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PASTA STRAINER TO JUNGLE CHEF
BRIGITTE DESVAUX TALKS FEEDING 100+ PEOPLE
IN THE HEART OF THE PANAMANIAN JUNGLE
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By: Greg Lepore
Photo by John Dupre via Kalu Yala Magazine
Dinner will be just as interesting: tilapia with a thai curry sauce, rice, and a cabbage salad. Next to today’s menu, a calendar with instructions for the following week.
As she gets to work prepping for the day’s meals, the nearly 100 students and staff she will feed are still sound asleep in their hammocks and sleeping bags. Soon, they too will be awake, and as each groggily walks into town square with one eye open, all will have one thing on their minds: breakfast. Desvaux is way ahead of them. Today’s breakfast is nearly complete: scrambled farm fresh eggs over rice with a dash of hot sauce. Pineapple on the side. For the vegans, oatmeal complete with all the fixings: peanut butter, craisins, assorted nuts, and Hershey chocolate seasoning. When the plates have been adorned, the howl of a conch shell horn signals breakfast is ready.
In the heart of the Panamanian jungle, rules are scarce, and nearly all are dictated by the sun. Rule #1: when the sun rises, so does everything else. No one knows this better than Brigitte Desvaux, head chef of the Kalu Yala Institute’s Farm-to-Table Culinary Arts Program.
Desvaux’s day starts when the sun is barely visible on the horizon. After a river bath and a light breakfast of oatmeal, baked plantains and coffee, she makes her way to her jungle kitchen and checks the giant white board that adorns the back wall of the wood rancho.
Scribbled in blue marker is today’s menu. For lunch: stuffed peppers, tomato salad, and sandia. The peppers are to be halved long ways, lightly seasoned with salt, pepper, and adobo, then stuffed with rice, baked beans, cauliflower, and mozzarella cheese. The tomato salad will consist of diced tomatoes and pesto. For dessert, fresh watermelon sprinkled with basil.
Donning a proven ability to turn jungle fantasy into culinary reality, one would be dumbfounded to learn that just 4 years earlier, Desvaux’s cooking experience was limited to straining pasta.
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Born in Rhode Island, the jungle chef does not recall eating a particularly exciting dietary regiment as a child “it was always just based on whatever my mom had stocked in the fridge.”
While she says her Rhode Island diet was nothing to write home about, the experiences Desvaux had visiting her father’s family in Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mar, France played a significant role in developing her culinary expertise. Her father, she says, was an amazing cook. But her grandparents were even better.
Desvaux recalls watching her grandparents prepare the classic French meal at family dinners: an apertif, or cocktail hour, meant to stimulate the pallet. The usual was champagne served with nuts, olives, or crackers. This was followed by an appetizer, usually soup, followed by an entrée consisting of an incarnation of potatoes and either chicken, pork, beef, veal, lamb, duck, or rabbit. After the entrée, a salad, and then a plate of assorted cheeses. Finally, a cake or cookies for dessert.
In spite of her experience with delicate French cuisine, Desvaux says cooking was not a passion that developed at an early age. “I would help out at occasional family dinners, but I wouldn’t do much,” she admits.
But today Desvaux’s passion for her craft radiates into every dish. What changed?
Desvaux began her jungle cooking career as a farmhand on the Institute’s budding organic farm. When the farm was installed in May 2013, Brigitte became enthralled by the idea of growing her own food and then preparing that food for others. She was captivated by the fact that she could take the ingredients she grew, walk a few feet to the kitchen, and turn those ingredients into a meal.
It was that same month that the Institute began searching for its next chef. Desvaux decided to roll the dice.
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"I realized I didn’t really like the planting part of farm-to-table. But I felt really attached to the plants, and I discovered that cooking was an alternative way of staying attached to the farm.”
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With a limited cooking background, Brigitte had to dig deep into her childhood memories to give herself the jumpstart she needed to become a successful chef.
“Now that I have been cooking for a couple years, I look back and I realize I have absorbed quite a significant amount from everything that [my grandparents] taught me, but I never realized it at the time.”
In the back corner of Brigitte’s kitchen is a stack of thick cookbooks, each at least a few hundred pages. She studies them, she says, not for their recipes but for inspiration. After 3 years of trial-and-error, Brigitte realizes she’s absorbed a lot of culinary information throughout her life. Now, she says, her subconscious is revealing itself, and a lot of the meals “just feel right.”
Her kitchen is quite simple. On the spice shelf is salt, pepper, nutmeg, red pepper, curry, adobo, paprika, and grated parmesan cheese. Olive oil and eggs stand at the ready nearby, as do sliced lemons, jars of peanut butter, bags of onions and garlic, a watermelon, cans of assorted nuts, oatmeal, dozens of pineapples, massive bags of rice, rows of canned beans, and an endless supply of hot sauce. Next to the gallon bottle of hand sanitizer are piles of grasses and leaves of all shapes, colors, textures and sizes. To the untrained eye, these serve no purpose. To the chef, each offers a distinct opportunity.
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Four silver propane tanks line up single file next to two ovens, two stoves, and two flat tops. Massive pots and pans, tongs, and even a dough roller hang above the appliances. Next to the walkway hang six different size knives with color-coded handles, a row of spatulas, and a cheese grater attached to the wall like a pencil sharpener.
Empty coffee mugs are everywhere, a reminder that cooking for 100 people is not easy, even if Desvaux makes it look easy.
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On the back wall outside of the kitchen are enormous bowls, okay to use for cooking, but much better suited for conjuring up potions. Just off to the side are compost buckets where flies congregate for their block parties. A giant cow skull complete with a pineapple crown and glass candle case earrings adorns the front of the kitchen.
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There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the placement of the ingredients and materials, and hardly anything is labeled. Yet Desvaux seems to know exactly where everything is within a moment’s notice.
Tasked with filling the stomachs of 100 hungry laborers in a remote section of the Tres Brazos Valley, Brigitte’s first goal is making sure everyone gets enough complete proteins to fulfill their bodies’ needs.
Her largest challenge is compensating for the valley’s lack of meat, the source of the average person’s complete proteins. For this, she relies on rice and beans, a staple in this region of Central America. When she wants to get creative, she turns to cereal and milk or nuts, eggs, tofu and quinoa.
With fewer people, meals are more varied, and Brigitte recalls a time when her jungle meals consisted of 5-6 items per plate. “We used to do a salad with chicken, potatoes or stuffing, bread and fried cheese. It’s a lot easier to cook for a smaller amount of people. You can use more ingredients straight from the farm and it allows you to be more creative.”
Because both her farm and kitchen are in the process of being upgraded, Brigitte’s ingredients at present mostly come from the Chiriquí province of West Panama. Her fish come from Panama City’s fish market and are usually caught the same morning of her order. Rice, nuts, and beans she buys in bulk, but she envisions a future in which the bulk items are grown right on her farm.
Though the head chef, Brigitte is not entirely alone in her endeavors. Her partners in crime are Corinne, a former student of Brigitte’s, and Christy, Brigitte’s hometown friend. Corinne, like Brigitte, finds inspiration in farming and understanding the uses of different plants. Christy on the other hand comes from a professional culinary background where she worked in upscale kitchens that demanded consistent perfection.
Desvaux’s favorite dish to make? Banana boats with beef and brown gravy. She has a list of recipes named after her, she says, and this is the latest. It’s her go-to during the Institute’s “fine dining night.”
However, her signature dish, she says, is Plasagna: plantain strips instead of noodles, sweet pepper and pesto sauce instead of tomato sauce, and homemade ricotta made with milk from the cows of the surrounding area.
The jungle chef owns two of the community’s dogs, but the others too follow her around as if they were hers. When it comes to Brigitte Desvaux, the four-legged and two-legged creatures of the Institute have one thing in common, “They like me because I feed them.”