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Jon Cox is one of three chefs who serve up nutritious, delicious and top-quality grub to the likes of Geraint Thomas, Egan Bernal and Filippo Ganna at Ineos Grenadiers. He spends around 175 days a year on the road, both at races and training camps, but away from the kitchen truck he currently lives in Berlin. That’s where we caught up with Cox to lift the lid on his work at the British team, while seeking culinary advice and inspiration for cyclists of all levels…
Jon, thanks for your time. You’ve been with the team since 2017, after serving as head chef at Mac and Wild, and before that chef de partie at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal. Let’s start where every good day should – with breakfast; in other words, what’s a regular for the riders at races?
Often, I’ll start breakfast from around 7.30am, though give myself about an hour and a half to prepare, so things aren’t too hectic. Breakfast consists of soy porridge with overnight oats. There’ll be white rice, white pasta, with more of that consumed on big days in the mountains. It’s rather boring but the riders like to be consistent.
We also make different compotes including banana yoghurt. We make purees to go on top, like sweet potato puree, which they can consume for further carbs. You can add it to porridge or rice and it’s very nice. Omelettes. Lots of them. Every rider will have their standard omelette for a race but that can vary throughout the season. Some riders will have three whites with one yoke. That’s a popular one. Or two whites with one yoke. It’s a way of cranking up the protein but cutting down the fat.
Then, some guys like poached eggs. On rest days one will have them, then someone else sees and they ask for poached. It snowballs and becomes rather chaotic. Poaching that many eggs when you’re used to cooking omelettes is a little too much. However, what I’ve done recently is slow poach the eggs. For this, I use a circulator and you submerge the eggs in 63°C water for 45 minutes. Then they’re perfectly poached, perfectly silky and delicious. You can pop them into a coffee cup with a pinch of salt, a drizzle of olive oil and slurp them like oysters! You can pop them onto toast, too, of course and they’re great, especially with good-quality eggs.
We also have jars of nuts, dried fruit and seeds, though we encourage the…
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