Lőrinc Sándor

One of the most important aspects of Salt - a green and Michelin-starred fine dining restaurant in Budapest serving contemporary Hungarian cuisine - is the sustainable use of ingredients.

Lőrinc Sándor and Edina Makai are Salt's two deputy chefs.

By sustainable use we mean seasonal use of raw materials. If a certain raw material is only available in a certain season, the question becomes how to conserve it for a period when it is not growing. This way of thinking is much more ethical towards nature, in the sense that it does not take the raw materials out of the environmental space, it respects the land and the growing season of a particular vegetable. And the tendency to seasonality leads us to technologies such as fermentation, which can be used to preserve a raw material for a period when it is not in season. Moreover, as a biochemical process, this practice also provides an insight into the biological changes of the different raw materials, since these changes are made possible by micro-organisms (bacteria, fungi) that transform one substance into another. Understanding these changes also helps us to better understand nature and, more specifically, teaches us how to store or process raw materials. And this knowledge is proving to be one of the increasingly important skills: fermentation not only makes our raw materials more durable, but also improves their quality.