Fighting fit: Adam Gray's healthy recipes for the New Year
Fitness fanatic and Skylon chef Adam Gray shares his best resolution recipes for January and explains why eating healthily and staying fit is so important to him.
Fighting fit: Adam Gray's healthy recipes for the New Year
Fitness fanatic and Skylon chef Adam Gray shares his best resolution recipes for January and explains why eating healthily and staying fit is so important to him.
A typical working day for Adam Gray, Executive Chef at Royal Festival Hall’s Skylon restaurant, starts at 8am and ends at midnight. And if that doesn’t make you choke on your watercress smoothie, then consider that he is also on his feet for most of the day and is responsible for the hundreds of diners and bar-dwellers that pass through the restaurant’s door. It is a truly exhausting thought.
Yet Gray is better equipped than most to cope with such a schedule, as not only does he possess an almost preternatural work ethic, but is also one of the fittest chefs around. His exploits in fear-inducing competitions such as Tough Mudder and Vertical Rush (a race to the top of Tower 42), are supplemented by a punishing weekly fitness regime.
“I have to keep fit every day,” he explains to Great British Chefs over a coffee at his majestic South Bank location. “I train, I cycle, I swim, I do Krav Maga”.
For us mere mortals, it seems like a curious choice of hobby: why would you want to push yourself in your spare time when your job is so demanding? But chefs by nature are a disciplined and competitive bunch, and Gray seems on a one-man mission to dispel the notion that they cannot keep a healthy diet.
“You can’t survive on a little slice of bread or some chips or whatever because it’s easy to eat, you know. You’re better off actually taking a little bit of time and making something healthy and having a meal."
“My chefs are fed well, they get breakfast and lunch and dinner. Obviously I want them to eat because I need them for their energy!”
Unsurprisingly, Gray’s diet is suitably virtuous: designed to keep him going over a busy day in the kitchen, he avoids bread and all “white carbs” and has lost three stone since making the change. But he is also keen to preach balance for those embarking on a post-Christmas detox.
Adam Gray
“I believe in moderation. I know people say that you have to eat your five-a-day and all the rest of it, but people get scared of that: ‘I’ve got to eat these five different vegetables and fruits’"
“I think people tend to have this massive shock of going on a diet as soon as January 1st comes round. And shock diets don’t help the body anyway, they really don’t. It should be little changes, little steps. You don’t have to suddenly dump what you like, but just introduce little things into your diet.”
The little things could be swapping olive oil for rapeseed oil (half the cholesterol, according to Gray) or bringing watercress into your diet (“higher in Vitamin C than orange juice”). But Gray is a chef first and foremost, and he doesn’t believe in making any changes that will diminish flavour or indeed enjoyment of food in general. Instead, he is full of ideas for making healthy eating more palatable, like roasting fruit in foil parcels with a few drops of maple syrup, perhaps.
It is these touches that make his new recipes, designed for those looking to shed their Christmas weight, so appealing. There is the gluten-free pizza using a dough made from grated cauliflower and gram flour; the fat-burning tomato, chilli and pepper soup that the chef ate daily for years; a lean and mean beef lasagne using sweet potato instead of pasta; sustainable fish stew; and a restorative duck salad.
“These sorts of dishes are dishes to do at home; they’re not fancy, fancy dishes,” he concludes. "Quick and healthy dishes, that's what it's all about."
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