Stephane Nguyen

Stefan, thank you so much for being on the podcast. 

Thank you very much for having me. 

Well, let’s start at the beginning. How did the French Cooking Academy come to be? What was the spark? 

Well, the spark. We need to go back. We need to go back a little bit further than that. The thing that people have to know is that first, when I arrived in Australia, I was absolutely not working in the world of food. I was actually working in a corporate world. I was an IT guy; technical support, networks, cable. I was a bit of a geek. I had no intention of working in the food business. But when I arrived in Australia and married Kate, very shortly after, I realised I was homesick, food wise. I realised how I took for granted the fact that I had so much food at my doorstep, in France, that’s what we have. I realised how far away I was here after flying 27 hours to get here. I said, my God, I’m on the other side of the world. Everything was gone. I really missed my food and the connection to food happened after that. I tried to find all my French places and I could not find them. People told me if you want your French food, you’re in Australia, you’re going to have to make it yourself. I thought, you know what? Well, that’s fine. I’ll do that. I’m French. I can do this. I thought I’d start with Boeuf Bourguignon. My mum used to make it. I bought all the stuff and then I faced my stove with the ingredients, and I thought, how did she do it again? I was trying to fiddle around, and I said, oh, my God, and I had the most terrible realisation: I’m very good at eating, like a lot of French people, being on the receiving end, but I was absolutely clueless at the actual cooking process. At the time, it really shocked me. I’m the French guy in Australia. When people talk to me, they expect me to make that dish. You’re from France, I went on holiday and ate this thing. Can you make it for us? I had no idea. I thought, I cannot be that guy that can’t cook. From then onwards, I took the decision that I couldn’t let that be. I would have to teach myself cooking. So, before the French Cooking Academy arrived, that was the very beginning when there was a time that led to that creation of the French Cooking Academy, for about two years I basically bought culinary textbooks from France, the same ones you can get in a culinary school, and I taught myself cooking. I did not learn by trial and error and grandma recipes. I actually followed the curriculum the same as a student in France, except that I did this on my own in my kitchen. To make things more fun, I decided to record the process on my iPhone because I thought it was so useful; the things I was learning. I thought people in the world, they need to know about the basics like that. My first series was a video on how to wash, peel and cut vegetables for 30 days. So it’s pretty boring. But I took my phone, I started recording, and I started the French Cooking Academy. The name started with a YouTube channel and I was looking for a name. I said, you know what? I’m going to call it French Cooking Academy. And that’s what I did. Every weekend, every night that I had some time after work because I was still working full time, that was the creation of The French Cooking Academy. This was the very, very beginning of the story where it all started. That was in 2014 when I created the channel. The following two years was just about sharing, learning the ropes, cooking, learning video stuff on top of that and editing. That was the beginning of all of it, the name and the massive journey. 

Was there a particular moment where you realised that it could become more than just your side project of learning yourself, a moment when you really realised you could take it to the next level?

So what happened really, after two years of training myself, I’d reached a point where I’d actually finished the curriculum. And I had ended up with a channel that was very successful. We had more than 100,000 subscribers already from all over the world. People were asking for more. Kate was saying, oh, you know what, maybe you should do something. I thought, well that was just for fun. I’d been working on it. But I have to say that at the time, I was still in need of a bit of a validation, like a student that wants to pass an exam after having studied for two years. And I didn’t have that. I thought if I was to go further, I needed validation. Did I actually learn something out of this or is it just me imagining that? I had that gap. And strangely enough, an unexpected thing, I received an email from a casting company in Sydney who told me, we’ve got a new food show on SBS that’s coming up, dedicated to French, like a food competition. Would you be interested to get to take part? I was like, oh, my God, this is it. I can throw myself in. I said, yes. And I passed the interview and out of all odds, I got selected. And that was the show that’s called the Chef’s Line that was released in 2017. I was in the very first series on the French section, and I didn’t win the competition, but I was second place in the Home Cooks. And I had my answer. This is where I realised, people told me that I was very charismatic. I had tons of interviews after the show. I said, maybe I should keep going. People were telling me I should keep going. I thought maybe there’s something there. But I still did not leave my job or anything. But I kept learning. I started to look for a new horizon, new things to learn and let the thing grow. This was a big turning point. 

In your own learning process, what was the most challenging part about it? 

It’s actually a good thing. One thing with French cooking is that people think it’s very difficult. We hear about fine dining and everything, but everything you learn, the whole curriculum has not changed, to be honest, for the past 50 years. It starts very, very easy and it’s gradual. So there’s no real time when things get massively difficult unless you want to start to venture into more restaurant stuff. After I finished working through the book, I thought, what’s next, what direction I’m taking? There’s a famous culinary reference book by Auguste Escoffier, Larousse Gastronomique, and I started to venture into more difficult territories. That was a bit of a challenge, stepping up. I was learning more advanced things and I think I learned a lot from that. There were a few hiccups in that moment, but it was a big turning point, a bit of challenge that I needed a ceiling I had to break, going from the basic student to someone that would actually start to make restaurant quality food, even at home, even with the things I’m doing. 

I’m very good at eating, like a lot of French people, being on the receiving end, but I was absolutely clueless at the actual cooking process. At the time, it really shocked me. I’m the French guy in Australia. When people talk to me, they expect me to make that dish. You’re from France, I went on holiday and ate this thing. Can you make it for us? I had no idea. I thought, I cannot be that guy that can’t cook. From then onwards, I took the decision that I couldn’t let that be. I would have to teach myself cooking.

Stéphane Nguyen, French Cooking Academy

I think nowadays I feel as though people cooking at home see so much on TV and on YouTube and Tik Tok and Instagram that people can have a fear of cooking because they don’t want to fail or they don’t have an understanding of, as you say, building up from certain techniques. You talk about confidence in the kitchen on your website and in the material you put out, how do you design your course to build that confidence in home cooks? 

Sorry to backtrack again, but the YouTube channel was Chapter One. One of the big breakthroughs that happened after the TV show and I got a little bit enthusiastic and wanted to go forward, Kate and I decided to spend an entire year in France touring France, going into villages and cooking food on the spot in Airbnbs and filming it. At the end of the trip, we ended up in Lyon for about three or four months. Kate was the one that said, after all the things we’d seen, and after all the things I’d done on YouTube, how could we take all those things and structure them in a more structured way, like a curriculum. We thought about the idea of creating an online course. I thought that was good and that I had so much to share. That’s what we did, we sat down in that Airbnb, we were traveling with pans in our suitcases and food. We were traveling in a train with lentils falling out, garlic everywhere. It was such a shambles. Don’t try to do a TV show on your own out of Airbnbs. But luckily enough, we had that place for three months with a great kitchen and we worked on a curriculum. We actually followed something that was established. As I said, in France, there are a lot of existing curricula. I was inspired looking at a professional curriculum, by what a student in their first year was learning. I transformed all this and adapted it for a home cooking environment. I trimmed out all the unnecessary bits, all the stuff that is too difficult, and kept only the useful things that were really doable and useful in a home kitchen. This is where we started to create from the ground up, starting with the very, very basics on health and safety, knife skills and vegetable cuts; baby steps and all the lessons are a very slow progression where you build your confidence. The first recipe in the course, for instance, is a soup. So it’s not a big challenge. It’s a very iconic soup, where you have to use all your knife skills and use these fresh things to get that flavour. And people, when they realise they can make one or two things, they start to get more confidence: I’ve made that thing that was great. They get feedback from everyone, their family and friends and then they slowly build confidence and think, I want to keep going. Then they progress. We have some students that went from knowing nothing about cooking to now restaurant style massive meals at home, inviting friends and they show us the pictures and it’s crazy stuff with sauces and dishes and all French food. They take all their French cookbooks and make everything. It’s great to see. 

I was going to ask you whether people reach out to you with their stories, but obviously they do. And who are your students? Is there a typical French Cooking Academy student or is it across the board? 

The first course started in 2019, so let’s say we have been going six years. The students are from all over the world, mainly the United States. We’ve got at the moment, worldwide, about 3,000 active students. The typical profile is people with more time, people from the older generation. I would say most of the people are mid-40s or 40s up to 70s or 80 years old, sometimes semi-retired, and they want to reconnect with French cooking. They had their past in France, they travelled, and they want to be able to make some French dishes. That makes up a big part of the student group. And to answer your question about whether they reach out, as part of the courses, we have a private online community for students only that we’ve created. So when you enrol in the course, it’s not just online with only the course, you are also part of a huge crew. It’s called the French Cooking Academy Club. We’ve got more than 1,000 active members sharing things. So as soon as you go there, you can share your progress of what you’ve done, and you get your feedback from me and from the other students. It’s a bit of a big family, really, after all these years. 

That’s so great. Have any of those students gone on to do anything surprising with their French cooking skills that you know of? 

We had a student, a young girl in America, who knew nothing, she didn’t have a job and she didn’t have enough money to go to Culinary School. She actually took her courses and went on to work a fine dining restaurant and is a chef by now. But she had the total transformation of going from knowing nothing to being able to work in a restaurant via the courses. That’s a good story we’ve heard. Family wise, there’s a lot of reconnection with single parents, they have suddenly their kids over and they could never make anything. When suddenly they get kids over there making all these meals, and the kids can’t believe their parent can cook. Or there was another funny story where a woman was saying that, the mise en place, which is how to organise yourself in the kitchen, saved her marriage because the husband was so messy when he cooked all the time that she was on the point of divorcing him. He learned how to be meticulous and organise everything. We made a book and we had a book signing and she came and said oh, you saved our marriage. I’ve seen her face to face. 

You mention on your site that it’s really important to understand the why behind techniques or the why behind the recipes. Can you give me an example of what you mean by that or how that might play out in a typical lesson? 

I think this is one of the biggest hurdles that even cooks in France, where if you don’t go through a formal education or like a course like this, and you are cooking like this out of recipe can take you a certain way, you can reach a point where you’re making a sauce. Let’s take a hollandaise sauce as a technique and if it fails or anything like this, typically you don’t know why it fails. Oh, I can’t make it. It fails all the time. I’m not good enough, or whatever. French cooking is made og a lot of building blocks, like Lego. When you make something, you add one block plus another, plus another, and then it gives you this. So when you create something, if something typically goes wrong and you know what went wrong so that element was not right or something like that, you can usually correct things. You can get something back on track. And it also gives you more ideas. When you look at the recipe, you know the structure in your head, you know how it works, or if someone says, oh, that doesn’t seem right, you can say, well, exactly, it doesn’t. You missed that step, or that was too cold or that was too hot, or the temperature of your butter was not right. Oil should not be stored there or your eggs were cold or, there’s all kinds of little things. It’s really tiny little things like a mayonnaise,. At a very, very basic level, all the ingredients should be at room temperature. If you make a mayonnaise with cold eggs, it’s going to fail. If you know that, you know it failed because you have to use everything at room temperature. It’s all these things that lead you to a flawless experience. When you cook, even at the simple level, or complicated, you can go through with all your things and succeed in making your dishes and have the right outcome you remove that kind of guesswork. When you do all these things, you want to understand what’s going on and how to take things further if you want to. 

You’ve got a lot of different courses. From the getting started course through to Master French sauces, you’ve got one about quiches, cooking potatoes. How do you decide on the courses? 

The Getting Started course was the first one we created in France. That’s the package for for total beginners to go from nothing to intermediate. There was a logical process. The first three courses are the culinary basics, the things you need to know. But after that, I think it’s been a mix of asking, reaching out for all the students and the people in the club and, and by email to see what would they like to see? Is there something in particular they wanted to be covered? For instance, our latest course on ice cream. That was one that was actually almost chosen by everyone. They said, oh, we would love to have a course on ice cream and sorbets. But sometimes it’s also just me. I just think, okay, what’s missing in our list? What is the next useful thing? Because I’m always thinking, I don’t want to bring courses because courses, when you see them from afar like this on the website, it’s just a picture: quiche, potatoes. But when you actually go into the courses, they are actually very, very in depth and they’re all about explanation and that understanding  of the why. It’s not just video making the recipe, it’s the whole teaching. I talk about understanding each ingredient, how to deal with them, how to select them, how to use them, how to cook them. You will learn everything there is to know about potatoes of all angles. And then only we’re going to start to cook with potatoes, what potato you need to use for this, what potato for that. When you finish a course, you have some knowledge. So for me, I’m always looking for something that’s going to be useful for someone at home at some point or something that might be fun. We did a series on regional food, it’s called the Gastronomad Journey that takes you through France and I talk about the history of each region and we make special dishes from each region and there will be some fun facts. There’s different formats. Sometimes I’m playing around. 

For the ice cream one, it looks like there’s maybe four workshops. And then the bistro charcuterie is 45 lessons. So that’s a bit more of an investment in time. When you have 45 lessons, how long does that take you to film? If we go behind the scenes, setting up and filming and editing. 

Okay. So that, that really depends. Charcuterie can be quite involved. Some things are more involved than others. Some courses easily take three to four months to create. And we’re talking recipe writing, finding the ideas, creating a curriculum, filming the video, testing the recipes, a lot of testing goes on there, selecting the recipe and also finding what is useful. Because every course starts with the basics. So charcuterie for beginners, you will start with the very basics. You make a very simple pate and go on with rillettes. And then you progress and then you make these super difficult things towards the end. So, typically three to four months. It can take six months for the big courses. 

Do you film this at home in your own kitchen? Do you have an amazing kitchen? 

It’s the one you see in the course. That’s one of the reasons we moved to the country, we wanted to find a house with a great kitchen that could be used as a kitchen studio. That’s the whole idea as well with the school, what makes it special is that it’s really for home cooks. Everything is filmed in a home kitchen and I’m filming and I’m cooking in that kitchen with home appliances. So it’s all done on the spot and in a real, true home environment with pans and normal ovens. 

Is there a particular piece of equipment that you think that the home cook can’t be without? 

People think you need a lot of things. Even chefs start learning with tons of pans and tons of knives and all these utensils, and after that you end up with two or three pots, a wooden spoon, a whisk, a stock pot. But there’s nothing that is super quintessential. I think you probably have all the things you need already in your kitchen. It is a bit of a myth that you need a special thing. I would say the most important thing is a sieve: a good sieve, a fine mesh sieve and a normal sieve are quintessential. 

When I was speaking to Gabriel Gâté a few years ago now, he’s very much about getting people into the kitchen, and especially children. He recommended that people who don’t usually cook get a recipe, make the dish, and then make it often, and then every month learn a new recipe. So by the end of the year, you have 12 recipes. How many times do you think it takes to cook a particular dish to really perfect it? 

I would say at least three times. The very first time you make a recipe is going to be totally new for you. It may not be perfect and you’re not going to know it by heart. When you make it a second time, you’re going to get familiar with the ingredients. But again, the end result might not be perfect. There’s always a little bit of fine tuning. Practice make perfect. It’s true. It happens a lot with the students when they do the course. They try the one thing and even though the recipe comes out as expected, I tell them, try this and try that, and then second time they do it, it’s much better.  And the third time they make it wow. 

Which part of France are you from? 

I was born near Versailles, but I grew up in Fontainebleau, which is in the south of Paris. The chateau of Fontainebleau is there, which is very countryside, rural. We’ve got the big forest of Fontainebleau around there. It used to be a retreat for all the kings and all the nobles during the hunting season. That forest yields a lot of good stuff that we used to hunt for, mushrooms and chestnuts. I still like the countryside. I’m a bit of a rural person. 

I spent a year in the south of France a long time ago and was very luck to make good friends who took me out foraging. The most memorable meal, I’d say I had was a cèpe  or Porcini mushroom omelette. So fragrant. The eggs were so delicious. I just thought it was the best thing ever. Do you have a dish that’s especially memorable or meaningful to you when you cook? 

There’s a lot. I like all kinds of dishes. But when I was in Lyon, because I was exploring a lot of Paul Bocuse things, and when would go to the bistro there, there is a famous charcuterie item called the pâté en croute, which is part of charcuterie, which an elegant, huge pate encased in a very specific pastry that’s decorated and inside is all layers of meat, of duck breast, of cognac and truffles and things. I love that thing because of the craft in it and how every chef works to get it right. But there’s a most important thing that I really liked over there that make a lot of time is chicken and vinegar. It’s a mix of creamy, tangy, typical Lyonnaise cuisine style that I really liked. I like  dishes that really surprise me, taste wise. The cèpe omelette, I can understand that you liked those strong flavours. I’m all about flavours in my cooking. I like anything with saffron, even when you have a bouillabaisse, the real one there’s a lot of saffron in there. But there’s plenty of dishes. I like that. It is hard to pinpoint one specifically because there are so many things in France. 

True. And you have a book. What led to that? You’re already sharing so much content. Why a book as well? 

We were approached for the book by a publisher. We didn’t actually make the book and try to reach out to someone. They contacted us and at first we said no, but then we started to think, oh, maybe it’s another medium. I think what I liked about the book, when I thought about it, online is good, but not everybody is keen on doing something on the Internet and having to watch things online electronically. I thought a book could be a good idea to reach another types of audiences, people that maybe an older generation or don’t like computers and things like that. We were approached in 2022 by an American publisher because we work with a lot with American people and they asked us and finally we gave in and we said yes. It’s called 100 Essential Recipes for the Home Cook. It’s made for beginners, simple recipes, simple ingredients to find anywhere in your supermarket. But what I’ve done with that book is that I’ve gathered a mix of classics, but all the recipes that use some of the core techniques that I used. The more recipes you make, the more skilled you become at cooking. Because every single time you learn something new: how to make a sauce or to make a roux, how to make a bechamel, how to use that bechamel to make something else. That’s how we approached the book. It’s still a recipe book, but there’s plenty of hidden stuff in there. 

That must have been quite the process to produce that as well. A hundred recipes. That’s impressive. 

If you do a book like that, it’s much harder than you think. It can easily take you two years to make a book. It’s always in your head every single day. Let’s talk about Kate, because my partner, she’s talking about the food and of course she’s always with me on the side and everything and the creation of things. But for the book, she was also the photographer because we had to take photos. Every picture is also made by us. And Kate had to learn on the job how to become a food photographer in very short amount of time. She did a great job, they were pretty pleased. It was such a crazy rush, but we learned a lot of things. So it was quite a fun. And we managed to do it. It’s been very well received as well. So we’re pretty happy with this. 

Well, congratulations. It feels like you’re both very high achievers to do all this. 

And just the two of us. 

Amazing. Yes, it’s very impressive. What’s next for the French Cooking Academy? 

Well, of course we’re going to continue the school. But talking about books, we’ve done something with a publisher, and you mentioned Gabriel Gâté, he’s published more than 24 books, I think, and he was telling us, we’ve got the energy, and we are still young and we’re looking forward to more books, maybe doing more self-publishing. If we do more books, that could be something I would like to explore, maybe smaller format that are more useful, more targeted to very specific things and again, trying to help people at home and promote that French cooking is not that difficult. It’s a very hard thing to sell, to tell people, that French cooking is not that hard. But we are also moving towards, I would not say sustainable, but we try to grow our own stuff more and we try to source our food responsibly; we work with local farmers here, we know where we get our meat. It’s great, it’s healthy. You can save money; you can make some great contacts knowing about your food a bit more. I think all chefs need to know that. There’s great stuff out there. There’s more than the supermarkets say, and it doesn’t cost you more money. So perhaps in the future there’s going to be an accent on this education, but awareness as well. 

Well, that’s right, and it is a big topic of conversation in recent times, speaking to chefs who like to use all of the product, or as you say, who grow their own vegetables and then have a greater respect for that vegetable and so are less likely to waste parts of it. I think it would be great for home cooks to know more about that, reusing lemon rind for detergents and all those kinds of things that chefs naturally experiment with and do in the kitchen. It’s good for us as well at home. 

There’s actually lots of little things. When you make a vanilla custard, every time you use a vanilla bean and you scrub the seeds in the vanilla pod, and the vanilla pod always ends up in a bin. You can dry them, and you put them in sugar, then you end up with a vanilla sugar. Instead of buying with all kinds of additives you can have your pot of super fragrant vanilla sugar for your baking. Egg whites can be frozen and can be kept for weeks in your freezer if you use egg yolk for mayonnaise. And like you said, you can use other part of the vegetables that are not commonly used, like the root of parsley. If you grow parsley at home, the root can be used. There’s plenty of interesting stuff, but you don’t want to scare people neither. This is one of my biggest problems, I’m doing baby steps, because I know it’s very easy to scare people with, especially when it comes to French cooking, when you start to go too and tell them you can do this, start to grow things and transform your garden into a lush vegetable thing. You have to take it easy. May I ask about your cooking, what’s your approach? Do you tend to be more of a someone that likes to cook yourself? 

I do. I love cooking. I am very lucky because I get to eat out quite a bit because I get invited to places but I actually love being at home and cooking. I like having the time to cook and I think certainly living in France, although it was a long time ago, it made me really appreciate just treating simple food really well and enjoying the seasons a lot more perhaps than we do here. I’ve got a lot to learn. I’m thinking I probably should do one of your courses. 

When you want to make anything, do you have to go to a market, or can you find it at the supermarket?

I would love to never go to the supermarket, but I have to say with a full-time teaching job, I often do end up at the supermarket. I much prefer to go to the market and the butcher. In an ideal world I’d certainly like to do a village style shop and go to the particular people for the particular thing. 

We all want that but this is the thing, not everyone can spend their time going to the markets and picking the right carrot and the piece of meat. In Lyon, if you know the town, every Sunday, it’s a day for the Lyonnaise people that is dedicated to making food. On Sunday, they all make a family dish. Someone is going to cook something special. It is the one day of the week where they’re going to take the effort to say, this Sunday we’re going to try to go to the butcher or go to that market for that one special day. They try to keep on having that special meal. It could be sweet and could be savoury. But on Sundays, I thought it was quite interesting to have that dedication. Maybe once a month you could say, let’s have a special day making something a bit better than usual. 

It’s nice to have that intentional approach. And it does. If we set that time aside and just enjoy the whole process and then sharing it with your family or friends, it is really good. 

With a glass of wine, of course. 

So for people listening, the best thing to do is to direct them to your website and perhaps have a look at that?

Yes, just go to the website. The frenchcookingacademy.com and we put as much information as possible and there we keep on adding new things. 

www.frenchcookingacademy.com