INTERVIEW: New Amazon series looks at culinary side of Tour de France

As the Tour de France continues to wind its way through the picturesque byways of the European nation, Amazon is set to premiere a new docuseries that looks at the behind-the-scenes culinary tastes of the famous cycling contest. Premiering on the streaming service Friday, July 27, EAT. RACE. WIN. follows chef Hannah Grant as she feeds and follows the Orica-Scott cycling team in 2017.

Grant’s job during the three-week race is a difficult one. She needs to ensure that her team is receiving the best culinary options, with adequate amounts of protein and tons of good taste. On top of that, she strives to include local ingredients from the mountainside villages and cities of France, and organic is definitely a preferred standard.

“I’ve worked within the field of cooking within the cycling industry for many years, and my first book, The Grand Tour Cookbook, I made based on that work,” Grant said in a recent phone interview. “And to have someone that was interested in making a TV show based on the hard work that I’ve done for half a decade was quite a big thing, and I thought this is an interesting way to a very classic sport that not many people begin to see that side of things. So it was kind of an honor to have that opportunity to show people what’s going on on the other side of things.”

To the uninitiated, Grant’s cooking for Tour de France competitors might seem simple: a chef takes her talents on the road for three weeks in the beautiful countryside. That’s not the case. The differences between restaurant cooking and Tour de France cooking are immense.

“The difference is pretty big in the sense that the guests are the same every night, but the restaurant moves about 100 to 150 miles every day, if not more,” said Grant, a veteran of Fat Duck and Noma. “So the privilege that I have is basically taking my restaurant kitchen across one of the most amazing culinary landscapes or countries, such as France, and then taking all the local ingredients where we go. And I can basically tailor the menu depending on where we are, and that’s I think a very unique thing that restaurants with a set address definitely can’t do. It’s a very different way of cooking to let you get inspired by all the regional ingredients and dishes.”

Besides the regional flavors experienced by cyclists, there is also the consideration of terrain. Grant will customize her menus according to what the riders will experience the next day on the race. That takes a lot of pre-planning and brainstorming.

“We look at what stages are coming up — flat stages or mountain stages, long or short — and then, of course, how far through the Tour de France or the Grand Tour we are,” Grant said. “Just to note, it’s a three-week race, so depending on where we are in the race and what’s to come, you want to plan the different types of protein, the different types of mixed carbs and fats depending on what they’re going through.”

As an example, Grant shared her thoughts on a “time trial,” when cyclists race as fast as they can to achieve, as the name suggests, the best time. For such a sudden burst of energy, Grant needs to compensate with the right food. Ditto for the strenuous endurance tests.

“If they’re having a time trial, which is basically getting on a bike, everyone either starts individually or together, and then they go as fast as they can through the entire stage … you’ve got to think about having something that is very easy to digest the night before, so you don’t have a lot to sit with in your stomach and your system because they basically push to the max all the way through the stage,” she said. “You can have longer, flat stages where it’s about endurance, in the sense where they don’t go full throttle the whole stage through. It’s just a longer distance, and so they have to slowly release the energy. It’s stages like that you can play a little bit more the night before with the foods.”

Grant reminds viewers that these cyclists are humans, and that means they have individual tastes. They won’t eat only protein bars. They want food that is enjoyable and perhaps reminiscent of home.

“They also want something that’s tasty and comforting and not just super strict, so these stages [of endurance] you can give them a little more fun, so to speak, in foods that take a little more energy for them to digest,” she said. “And then in the mountain stages, you want to think about, of course, things not getting too hard for the digestion, but also you want something that can give them a lot of power to get over the climbs that they need to get. And, of course, you’ve got to think about a very rich iron intake when you hit the mountain stages.”

Complicating matters — although it seems like Grant welcomes these challenges — is that each cyclist on the team has different tastes. If she knows someone does not like fish, for example, she will have an alternative.

In her years of feeding competitors, she has not encountered someone who stuck to a vegan or vegetarian diet while on the Grand Tour, which includes the Tour de France and a couple other European races. Some special considerations have to be given to someone who chooses to take out meat from their diet.

“A lot of riders will choose to occasionally eat more vegetarian-based food when they’re home training and at the smaller races,” she said.

Buying from the local villages and cities is one of the highlights for Grant and the team. Sometimes it can be tricky, especially when the Tour de France makes its way to the upper reaches of the Alps.

“The selection of products are very small [in the mountains], and you get to points where the most stuff you can get is lots of cheese, lots of cured meat, which is not exactly the perfect diet for a professional cyclist,” she said. “So, yeah, we’ve got to think ahead, and … if we know we’re heading into the mountains for a couple of days, we need to basically bulk up prior to that. In France, they have really amazing organic vegetable supermarkets, so to find those and get what we need, so that we know we can get through the days in the mountains, that’s really important. Let me put it this way, had it been the first time I did the Tour de France, it would have been a very different situation, but I’ve done the Tour six times. So you learn as you go. You know that it’s going to be difficult to get certain things, so then that way you get smarter about it.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

EAT. RACE. WIN., featuring Hannah Grant, premieres Friday, July 27 on Amazon Prime Video. Click here for more information.