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Originally I was a business advisor.
I founded a vegan catering
company for the simple reason
that I ate a vegan currywurst
that was so good I just wanted to
sell it as well. I’m a vegan myself
and wanted to spread the idea to
the rest of the world – without
doing it in a preachy way. The best
way to do this was with a simple
concept. As well as the currywurst,
we added other traditional fast
food classics like burgers and sweet
potato fries. Now we do brunch
too. 80 percent of our customers
are either vegan or vegetarian, or
just come because the food tastes
so good.
I don’t personally spend much
time in the trucks any more.
When we started in 2014, though,
there were only two of us, so of
course I did everything. I’m not
a professional chef, so I never
really learnt my trade as such, but
just kept trying things out – and
luckily it tasted great. The recipes
for our sauces, for example, were
created by us.
There’s nothing worse than
a blunt knife. The right tool has
to fit perfectly in your hand and
be the right size – like the chef’s
knives from the Grand Gourmet
series by WMF. In the beginning,
our tools were still rented and not
particularly good either. I didn’t
have much of an idea about
catering when we first started.
At some point, though, I realised
that a high-quality knife like this
one is extremely important and
makes work a great deal easier.
Christian Kuper (35) has been
Managing Director of the
Hamburg-based vegan food
truck company Vincent Vegan
since 2014.
Y
ou have to treat a knife the way you’d treat a woman: with affection and tenderness.
That way, it will stay loyal to you,” says Markus Jüngert, and he should know: the Head
of Gastronomy at WMF in Geislingen, Baden-Württemberg, has decades of practical
experience in the kitchen and so has used countless different knives in his time. He also
puts on training seminars for sales assistants in the branches, where he lets participants discover for
themselves what a good knife can do.
The knife is the most important tool in the kitchen. The WMF product range covers up to 30
different types of knives and 10 different series for various types of food. How wide a choice you
should have in your own knife block, or magnetic knife rack, is of course a matter of taste. A big
kitchen knife, though, is something that no kitchen should be without. That’s what our food trucker
Christian tell us, as does our hobby chef Nina and of course Markus Jüngert from WMF.
You can even do your bit at home to make sure your knives retain their sharpness and precision.
“When storing your knives in the knife block, you should always have the cutting edge facing
upwards,”, advises Markus Jüngert. Chopped vegetables should also always be removed from the
chopping board with the knife turned upside down, so that the sharp side does not scratch the
material and go blunt in the process.
•
SOMETHING BIG’S HAPPENING ON THE TRUCK.
People from all walks of life in Hamburg are happy to queue up
wherever one of Vincent Vegan’s three trucks can be found.
Dish
by WMF
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