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Book review: ‘The Grand Tour Cookbook’

Tinkoff-saxo chef hannah grant shows readers how to cook their way through a grand tour in her newly translated book..

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There was a time — and not long ago — that grand tour riders left their diet during the race to chance. There wasn’t any alternative; the quality of race hotels — and their kitchens — varied widely from stage to stage, and you ate what was available because, well, you were hungry.

But in the era of marginal gains, teams have realized the central role nutrition plays in riders’ ability to sustain good form over the course of a three-week race. Teams began by working with nutritionists to improve riders’ diets, and it was only a matter of time before teams discovered a way to solve the problem of the unpredictability of food during the races. The last five years have touched off something of a renaissance in cycling nutrition as teams built custom kitchen trucks and hired full-time chefs to staff those trucks.

Among team chefs, none have built a bigger following than Tinkoff-Saxo’s Danish chef, Hannah Grant . Grant joined the team in 2011 and, in 2013, published her “Grand Tour Cookbook” in Danish, based on her experience cooking for the team at the Tour and other major races.

The book was finally released in English weeks before the beginning of the 2015 Tour de France.

The book is laid out using the rhythm of a grand tour, 20 stages and two rest days with a host of dinner recipes — plus a dessert — to choose from for each day, representing what Grant might cook for the team for each stage. There are separate sections on breakfast and a look at what goes into the musette bags riders snag as they pass through the feed zone. (Since riders don’t get a break for lunch, regular stages do not include lunchtime recipes.)

There are additional sections with instructions on how to prepare the various stocks and sauces Grant uses through the book. Stages and sections are occasionally intercut with rider and staff interviews and other information about food and nutrition.

The layout is smart, engaging, and gorgeous. Virtually every recipe is accompanied by a photo of the dish, so the book is bright and colorful and mouthwatering. At home, I generally cook dinner for my wife and children, and I worked my way through the three weeks of the Tour de France pulling recipes from the book. After all, growing kids are not all that different from stage racers — they need a ton of food, as nutritious as possible.

The recipes are well-presented, the ingredients helpfully listed in the margin of the text with a little code to tell you whether the dish is appropriate for someone eating a diet free of gluten, nuts, or dairy. It’s a chef’s cookbook: The recipes are concise and clear and to the point, but they could be a little challenging for an inexperienced cook. The book’s organization is undeniably a gimmick, but it’s a good one and Grant has clearly put some thought into how the different meals fit into the arc of a grand tour. The book has a clear and well-organized index that helped me find the recipe I know I must have made somewhere during the race’s passage through the Alps, even when I couldn’t remember which stage it appeared in in the book.

During our Tour de France cooking experiment, I didn’t cook from the book every night, but we enjoyed following along, picking out interesting recipes and trying them out. Most of the recipes we tried will go into our regular dinner menu rotation. It’s a good addition to the bookshelf for anybody who enjoys a good meal but is interested in cycling, fitness, and nutrition. It is available via hannahgrant.com and at select cycling retailers.

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Life in the saddle.

by Tim Wiggins

Book Review – 'The Grand Tour Cookbook' by Hannah Grant

"You are what you eat. I have never been faster..." Michael Rogers

Great review and mouthwatering pictures. I bought this book January 2014 and it is indeed an excellent and inspirational cookbook.

I have had this cookbook for some time now, and the recipes are just so good, I mean really good. The photos in the book are so beautiful, that it is a pleasure just to look at all of them.

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The Grand Tour Cookbook

Publisher description.

The long awaited ultimate performance cookbook, a modern classic, a must-have for all cycling aficionados serious about nutritional intake. Translated from the original in Danish, Hannah Grant s unmissable cookbook takes you through a 3 week, with 350-pages of easy-to-prepare recipes containing allergy friendly, natural, un-processed foods, The Grand Tour Cookbook is the ultimate companion in the kitchen for athletes. Based on actual food prepared for professional cycling s grueling 3-week Grand Tours including the Giro d'Italia, Tour de France and the Vuelta, this book is a guide on how to cook, what to eat and how to maximize athletic performance throughout the year. Hannah Grant has a background in modern sports nutrition and The Grand Tour Cookbook focuses on the challenges presented by the caloric requirements of an endurance athlete: solutions are presented that comprise a beneficial carbohydrate intake, a bounty of ideas to keep vegetables, proteins and good fats captivating and mouth-watering. Maximise your performance by changing the way you eat - lose weight, get more energy, conquer those goals and become a successful rider. Acknowledged by the world s best restaurant executive head chef Rene Redzepi (NOMA, Copenhagen), the book also features insight and experience from Exercise Physiologist-Nutrition Scientist Stacy T Sims, MSc, PhD, World Tour riders: Alberto Contador, Peter Sagan, Michael Rogers, Nicholas Roche, Ivan Basso, Roman Kreuziger, Matti Brechel, Michael Valgren, Michael Mørkøv, Christoffer Juul, Chris Anker, Sports Director Nicki Sørensen and Body Therapist Kristoffer Glavind Kjær. Read opinions on food and nutrition for body and mind and how they optimise performance through eating intelligently.

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PEZ Bookshelf: The New Grand Tour Cookbook

Tour de france cooking.

For a sport that is noted for its conservatism in the professional ranks—both by managers and riders– cycling has, in fact, seen many innovations in the past few decades. Even as the business aspects of the sport still conspire to keep bike racing firmly in a niche, there have been the obvious technical advances, such as carbon frames emphasizing aerodynamics, electronic shifting, disc brakes and tubeless tires. Add to this the exhaustively detailed re-examination of training methods, including periodization, HIIT workouts, the rediscovery of Zone 2, using heart rate monitors, power meters and altitude camps, and the realization that recovery is a useful thing. The third leg of the stool, along with technology and training, is nutrition, and it is surprising how comparatively recent is the discovery that the right food builds the Right Stuff. One of the pioneers in this has been Hannah Grant, a Danish chef who first came onto the scene when hired by Bjarne Riis for his Tinkoff-Saxo Bank pro team. In 2015 her “The Grand Tour Cookbook” was published in English and now we have a sequel, “The New Grand Tour Cookbook,” marking a decade in cycling’s kitchen.

For serious cyclists, food equates to fuel so it is weird to an outsider to see how long it took for the focus on nutrition to become a point of emphasis. In his Foreword to the book, Bjarne Riis writes that when he began as a pro rider in the Merckx Era his team manager thought emulating Merckx was the way to go. Supposedly Merckx ate steak, so it was steak for breakfast, lunch and dinner—tough, nasty steak, according to Riis. As the eventual head of pro teams himself, Riis wanted to do things differently and hence the arrival of Grant. Today all the World Tour teams have at least one dedicated chef, along with professional nutritionists and this has even extended to food trucks to follow the Grand Tours so that the team chef does not have to inconvenience everyone in a hotel kitchen.

After a stint in the Danish Navy (!), Hannah Grant obtained her chef’s diploma in 2007 and went to work cooking in a wide range of environments. In 2010 Riis decided his team needed a new chef with a Michelin-star background to radically change the team’s diet and Grant was chosen from three highly-qualified candidates. She was to remain with the team until 2016, being the only employee in all three Grand Tours, smaller stage races and two training camps each year, being on the road for something like 140 days annually.

She writes: “The plan was ambitious—the team was to develop a completely new nutritional strategy, where variety, taste, and pure ingredients were to be part of the daily life of the team’s riders.” Ambitious indeed as it turned out to be a considerable challenge. She was surprised to discover that “the world’s best athletes were completely indifferent to what the team had planned for their diet and nutrition.” They were habituated to eating soggy fries and white pasta in hotel buffets so the arrival of quinoa, brown rice, fish and vegetable came as an unwelcome change. Over time she came up with a system using a 2:1 ratio: two parts familiar ingredients high one the list of favourites to one part new (“or less loved”) ingredients.

Nobody was going to sort out what was on their plates so everything got eaten. The riders learned that they actually liked some of the less known things and the chef’s job got easier. From her experiences came “The Grand Tour Cookbook” in 2013, translated from Danish to English, German, French and Czech subsequently. One can argue that this book was highly influential and even today a used copy is quite expensive if you can find one so this new cookbook is most welcome.

The book opens with basic information on nutrition (fats, carbs, proteins, vitamins and minerals) and provides a short list of useful kitchen equipment and another for supplies. While the experienced cook can gloss over this part, it is apparent that the book is aimed at athletes wanting to improve what they eat. Her instructions on what to do before using the book to cook are wonderful and will encourage those starting out. There is also good advice on how to actually fuel for training, depending on time and intensity, as well as tips on hydration.

“What does it take to complete a Tour de France?” heads one section. You can see how important getting proper fuel into the system is when considering that a pro cyclist burns 5,000 to 8,000 kcal per day. This means on average over 21 stages and two rest days there would have to be an intake of around 143,500 kcal per rider for the duration of the Tour. This would be the equivalent of 435 kg of broccoli or, perhaps more attractively, 388 litres of lager beer but the author does not recommend taking this route!

Four or five recipes are featured in each chapter, denoted as “Stages” from 1 to 21, plus extra chapters on breakfast ideas and useful things, such as making stock, homemade pasta, and sauces—and even how to properly boil an egg! There is also the most complex index we have ever seen at the back of a book, arranging contents by chronology, plant-based, baked and sweet stuff, energy bars and drinks, etc.

During the three weeks of a Grand Tour it is important to vary ingredients as much as possible so, for example, it is not always chicken done the same way. Going through the recipes, certain ingredients make appearances fairly often, including sweet potatoes, pasta and (hooray for the Canadian Edge!) maple syrup. There are a lot of fresh vegetables and a pretty wide variety of herbs, but nothing not easily found. The only unfamiliar item to me was “dukkah,” an Egyptian roasted nut and spice blend that is actually quite easy to make. Each of the recipes is presented clearly, with ingredients and measurements shown on the left of the text, with instructions clearly set out. Each recipe is accompanied by a full-page photograph of the result.

There are many appetizing foods here, such as “Green Asparagus with Cilantro Sauce,” or “Seared Tuna with Nectarines.” Along with Old Faithfuls such as Salad Niçoise, you will find Magnus Cort’s go-to “Smash Burger” and “Falafel Waffle with Salted Red Cabbage, Pomegranate and Yogurt Dressing” and a lot more to drool over. One of Grant’s important instructions for cooking is to “enjoy your food!”

Interspersed with the guidance and recipes are a series of very enlightening sections contributed by professional racers, current and retired, including Kasper Asgreen, Jens Voigt, Matt Stephens, Ashleigh Moolman Pasio, as well as Team Jumbo-Visma (now Visma-Lease A Bike) consulting sports dietician Karin Lambrechtse. These really set the book apart with their insight into how athletes view and use food.

“The New Grand Tour Cookbook” not only offers healthful and attractive recipes that nobody should be afraid to make, whatever their cooking skill level, but also sound advice for training and racing athletes on how to make the most of that nourishment. This large hardcover book is superbly designed and presented with gorgeous photos and in our view justifies its price (which is not inconsistent with other high-quality publications.

Musette Publishing was started as a vehicle for the publication of Hannah Grant’s books and more information about her and her writing, as well as an excellent blog about food, can be found on her website (see below).

“The New Grand Tour Cookbook” by Hannah Grant Foreword by Bjarne Riis 352 pp., profusely illustrated, hardcover Helmin & Sorgenfri and Musette Publishing, 2023 ISBN 978-879-419-0206 *All photos are from the book.

The book is available from Hannah Grant (in Danish, English and German!) directly at: hannahgrant.com , in both hardback ( C$64.00 ) or E-book ( C$31.00 ) versions.

Pen-and-Sword Books’ subsidiary Casement UK manages Musette Publishing’s distribution and offers the book as well for GBP 38.95 here: www.casemateuk.com

Growing up in the two-wheel desert that was Canada decades ago, Leslie Reissner discovered the joys of cycling when he and a friend rode from London to Munich one summer after high school. Since then, he has done some long distance riding in Europe, including the Camino de Santiago (which apparently entitles him to reduced time in Purgatory), dragged himself over major climbs in the Alps, Pyrenees, Dolomites, Vosges and Appalachians, and even done some racing. In spite of owning 11 bicycles and a cool sports car, Leslie still stays indoors for six months of the year due to the lousy weather and terrible roads in Ottawa but at least he has time to listen to classical music and read a lot of cycling books.

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The Grand Tour Cookbook Kindle Edition

• Print length 530 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Musette Publishing
• Publication date June 18, 2015
• File size 19043 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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About the author, product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01F5PQOOU
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Musette Publishing; English Edition (June 18, 2015)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 18, 2015
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 19043 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 530 pages
• #605 in Cycling (Kindle Store)
• #877 in Gastronomy Essays (Kindle Store)
• #2,381 in Gastronomy Essays (Books)

About the author

Hannah grant.

Hannah Grant, Author of the Grand Tour cookbook and EAT RACE WIN, was born in Denmark in 1982 to a Danish mother and Scottish father and grew up in a loving and creative family filled with people from the theatre and the restaurant industry. It fired her passion for food, creativity and cooking which has been her life s work. After a year spent in the Danish Royal Navy in 2003, Hannah joined the culinary institute of Copenhagen to pursue her dream of combining creative skills and cooking with traveling, all the while continuing to learn, evolve and develop. First she spent a year on a kite boarding expedition boat sailing the South Pacific. Hannah sourced local ingredients and cooked wholesome meals for the kiteboarders and surfers on board. It was an experience that triggered a new and exciting interest in nutrition, special diets and performance fuel. It was the start of a unique culinary adventure that shaped her life Diploma in hand she then ventured into some of the best restaurants in the world including the Fat Duck in the UK and Noma in Denmark before the door opened onto a completely different world of food and endurance sport. In 2010, Hannah was hired by Bjarne Riis to cook for the riders on his professional cycling team. Throughout the season she travelled full time with the team through the incredible culinary touchpoints of France, Italy and Spain. During her 5 years with the team Hannah developed a close working relationship with Sports physiologist Dr. Stacy Sims Ph.d. The pair clicked instantly and started bringing innovative ideas to the table about fueling endurance athletes at the highest level. It was the start of the process that would end with the publication of the Grand Tour Cookbook in 2013. Originally published in Danish, then translated into English, French and German in 2015. The core themes of the book was translated into the TV show Eat, Ride, Win (Amazon Prime) which followed Hannah and her crew as they cooked for a cycling team throughout the 2017 Tour de France. On a daily basis Hannah Grant works with recipe development for her own brand as well as in collaboration with various Magazines and companies as well as doing motivational speaking and workshops.

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Varen er lagt i indkøbskurven

Hannahgrant.com

Pizzabogen er til alle der elsker pizza, hvad end du er begynder eller garvet pizzabager - og også de glutenfri. Dyk ned i Hannahs vilde Pizza univers og ta dine pizzaer til nye højder.

PIZZA BOGEN

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The New Grand Tour Cookbook 2 - Pakke

The Cake Cookbook

The cake cookbook er på dansk og til dig der elsker kage, gerne vil leve en sund livsstil med masser af grøntsager - og som aldrig går på kompromis med smagen..

Lær hvordan du forvandler almindelige grøntsager til lækre kager ved at bruge:

🥕 Gulerødder 🍠 Sød kartoffel 🥔 Kartofler

Lær også hvordan du bager kager, der er:

👉 Glutenfri  👉 Uden tilsat sukker  👉 Uden mælkeprodukter  

Dem du bare skal ha' !

Ebog - the new grand tour cookbook 2 (epub.3 fixed), the cake cookbook (dansk), cake cookbook bundle (english), den coq au vin blanc.

Coq au vin blanc     Middel 4 personer 90 minutter   1 hel kylling eller 4 hele kyllingelår 2 spsk. olivenolie 4 porrer 1 fennikel 3 løg 1 helt...

Risotto med Ærter og citron

Le Gulekalender med Hannah Grant Etape 17 Asgreens Risotto - det er en vinder!   Husk at du kan købe kogebogen med alle opskrifterne i linket nedenunder.  ⚡️ HUSK Du kan finde...

Salat med Kylling og mango - Le Gulekalender

Le Gulekalender med Hannah Grant Etape 17 Kyllingesalat med Mango - en fantastisk sommersalat perfekt til frokost eller et let aftensmåltid.   Husk at du kan købe kogebogen med alle opskrifterne...

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Top 10 books about the Grand Tour

Adding finish to young aristocrats’ education in centuries past, and recorded by Goethe, Sterne and others, these alluring journeys had a very dark side

T he Grand Tour was one of the defining educational experiences of the 18th century, a kind of travelling finishing school, comprising aristocratic visits to ancient cultural sites, princely art galleries, and exclusive Enlightenment soirees. Typically, British “tourists” (the word dates from 1772) visited France, Germany and Italy. Some, like Byron, even went on to Greece and Turkey for headier pursuits. It was a year of sightseeing, hobnobbing and sex before returning home with good memories – and possibly syphilis. But this was strictly an elite experience. It was very much not for the oiks.

My new novel tells the story of two brothers dispatched on to the Grand Tour in the 1760s to make fashionable new friends. Instead they meet the magnificently savage Lavelle, who destroys their plans. There is plenty of sex and culture in the book, but as a writer, I am more interested in the other side of history, the history of outsiders.

The Grand Tour is the ultimate story of insiders: rich, white Europeans go on an exclusive jolly before commencing a life of power and privilege. We can all imagine a certain blond-haired chap having done it as a youth. Writing my novel, I was asking: is there an outsider history of the Grand Tour? Does the other even exist in the Enlightenment, which spoke of freedom, but from the most elite vantage point?

1. The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century by Jeremy Black (1992) If you want a readable introduction to the subject, this is it. It covers everything from the harsh realities of life on the road, the still-perilous journeys, that discovery of sex and suddenly running out of money 1,000 miles from home. It also shows how unforeseen events (the French Revolution) could suddenly change everything. Should you too be living through a time where unforeseen events have suddenly changed everything, I recommend it.

2. Of Travel by Sir Francis Bacon (1625) Gleaned from his own journeys around France, Italy and Spain, polymath genius Bacon recommends travellers should keep a journal, meet locals, get them to show you around, visit many famous sights, and regard travel as an illuminating experience. It is amazing to think these were new ideas then, but as with so much of modern life, Bacon had to show us first.

3. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett (1751) Frankly, Peregrine Pickle is a pain in the arse. The Grand Tour is only part of this story – the hero only gets as far as France before turning back – but he is cantankerous, offensive and hilarious right across his travels, not least in poisonous pen portraits of literary enemies such as Henry Fielding. George Orwell hated the book, deriding its snobbish, elitist impulses. But then again, Orwell was proudly, openly homophobic.

4. Travels through France and Italy by Tobias Smollett (1766) Despite Peregrine Pickle’s awfulness, you still want to like Smollett because of the circumstances in which he wrote his hugely influential Grand Tour travelogue: grief-stricken, fleeing the death of his only child. But the same wonderfully awful Smollett who insulted and berated through that book now picks stupid, pointless real-life fights all the way across France. He hates his travel companions and is dubiously withering about Catholic southern Europe. But his wicked – in the real sense – humour and perceptive eye make this glorious, shameless, appalling fun.

5. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne (1768) Written in response to Smollett’s travelogue, it was allegedly inspired when the two writers met. Sterne so disliked Smollett that he created the odious, fabulously named Smelfungus, whom his own alter ego, Yorick, meets en route. Wandering aimlessly around France, Yorick is more interested in sex than culture. In so doing, Sterne cleverly reminds us of a big part of the Tour’s appeal for young British people: sex.

6. Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex Since the Grand Tour by Ian Littlewood (2001) Speaking of which, this very entertaining book explores the Grand Tour more fully as an opportunity for sex of every variety, frowned upon back home. It also considers the influence of the Tour on how we’ve holidayed ever since. Are you a Connoisseur, a Pilgrim or a Rebel? This book shows you how the Grand Tour shaped how you travel.

7. Italian Journey by Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1816) Where the British snigger and satirise, the Germans bring poetry. Italian Journey is a lovely work suffused with Goethe’s sincere, lush Romanticism – genuinely new after the hard-eyed satires of the 18th century. Ruminations on art, culture, history, climate, even geology hover beautifully, while Goethe shows how Italy seemed to the Grand Tourist – a great civilisation simultaneously alive and in ruins. Which is all great: but still white, male, elite business as usual.

8. Ladies of the Grand Tour by Brian Dolan (1992) Women rarely feature much in writing about the Tour but Dolan’s survey captures its liberating – sometimes revolutionary – impact on British women, celebrating them as writers, thinkers and observers. It finds interesting links between travel and radicalism for that first generation of women we now see as feminists, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft .

9. Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) Speaking of whom, you could probably make a good argument for the influence of the Tour on Shelley’s Frankenstein, but Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter also wrote an account of her own experience of the Grand Tour. Today, it’s a fascinating document of a politically radical young woman venturing off on her own adventures, claiming a female voice in an otherwise male space. And what a voice – insightful, polemical, literary – and all written when she was just 20. Marvellous.

10. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) But while the upper classes had such fun on the Tour, many people in the 18th century were on far darker journeys. Equiano’s autobiographical masterpiece travels from his childhood in (what is now) Nigeria to slavery in the Caribbean and freedom – and fame in Britain as a leading black activist. His book thus becomes a horrifically clever inversion of the classic Grand Tour narrative, boldly smashing open the vanity of so much of the Enlightenment.

In my book, Lavelle casts a withering eye over the self-regard of the Enlightenment. He retains his ire most of all for the adored Voltaire, who was also an antisemite who sucked up to autocrats. “The world is rotten,” Lavelle says. “Lovers of books, do you think they do not rape their maids? And philosophers, do they not whip their slaves?” Equiano teaches us the truth of 18th-century Europe as much as Voltaire, Sterne and Smollett. It is he, the outsider, who tells the truth of history, every bit as much as – or more than – its privileged heroes.

The Intoxicating Mr Lavelle by Neil Blackmore is published by Cornerstone. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com .

• Laurence Sterne
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Mary Shelley

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Over 100 players will converge at the Bujumbura Golf Club in Burundi this Saturday for the KCB East Africa Golf Tour.

The golfers will be seeking a place in the Tour's Grand Finale scheduled for December 6. 

The nine-hole golf club will play host to top amateur golfers across the East Africa region. 

 Bujumbura Golf Club captain Huynen Benjamin said: “The KCB East Africa Golf Tour has played a pivotal role in bolstering the sport in the East African region and empowering thousands of golfers to hone their skills and nurture emerging talent."

"The club is elated to once again partner with the bank for the second year running in this noble initiative that will be instrumental in growing this sport.”

The Burundi leg of the series, which is the first outside Kenya, will see the morning tee get underway at 6:30 am and the afternoon session will start at 12:30 pm at the par 71 golf course.

In Kenya, the tour has so far traversed Mombasa, Nakuru, Kakamega, Eldoret, Nandi, and Kericho counties.

"Our interaction with golfers so far has been commendable and the numbers we are receiving across the different courses are high.

Through the series, we are making an impact by reaching as many people as possible," he went on.

"We want to grow this sport to an elite level and build the next generation of golfers,” KCB Group Director Marketing and Communications Rosalind Gichuru said.

In the Kenyan series, the tour will resume action on May 17 at the Nakuru Golf Course. 

Konzolo and team book spot in KCB Golf Series Grand Finale

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