Alain Ducasse on the plane crash that changed the course of his life, vegan desserts and Chinese caviar

Kitchen nightmare I was born in 1956 and grew up on our family farm in Castel-Sarrazin, in southwestern France. My memories of the farm are of the smells that nurtured my passion for cooking: the smell of home-cooked food like mushrooms, vegetables, veal blanquette. And then I started to taste.

When I was 12, I decided to become a chef, before I had stepped into a professional kitchen or restaurant, much to my mother’s despair. She sent me to work at a roadside restaurant for truckers, which she considered a nightmare at the time. I washed dishes and plucked hens and turkeys outside in freezing winter temperatures. She tried to scare me but it didn’t work.

Seeing stars I apprenticed with several top chefs, very different from each other. From Michel Guérard I learned creativity, Gaston Lenôtre pastry, Roger Vergé professionalism and Alain Chapel the meaning of natural cooking – using the original taste of ingredients. I have taken Chapel’s philosophy or culinary spirit, not his recipes.

At 25, I became head chef of La Terrasse, in Juan-les-Pins. Three years later (in 1984), the restaurant was awarded two Michelin stars and I was the youngest chef to achieve this. I was happy for five minutes and then thought, “What will it take for me to have three stars?” I am not happy with three, four or five stars. I am never satisfied.

Dying without dying Three months later, I was on a Piper Aztec aircraft with some of my chefs, flying to Courchevel, in the Alps. It was foggy and the pilot couldn’t see well, when all of a sudden we saw the mountain face and crashed. Everyone died except me. I lay there for almost seven hours in the snow, bleeding, hoping for someone to rescue me. I learned that nothing is serious except being paralysed intellectually or physically.