Kitchen minceur is a low-calorie cooking style created by French chef Michel Guérard that re-creates traditional French dishes in lighter, healthier ways. The cuisine avoids leaving diners feeling heavy and full, while still providing full flavor. Guérard’s style is based on Nouvelle cuisine and involves simple concepts, such as reducing the use of high-calorie ingredients. Central to his cooking style is cream removal, and he has found many substitutions for high-calorie ingredients. One of the most famous dishes in Guérard’s kitchen is crab salad with grapefruit.
A low-calorie cooking style, the kitchen minceur was created by French chef Michel Guérard. The cooking style focuses on re-creating traditional French dishes in lighter, often healthier ways. Minceur cuisine dishes have been praised for both tasting superior to ordinary French cuisine and remaining authentic to the cooking style.
While many traditional French meals leave the diner feeling awkward, heavy and full after eating, the cuisine’s minceur dishes avoid this effect. Conversely, they offer fewer calories and less cholesterol, while still providing full flavor. For this reason, his cooking style is known as the kitchen minceur or the kitchen of thinness.
During the 1970s, chef Guérard joined his wife, Christine Barthelemy, in the renovation of a spa resort. During the renovation, Guérard developed his cooking style to complement the health-conscious nature of the spa. Guérard, a former pastry chef, was able to reduce meals containing 3,000 or more calories to just 500 calories while still retaining their flavor. According to Guérard, a dietitian can shed up to five pounds (two and a half kilos) a week by eating his cuisine.
The cooking minceur is based on the Nouvelle cooking style. Before Guérard’s invention, other chefs had developed the Nouvelle style, which focused on simple, fresh foods. Guérard decided to take this style one step further in the direction of a healthy lifestyle, updating traditional Nouvelle cuisine by drastically cutting the amount of calories they contain.
Like Nouvelle cuisine, Guérard’s culinary adaptations are very simple. The use of fat in his dishes is kept to a minimum. Many dishes avoid fat entirely. Easy substitutions, like cutting the use of an ingredient in half to a quarter, are also made for high-calorie ingredients. These simple concepts, without detracting from the flavors of the food, have made Guérard’s cooking style very popular in the Western world.
Central to Gerrard’s cooking style is cream removal. He has experimented with yogurt, frontage blanc and many other substitutes. Eventually he discovered a desirable replacement for the creme: a blend of dry, fat-free blanc frontage with a blend of puréed vegetables, such as leeks, mushrooms, and carrots. This blend provided the same velvety texture and taste of cream sauce without the large amount of calories. Gerrard has also found substitutions for mayonnaise, butter, and many other high-calorie ingredients.
One of the most famous dishes in Gerrard’s kitchen is crab salad with grapefruit. Other low-calorie recipes from the chef that are very popular include eggplant caviar, veal and various fresh soups. One drawback to Guérard’s style, however, is the practice of discarding certain foods used in the preparation of other foods in order to reduce their caloric value. This practice is considered wasteful by some people.
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