Slow food, soul food: eating healthy while traveling

Pickles and Sprouts

The Food Lab is Executive Chef John Bakker’s first love. It is a flavor library of jars stacked floor to ceiling with kimchi, ferments, and pickles. From honeycomb in vinegar to a whole head of preserved garlic, when the chefs are having fun the food tastes better! It often takes a funny pickle to complete the dish.

Everyone’s talking about the benefits of pickling nowadays, and you can have a go during our Pickles, Yogurts and Sprouts workshops at Six Senses Douro Valley, Portugal. The organic produce comes from our own gardens and, by discovering the properties of these ingredients and their health benefits, you can also explore how easy it is to create sustainable healthy food habits.

Across all our Six Senses properties, everything starts with the philosophy of better food. It is a holistic approach. The aim is to connect people to sustainability as well as nutrition and health. We start with the locality and sourcing, knowing where food is from, analyzing each label and producing as much as we can in our own gardens. We even have our own farms, such as in the heartlands of Ibiza and Dibba near Six Senses Zighy Bay.

We’re also fierce when it comes to purchasing, from sustainable fishing and farming to packaging too. This is an area that demands doing what is right rather than what is easy. We demand that our suppliers switch to reusable or compostable food packaging and remove all Styrofoam boxes. Our properties are also innovative when it comes to composting to limit food waste. The result is, whatever they choose from the menu, all guests are eating from this foundation of better food by default when they Eat With Six Senses.