Some of Life's Greatest Secrets Are Hidden in a Bowl of Bouillon

My first contact with bouillon goes back to childhood. I grew up in the French countryside, and at the time, we ate it daily. If I rewind the tape on my memories, I can see the soup we ate every night, and practically all year: It was either with vegetables or meat, because we were pretty spoiled when it came to vegetable gardens, and my uncle was a butcher. It also made appearances as a bouillon of pot-au-feu, chicken, pork, or rabbit. There you have it, soup and bouillon—it's my rustic side, and two things I was exposed to early in life.

My second contact with bouillon was when I got into Ferrandi, the French school of culinary arts, after obtaining my technician certificate. There, I discovered something really different. Bouillon was considered as a kind of culinary assistant. During my internships with Guy Savoy, I created my first jus. I learned to blanch and to skim. I also caught a glimpse of a world I'd never had access to before: the one involving crustaceans, shellfish, and fish. In my youth, the closest seafood shop was 15 miles away, so we ate what we could fish out of neighboring rivers and ponds—fish that was extremely fresh, and unbelievably rare, too.

Lastly, my ultimate "encounter" with bouillon was when I decided that my cooking needed to take a radical turn. Something just clicked. Out of curiosity, I began to take interest in Asian ingredients. Little by little, I familiarized myself with certain tonalities, especially in my travels and through friends who cooked with the aromas of Cambodian cuisine. I took in the smells, drank bowlfuls of flavors I'd never tasted, and understood that bouillon is at the heart of everything.

If bouillon is omnipresent, it's because it doesn't just help with cooking. Take Vietnamese pho, Thai tom kha kai, or Japanese dashi: All are complete dishes. Bouillon has the advantage of being simple to produce, while also relating to a local culture; a way of eating that pulls directly from seasonal ingredients. Even street food in Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia consist—in part—of small stands that prepare daily vats and vats of bouillon.

These ephemeral restaurants, which are set up just for the day, allow you to almost craft your own bouillon, manifest a kind of fragility, but also exceptional spontaneity and freshness. A little carriage arrives in the morning, the folding tables are put out, and you've got rhizomes barely out of the ground, super fresh galangas with finely minced pink stems—all this in the street. The large central market in Bangkok by the Chao Praya River is a magnificent thing for a cook: kefir lime, fresh bunches of herbs, wicker baskets overflowing with peppers, ginger… All of these ingredients end up in bouillon.

In Japan, I discovered the same thing with dashi. In France, soup does not hold this kind of importance in the same way, and that is also why I wanted to reintegrate bouillon in French cuisine. I wouldn't say that it's been discredited, but I think it's a support that is not rewarding enough for certain chefs. I don't say that as a criticism. Most books by chefs documenting their cooking want to be works of art. Bouillon is probably not spectacular enough.

For me, the most important thing with bouillon is to understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. I discovered this empirically by doing the opposite of what I'm saying. I was using ingredients before I really grasped their place in the jus and truly understanding their "functions." I wanted to go beyond what you found in kitchens a few years ago when you still heard: "Your bouillon is a little bland, season it," and all that was meant was simply adding salt or pepper.

The success of a bouillon lies in the accuracy of the combinations. My cuisine, if dosed incorrectly, can become carnage. I'm not in the business of sprinkling on flavors; there is real work behind it, a real sensibility. You can't really reproduce it by saying, "I'm going to put this in; I'm going to put that in." You have to understand it, and find a balance. This way of doing things is born out of curiosity, one of the prerequisites of cuisine. Being curious is the only real tool a cook can take along when you're traveling abroad, when you find yourself without your team or your equipment. That cook's first mission is to unearth the local riches, which they'll be able to rely on. Then, they can play around with their own feelings.

Bouillon also corresponds to my vision of food. To know about root vegetables and herbs is to absorb notions of your well-being—not necessarily in the medical sense of the term. You see it today: We have jobs that are more and more demanding and we've become more and more sedentary. We need physical activity. I just read that the 30 minutes of physical exercise per day, which we should all be doing, isn't enough. It's not enough to just walk to the subway station, whistling away. You have to really build up a sweat. I concluded that it was much easier to just eat well.

I don't reject the "technical" term, but I do consider it more appropriate for chefs like Jean-François Piège (who, in my eyes, is the greatest technician in France today). I feel incapable of doing what he does. It requires incredible mastery. My knowledge is more instinctive. I don't necessarily correspond to what you find in hospitality school textbooks, with titles like The Basics and Techniques of French Cuisine. Many chefs push techniques forward, and modernize and adapt them. I sometimes use them, but my technicality resides mainly in my way of seeing things. It's a slightly different impact.

I'm a little wild, a little brutal. I can't stand crowds; I need air and space. I need to leave Paris, to reconnect with nature, which is a huge source of inspiration—and not just to pick out vegetables. In Thailand, it was influential to see a galloping urbanization coexist alongside more antiquated things, to see people living off the soup they make with fresh produce alongside more modern places. They are the ones who allow you to understand local culture. It's the same in Japan, even though it looks like a more controlled environment. One part of the heritage has been preserved. On one side, you have enormous buildings, and on the other, tiny village streets. French cuisine is also very rural. It comes from the provinces. Its richness lies in the combination of strong local identities.

After the bouillon, I'm going to focus on pasta, both Asian and Italian. I think it can offer a fantastic array of renditions. I like the idea of combinations—the spirit of a noodle but with Italian pasta, or the spirit of dim sum, but with French products. The field of possibilities is pretty vast. If I say "linguine," a ton of recipes come to mind. If I say "veal shank," not so many.

As told to Alexis Ferenczi.

William Ledeuil received his first Michelin star in 2008, and in 2010, he received the title of Chef of the Year by Gault et Millau and Fooding d'Honneur. He heads up two Parisian restaurants, Ze Kitchen Galerie and KGB (which stands for Kitchen Galerie Bis), and just released Bouillons (published by La Martinière), a recipe book in which he declares his love for the most emblematic liquid dish in his cuisine. This post previously appeared in MUNCHIES French.