It is with great pleasure that we are announcing today that Sébastien Houillon is joining Délidoor as our new Executive Chef. This announcement is for us an opportunity to share with you some insights into our food production principles.
Who is Sebastien?
Sébastien has started his chef journey and learnt his craft in London as a sous-chef for the world-renowned Marco Pierre. He decided to move to Australia 15 years ago and has since held multiple positions in restaurants and has also operated his own catering business. Sébastien has developed some unique skills in cooking delicious and clean frozen prepared meals.
As a key member of the Délidoor team, Sébastien will be overseeing the kitchen operations including the produce sourcing and the relationship with our local suppliers. He will play a key part along with Jacques and Mathieu in the development of new recipes. With the help of Sébastien, Délidoor intends to become a leader in prepared meal delivery in Sydney and later in major Australian capital cities.
Délidoor kitchen operation principles
Sebastien has a team of 4 cooks working alongside him in our commercial kitchen in Sydney’s Inner West, and each member of the team is key in implementing our vision of food production.
At Délidoor we pride ourselves on our kitchen operation principles. We believe that to guarantee the best customer experience and to bring good, clean and easy food for all households (Read Our Story here) we need to abide by three key principles: control, tradition, and staff empowerment, and Sebastien is instrumental in bringing this to life.
Control
To ensure the best experience for our customers we make sure we control everything we do. With this in mind, we decided that we would do all the recipe creation and cooking in-house and not outsource any of it. We operate our own commercial kitchen and Sebastien and his team cook each dish from scratch themselves. We pride ourselves on selecting only the best produce available, and we do not use any vegetable powders, highly processed ingredients, or flavours. All our produce is sourced by our own produce buyer, Frank, at the Flemington market.
Tradition
Traditional cooking techniques: We use traditional cooking techniques, and we don’t take any shortcuts. We know for a fact that cooking delicious meals takes time, like when you decide to cook at home a delicious meal for the family. In our kitchen we slice, chop, mince, roast, bake, simmer, steam, broil, sauté, sear, brown and char. You name it, we do it, when it comes to cooking or preparation methods. As an example, all in our Marchand de Vin sauce (see photo below) is made from scratch by Chef Sébastien using Shallots, Garlic, Red wine, Salt Pepper, Olive Oil and homemade Stock.
Empowerment
Staff empowerment: We genuinely believe in staff empowerment and involve all our cooks in the recipe development process. We enjoy showcasing the unique dishes from the home countries of our staff, one example is our amazing Green Curry (see photo below) developed by Chef Rungkhajohnsak, our Thai chef.
Thai Green Chicken Curry
