Chef Naturelle

Home
Chef Naturelle

Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Chef Naturelle, .

Naturopathic chef based in Hertford and specialising in delicious and nourishing plant-based whole food cooking offering cooking lessons, retreat catering and pop-up events.

15/11/2025

Raindrops are hitting the windows creating a seasonal chime, there’s a colder chill in the air. Winter is on its way. It’s time to store our energy with warming, grounding foods using ingredients that take longer to cook and whose colours bring balance to the longer dark hours.

Buttercup squash, butter beans, ginger and turmeric soup with a digestive sprinkle - toasted coriander, cumin and fennel seeds with whole h**p seeds and sea salt, kimchi and nasturtium leaves and blossoms.

Here’s to a nourishing and smooth transition 🍂❄️

18/10/2025

Food styling and presentation musings. A couple of delightful days in the kitchen teaching two new cohorts of students alongside teaching phone photography.

I just adore teaching this class. Plating food is more than adding elements to a plate, it’s more than thinking about textures and height and colours. It’s more than adding pretty flowers or creating fun shapes with a custard.

It is leaving our trace, our signature to a dish. At first, we are not quite sure how we want to go about it, so we take inspiration from others, from nature, from the ingredients and with time and practice, we develop our own unique signature and embody it.

Pictured is an hazelnut financier with a lemon custard and blood orange gel.

12/10/2025

Flowers from the garden to complement this exquisite baked “no-cheese”cake infused with orange, in true Autumn mood 🍂

Autumn is slowly settling in, with its scents of the forest floor, colourful vegetables and fruits, hearty dishes and sweet treats. What joy!

At this time of year, you can find me between the kitchen and walking around, gathering rosehips, hawthorn berries, elderberries to make up herbal concoctions to support the body in this transition, making tarts with the abundance of apples, slow cooking quince, sipping on broths, warming up with stews and congee and hot chocolates by the fire.

How about you, what does an Autumn day look like?

21/09/2025

Autumn Equinox scenes 🍁✨ 🕯️

Letting in the light crack through the darkness, welcoming the darker days while continuing to shine our light. Embracing the slowness of Autumn when everything unfolds at the pace it’s supposed to, trusting the balance in nature and its cycles. Making meals warmer, lighting a candle at the table, smiling and savouring a piece of chestnut and apple cake for breakfast drizzled with elderberry syrup and cherry compote.

19/08/2025

Bakes from the weekend - two carrot cakes with pistachio and an orange blossom icing, one black sesame cake with plum compote and black sesame icing.

I really thought hard about the finish on those two, which were ordered by a daughter for her dad’s 60th birthday. I don’t have a “signature decoration” as such, I like to create and I am inspired by the ingredients, the season and what nature looks like at the time of making the cake, and by the person it’s made for. It means I can get my creativity flow freely. In the end, I decided to go simple, with some crushed pistachios and orange zest for the carrot cakes and half moon piping with compote for the black sesame one. I feel like simplicity often reflects the natural rhythm of life and nature - as years go by, we tend to appreciate and see the beauty in the simplicity and the delicate.

14/08/2025

Gathering raspberry leaves, calendula, redcurrants and St John’s Wort.

Watching my son snack on a peach while looking at a spider.

Eating a peach straight from the tree, juicy, sweet and warm from the sun. A very pleasurable experience - I couldn’t do anything else but close my eyes and be fully in this moment. Ah peach 🍑!

Very simple and very precious Summer moments

05/08/2025

Cakes from the weekend made for a mother blessing ceremony and baby shower day ✨

Every celebration cake is special but since becoming a mother myself , celebrating the rite of passage from woman to mother and honouring mamas and mamas-to-be takes a deeper meaning.

I loved making and decorating these cakes featuring the perfect flavour match of strawberries and rose, the flower of the heart 🍓 🌹

Rose sponge, strawberry and rose compote made with the very last strawberries of the season, and a vanilla and white miso icing.

Gluten-free, vegan, organic and free of refined sugars and ingredients. Cakes that look, taste beautiful and which are made with ingredients gathered, grown by myself, sourced from local farms and gardens, who put love and care in what they do.

Congratulations and on this magical new chapter of your lives and thank you for the photos 🤍

28/07/2025

Look up, there are plums on the trees. A lot of them. This year seems to be a magnificent year for fruits.

There are blue tit, gage, opal, victoria, damson, Mirabelles and Reine Claude if you’re in France, to name a few varieties.

Those we picked yesterday - pictured, are deliciously sweet eaten straight from the tree and become sour when cooked, making a great pairing with a sweet cake (last picture) or adding an edge to a breakfast with coconut yoghurt and sprouted buckwheat.

Plums have a beautiful tendency to become thick when cooked thanks to their high pectin content and make a great compote or coulis, without the need to add anything to thicken.

11/07/2025

Connecting with food, with the soil, with our Mother Earth. This is one of the keys for a bright future for our children, one in which they feel connected to the land, the earth, nature as a whole, they understand it and their role in it, love it and look after it.

As adults we can lead the way, show and teach the next generation but really, they are the ones remind us what we’ve simply forgotten.

And the taste of a homegrown carrot? Still an unbeaten sensorial experience for me - it’s sweet, crunchy, full of flavour, and the satisfaction and patience to have watched something grown. Simple and yet one of life’s greatest pleasures

30/06/2025

Birthday cakes, for my own little one this time. 2 years of being your maman 💕

I am really liking making a cake just for him, which he can share if he wants to, and another one for us all.

For him, another fraisier this year. I did think a lot about it, wanting to do something different but Strawberries are at their juiciest and sweetest for his birthday and he loves them as much this year as he did last year. A chocolate sponge forms the base which is circled with fresh strawberries and topped with a coconut yoghurt - roasted strawberries - vanilla mousse. The very first calendula of the garden crowns the fraisier to finish.

For everyone else (and also for him!), a layered sponge cake filled with apricot and thyme compote and topped with a blueberry and lavender ganache. It’s so stunning by itself I just garnished it with a nastartium blossom from the garden. I still can’t get over the colour of the ganache, such a beautiful purple which complements the orange so well - both in flavours and colour. I hadn’t planned on flavouring it with lavender but as soon as I saw the colour it became, I just had to - it was screaming for lavender! And the flavour combinations were just perfect.

Happy birthday to my little love, and birthing day to me. We both had plenty of cake 😋

05/05/2025

The best time of year.

Spring really is the best time of year and a delicious time to be cooking. After a long winter of limited produce that needs time to cook comes an array of freshness, colour and textures.

Radishes are roasted and generously sprinkled with sea salt. If you’ve never roasted radishes before, you’re in for a treat! These spicy Cherry Belle become sweet like candy and will become your new favourite snack.

Potatoes are boiled and dressed with mint and a strong mustard dressing.

Asparagus are steamed and a dollop of wild garlic butter is dropped while they are still hot, allowing the butter to melt and coat them.

I picked up some beautiful red Russian Kale at , blanched it and shocked it in cold water before blending with chickpeas for a delicious purée. On top, pointed cabbage is braised and then cooked in stock for a melt in the mouth result. I love my cabbage when it melts in the mouth, something inherited from my grandmother and which I count to pass onto@next generations. A sprinkle of Cornish kelp to finish.

04/05/2025

Upside down rhubarb, chocolate and orange cake.

I spent all morning walking in the woods, playing with my son play among the trees, watching him trying to pick (successfully!) a solitary bee, and picking nettle and hawthorn.

When I got back, I was craving for chocolate cake. After taking my son for his nap, I went to the kitchen, took out some trusted ingredients out of the cupboard and placed them on the counter. I also had fresh rhubarb and I fancied using it, one of my favourite ways being in an upside down cake. Usually, I pair rhubarb with orange and rosemary but my love for pure and dark cacao is strong these days (oh hello magnesium! 🍫), so I decided to combine these three ingredients together. I could see how the tartness of the rhubarb would go well with the richness of the chocolate. I changed one of the recipes I know by heart to include raw cacao powder while making sure my dry-wet ratio was the same (so there was some note taking involved), olive oil in place of coconut oil and a generous amount of orange zest. In the oven it went, and after just 30 minutes patiently waiting in front of the oven, it was ready. Almost. Gluten-free cakes always need to rest a little in the tin to avoid falling apart. So I waited some more, then turned the tin upside down onto a plate, the contrast of the pink and green hues of rhubarb against the dark brown sponge taking my breath away. I couldn’t wait for it to cool down completely to slice it, it was so delicious. The sponge is soft, rich in chocolate, just sweet enough and zesty from the orange with its centre slightly runny, which I adore. The rhubarb is soft and sticky, caramelised. My idea of a lovely Sunday.

Address

Website

https://www.chefnaturelle.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Chef Naturelle posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Chef Naturelle:

Shortcuts

Want your business to be the top-listed Event Planning Service?

Country:

City: