What is the Cuisine of the Loire Valley?

Salads, or more precisely, salades composées, are one of the unsung heroes of French cuisine. The most well known to anglophones is salade nicoise, but you can get delicious and satisfying salads all over France. In the Loire Valley the regional salad is called Salade Tourangelle and includes morcels of slow cooked belly pork. Lettuce is not a garnish here, it is meant to be eaten, and tomatoes are something you look forward to in the late summer when they are ripe and full of flavour. Out of season tomatoes are not consumed much by most people, although these days they are available. Come and sample the salads of the Loire Valley when you book a tour with us!

Homegrown cherry tomatoes in our potager.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. You may also like to check out our YouTube channel. 

Wildlife Conservation Meets Heritage Conservation in the Loire Valley

Because we are actively involved in both heritage and nature conservation in the Loire Valley we are in a unique position to present many conservation projects in a more complex and wholistic way than other tour operators or guides. For example, the recent project to repair lightning damage to a church in Loches that we often take clients to meant that we were invited to participate in a site meeting about how to achieve the building work without disturbing a precious population of nesting Common Swifts. These amazing aerial performers are now in serious decline, a protected species, no longer 'common'. It was our photos which enabled the Head of Technical Services in Loches to pinpoint where the nest entrances are and establish that the scaffolding was not blocking entry and egress. Then an outreach plan to educate and inform the public about the importance of incorporating wildlife into building projects was developed for the municipality of Loches. If you would like to hear more about this, or even if you just want to visit a beautifully preserved medieval town in the Touraine Loire Valley, then book a tour with us. We offer both 3 hour walking tours of Loches, or we can include the town in a chauffeured day trip using our classic cars. And if you are here between May and July you will witness the swifts aerial antics as well as admire some marvellous medieval buildings.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. You may also like to check out our YouTube channel. 

Watching a Baker at Work in the Loire Valley

One of the fun things about many French bakeries, especially the modern ones, is that you can look right past the counter into the kitchen and see the bakers at work. Just another thing to look out for if you are on a tour with us and we have time to pop in to one of our favourite bakeries. And our top tip is that the bread is made from scratch on the premises if the sign over the door says the shop is a 'boulangerie'. French bakers are not allowed to call their shops boulangeries (bakeries) if they do not make the bread on the premise from flour, water, salt and yeast. Many loaves have nothing else, except time because of instead of modern accelerated raising techniques, French bread is given time for the yeast to act naturally on the flour and raise (prove) the bread. This is one of the things that gives French bread its superior taste and texture. Just like our French friends and neighbours, we are passionate about bread. Ask us all about it when you take a tour with us.

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For details of our private guided tours of chateaux, gardens, wineries, markets and more please visit the Loire Valley Time Travel website. We would be delighted to design a tour for you.

We are also on Instagram, so check us out to see a regularly updated selection of our very best photos. You may also like to check out our YouTube channel.