Lefteris Tsoukas on cooking beyond the season

After the dinner at Kuzina we described in our earlier feature, chef Lefteris Tsoukas left us thinking about what it means to cook with the seasons.

For Tsoukas, preserving and fermentation are different ways of holding on to an ingredient at its best. Summer’s flavour need not end with summer. He describes preservation as indispensable to his cooking: it lets him return to ingredients after their season has passed. The interest extends beyond the restaurant.

He also experiments with fermentation at home, as a personal ritual rather than simply an extension of the working kitchen. Some ingredients served during his Kuzina visit began there. Cherries provided one example of his interest in giving seasonal produce another place in a menu.

The useful idea is to look at an ingredient beyond the dish immediately in front of you.

In Tsoukas’s cooking, cherries can move between sweet and savoury dishes, taking on a different character beside fish, meat or dessert. What matters here is his way of thinking about flavour, rather than a recipe to follow at home.

That attention extends beyond the fruit itself. Tsoukas is interested in the flavour left in a preserving liquid, as well as the ingredient it surrounds. At the Kuzina dinner, a magnolia sauce offered another example of his curiosity about ingredients and how they might change.

It is an approach that asks for patience and precision,

as well as imagination. The flavour of a season can become part of a later meal. Anyone trying preservation at home should use a tested recipe with complete preparation and storage instructions; an account of a restaurant dish is not a substitute for one.

“For me, this is Greece”: Lefteris Tsoukas on travel, flavour and Michelin stars

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