Author Bill Buford has retracted his claim that famed chef Daniel Boulud, known for his eponymous restaurants, uses food coloring to make his pasta appear more yellow.
The allegation appears in Buford’s new book, Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret to French Cooking, and after Page Six pointed out the claim, Buford reached out to the publication to set the record straight.
“Thank you for the plug for the new book, but I need to ask for a correction,” Buford emailed Page Six. “Daniel does enhance the yellow of his pasta but not by artificial food coloring, as I said, but by a method he picked up in Italy, namely by adding a couple pinches of turmeric powder to the dough.”
“It is completely correct for chefs to enhance color with natural ingredients,” he added. “Like beets for a vibrant red. Or the green juice squeezed out of parsley leaves. Or a couple pinches of an Indian spice.”
The food coloring claim appears in Dirt thusly: “When I later found myself in Boulud’s kitchen, and I was on my own downstairs, among the prep cooks, I fell into admiring the deep egg-yolky tortellini that the pasta guy was making,” Buford writes, “and after asking if I could see the recipe discovered that, oh my, it included yellow food coloring.”
Buford told Page Six that he will be “correcting this in future editions of the book.”
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