come from one fruit.

I don’t necessarily have a favourite wine either. It’s precisely the diversity that I love—that it can taste so different. You can get so much out of it.

Indispensable kitchen gadget?

What I really don’t understand is why everyone doesn’t have a metal pair of kitchen tongs. Maarten (the chef at Mister Kitchen, ed.) always has one in his hand. Turning meat or vegetables, picking up pasta—you can do it all with them. They cost €3 and you can use them for everything.

A zester such as a Microplane, or a good knife, is important too. But the basic item is a pair of tongs.

What would you never eat again?

The only thing I really don’t like is offal. My body resists it. Once in France, my wife and I ordered a savoury tart at a wonderfully charming restaurant decorated with lanterns. But when it arrived, it was absolutely packed with brains and all sorts of other things.

Because the place was so beautiful and it was our own fault—we had simply ordered the wrong thing—we didn’t want to send it back. There was a sort of hedge near our table, so I stuffed it in there and then we ordered something new. Really reluctantly, because it had been lovingly prepared, but we genuinely couldn’t eat it.

Which country is your favourite when it comes to food?
I think it’s France, in terms of its variety. There is so much, and I’m not even talking about the cuisine but about the ingredients and the wines. You should really look at what you can buy at a market, and France truly excels at that. When it comes to food, Spain is number two and Italy is in third place.

What should everyone try at least once?
Everyone should have a proper vegetarian or vegan meal at least once. And not one where the meat is replaced, but where the kick that meat provides—the umami flavour—is replaced. We went to Korea for Delicious, originally intending to grill meat and fish there. In the end, we ended up on a mountain with the Buddhist nun Jeong Kwan (known from Chef’s Table). She cooked twelve vegan courses, and it was so special. The unique thing about Korea is that so many things are fermented, giving food a very distinctive flavour, and you really don’t miss the meat.

Not imitating chicken breast, but replacing the kick you get from fish oil, kimchi or soy sauce—that’s the solution, in my opinion, so you don’t miss that orgasmic feeling meat gives you. Anyone who cooks with less meat becomes a better cook, because you force yourself to get more out of vegetables or plant-based ingredients.

What is the best supermarket product?
Our seven peanut butter flavours, haha. Not that specific product, but I do like the fact that supermarkets are increasingly looking beyond the major brands. They’re still offered too, of course, but alongside them you can choose from lots of great indie brands that are now emerging.

Things like Tony Chocolonely and other brands whose products contain more craftsmanship, love and culinary knowledge. Those are the kinds of products I try to look for in the supermarket. You pay a little more, but you get more in return too. It’s not all the same.

What is still on your food wish list?
We would really love to go to Japan with Mister Kitchen. When it comes to food, it really is another planet. The same actually goes for India, where my grandmother came from. I’d like to go there for the country, but also for the food.

I also really enjoy picking and catching things myself. I’d still like to fish for salmon in Alaska or look for truffles in Italy. Picking and catching, but hunting too, always has something primal about it.

Which cookbook should everyone have on their shelf?
I hardly ever look at a cookbook anymore. I’ve always found Larousse a useful reference work. Or our bible, Delicious—the recipes in it are easy to make but still have that little something extra.

What do you like to make at home when you want to eat quickly and well?
On Sundays, I really enjoy the challenge of cooking with the things you have left over in that overstuffed fridge. It’s often pasta or risotto made with whatever is still around.

Recently, for example, I made long spiral-shaped pasta with spring onion, fried lengthwise. I added small tomatoes and soft salami, threw it all into the wok, and it was ready super quickly. I’m going to eat it again tonight.

Which dish do you have no self-control around?
I find it very difficult to stop eating good cheeses. Really delicious runny goat’s or sheep’s cheese—I can’t get enough of it.

I’m not really into sweets, but as soon as there’s almond in something, it triggers something in me. Almond paste, almond flour, amaretti biscuits—I eat so much of them that I make myself sick.