We can open our mouths with a cane of mini asparagus beer. The menu that awaits us is salty nougat soup, liquid croquettes and egg yolk churros. To top it off, frozen yogurt and olive oil lollipop. Such are the surprises prepared by Ferran Adrià, considered the best chef in the world and co-owner of the El Bulli restaurant, a three-star Michelin restaurant located in a cove in Rosas (Gerona) that attracts gourmets from all over the planet. Adrià, short and friendly, is a cold man when it comes to organizing and achieving his goals – he has a reputation for being tough – but endowed with a lunatic creativity. He demonstrates this in this conversation held in the El Bulli laboratory-workshop in Barcelona, where the chef and his creative team assistants invent new recipes.
–What is your latest invention?
-Today we have done a marvel. Have you seen some cotton sticks in the kitchen? It is the cotton that children buy at the fair. We had been looking for a machine capable of manufacturing it in a reduced size for five years to serve it on our menu. Today we have finally achieved it – we collaborate with an industrial designer – and we are going to produce cottons filled with surprising flavors.
–I thought no one was eating it anymore.
-Well, yes, but who takes it outside an amusement park? Our contribution will be to decontextualize it from that environment and introduce it into haute cuisine. That is creating a new concept, we will reinvent fairground cotton.
–What do you intend with these bizarre dishes?
-Look, I’m not looking to make the best consommé, even if I know how to do it. I want to capture the flavor of a consommé and make a consommé patty, for example, or take a product like oil and make olive oil candies. That is my way of seeing the kitchen: surprise and surprise.
–Do you look like a kitchen scientist?
-Of all the creatives, the ones I respect the most is the scientists. I value Pasteur much more than Picasso. Solving lives, or improving their quality, is priceless. But our work has an objective, scientific research part, and a subjective part similar to the plastic arts. I can make an important dish, a novel creation, but if someone at the table does not like it, I will have nothing to reproach him for, it is subjective. Instead, a vaccine is a vaccine and you wear it whether you like it or not. Something else unites me with scientists: their calculations try to bring out what is not calculated. It is identical to our way of dealing with the kitchen: we work on concepts and ideas so that the spark, the magic, appears.
–What is the elite chef like?
– The fundamental thing is that it does not work alone. Your team must have creatives but also good kitchen technicians, who do the dishes well. Creativity must be allied with quality. And in the future, his team is going to expand with graphic designers, architects … All of them will help to build the plate.
–Despite his avant-garde, he admires the omelette.
-When someone thought of beating an egg, they had a brilliant, minimalist idea, and created a product that is still very current due to its lightness. Without the first omelette, what I call “consequential creativity” would not have been unleashed: the potato omelette or the French omelette are an offshoot of a lucky first find. I am also a fan of salt, an incredible natural product, which totally changes the possibilities of a kitchen. Sugar is not that important because there are already many foods that contain natural sugars.
–You have rethought the sweet-savory relationship by sweetening salty products and vice versa.
-It is that sometimes we are shortsighted. I have just been in China and there they served me a first course tocinillo de cielo, along with the dimsums. In the West we have a very tight division of food: first, second, dessert, sweets with coffee … It is too rigid and generates contradictions: people who reject bittersweet drink cola at meals. Is incredible! Is there anything sweeter than that? And he also puts ketchup on the side!
–How does the creative process arise? In your workshop-laboratory?
– Pointing out an idea that occurs to me when, for example, I am eating spider crab and I realize that its red part, the coral, taken undercooked is an unspeakable delight. We do not usually notice it because the spider crab is eaten very cooked. So I put this idea on my list.
–A plate of crab coral?
-It doesn’t have to. It is a new product, nothing more. In the same way, we will also find new preparations (such as hot jellies), cooking modes (cooking in the customer’s mouth), styles and utensils. In other words, we organize the kitchen in a series of families, of processes. With these materials we start looking for something new and we choose the main idea of each dish. Then we use the discarded ones as secondaries and start combining.
–And here, in the workshop, is where you have to like …
-We tried it in the workshop with the other two cooks, Oriol Castro and my brother Albert. Between three it is difficult to make a mistake in taste, although there may be those who disagree, because there are dishes that have been cooked century after century and still do not like some people.
–We already have a plate. How long did it take to cook it?
-One year, it is a process that lasts from July to July. Now we plan that the ideas last two years to be able to perfect them and that they give their best. Also, it’s going to be very difficult to continue being concept creators at this rate. Every season we release about sixty new concepts.
–They look like fashion collections.
-We could work with that scheme, presenting collections and publishing books that explain them. But my dream would be to emulate the automobile industry when it launches a new car, much more studied.
–Do we eat only with our mouths?
-No, although taste is the main sense involved. Next is the touch: temperature and texture are two determining factors of our perception of the dish. Then, the smell – do we accompany some dishes with a perfume, like that of “humid forest”? and the view. Finally, the ear, which is not negligible: the crunch of food can be a very satisfying sensation.
–Anticipate me some dish that will offer next season.
-We are working on an evolution of foams and siphons, and we are going to offer the customer to eat air. Yes, how you hear it. We are going to serve a pot with an aerial and edible product similar to soap bubbles. But I can’t reveal what the air is made of.
Jose Angel Martos
This interview was published in March 2003, in number 262 of VERY Interesting.
