Sesame-crusted fish with green beans and mushrooms

Healthy isn’t a flavor.It’s nutrition, cooked properly.

Macronutrient-balanced meals for private households, built around your training, your preferences, and the shape of your week.

Le Cordon Bleu · Private Chef · Los Angeles

Private Chef

Fifteen years in private estate kitchens.

The work comes through the staffing agencies that vet chefs at this level, through estate managers passing my name on, and through the families themselves.

Daily service for the principal and household, dinners for a table of eight, events for a room of forty. Cooked in the estate kitchen and served.

Menus are written around the household rather than chosen from a list — what they are training for, what they cannot eat, who is staying, and what the week actually looks like.

Celebrities, families, executives and public figures, in households that run on staff and expect a chef who works to that standard and adapts when the plan changes.

Thirty years of strength training sits underneath all of it — I am a certified strength coach as well as a chef. That is why the food is built the way it is, and why I ended up writing three books about it.

Daniel Edlund in chef whites
Los Angeles

Macronutrients are my job, not yours.

Every meal is protein, carbohydrate and fat in some ratio. Which ratio is right depends entirely on what the person eating it is asking their body to do.

You tell me the goal — yours, your trainer's, or your dietitian's. From there it is handled.

It is judged by eye and by experience rather than by scales — which is how a professional kitchen has always worked. What reaches the table is dinner, cooked properly, not a portion you have to measure.


Selected Work

Plated courses, family style, and the principals own plates.

A long table laid for dinner at dusk, under string lights
Crisp-skinned salmon on quinoa with broccolini
Chilled soup shots and canapés lined up for a party
Plated salads lined up for service
Braised beef with mango salsa
Roast chicken with asparagus and mashed potato
Herb-crusted rack of lamb
Poppy-crusted salmon on watercress
Roasted squash with soft cheese
Tuna tartare served in a cucumber cup
Braised short rib with squash ravioli
A grazing table laid out for a standing party

Weekly Meals

One day’s cooking, and the week is handled.

Dinners and events are the visible part. Most of what I actually do is quieter than that: a week of food, cooked properly in your kitchen, portioned and left in your fridge so that eating well on any day of the week takes no decisions and no effort.

Proteins, vegetables and grains built around what the household is training for and what they will actually eat. One day's cooking makes the week — portioned and refrigerated, never frozen. The same food I would plate at a table.

Prepared meals: chicken, meatballs, steak and corn Prepared meals lined up on the counter Prepared meals: grilled chicken, carrots and green beans

How it works

Built, not chosen. Cooked in your kitchen, served at your table.

01

It starts with a list

Allergies, intolerances, the things people never think to mention. I send a preference form before anything is cooked, and it travels with you.

02

Menus are built, not chosen

Nothing comes off a set list. Menus are written around what the household is doing — training, traveling, recovering, entertaining.

03

The kitchen is left clean

Shopping, sourcing, prep, service and the mess afterwards. The point is that the food happens without you having to think about it.

The Overhyped Ten

Free report

The Overhyped Ten

Ten supplements the industry sells hard, graded one by one against the research each claim actually rests on. It is an extract from the guide, and it is the part where I say what did not hold up.

20 pages · instant download · no charge

Get the report →

Books

Three books, written for the people I cook for.

The EASY Way to Organic Cooking

The EASY Way to Organic Cooking

216 pages · 240 recipes · $19

The full organic repertoire, built for real weeks. Cook once, eat well for five days.

Read more →
The Optimized Performance Lifestyle

The Optimized Performance Lifestyle

127 pages · 16 chapters · $27

Eating, training, sleeping and recovering treated as one system rather than four.

Read more →
The Complete Supplement Guide

The Complete Supplement Guide

177 pages · 147 entries · $49

Every compound graded against the clinical literature — including the ten where the marketing has outrun the research.

Read more →

The Complete Library

$79

All three books together. Sixteen dollars less than buying them separately, and the only way the system reads end to end — the food, the framework the food sits inside, and the evidence behind one chapter of it. The Overhyped Ten is included so the set is complete, though it is free on its own.

Get the Library →

Background

How I got to a private kitchen.

Originally from Sweden. I started training and studying nutrition at fifteen, and qualified as a strength and conditioning coach there in 2000.

London came next: a personal training, nutrition and massage practice, and a high-end catering company alongside it. That is where organic cooking stopped being something I preferred and became a lifestyle.

Then Los Angeles, Le Cordon Bleu, and a successful private chef business built from there.

Cooking, training and bodywork have never been separate practices to me. They are the three things a healthy, balanced life is built on.


Inquiries

daniel@danieledlund.com