Ferran Adrià
El Bulli, RosesRenowned for his restaurant El Bulli, in Roses Spain, Ferran Adrià has been labeled both a “mad scientist” and “the world’s best chef”. Rather than Spanish food, Adrià concentrates on avant garde cuisine, and spends six months of the year inventing new techniques and creating original dishes in his laboratory.
Of all of the chefs at Spain’s 10, Adrià had the most to say, speaking at length about his food philosophy. He seemed to be attempting to answer his critics and inspire his followers all at once. He introduced his presentation by saying, “If we had never seen water before, we would be amazed…When you try a new product, you don’t know what it is, you have to experience it.” In other words, while some of his inventions and discoveries may seem weird, they are merely unfamiliar.
To Adrià, the definition of Haute Cuisine means that a diner is there to think – not to chat with his friends about the day’s events, but to consider what he is eating, to be amazed, and to really concentrate on the dish in front of him. Therefore the food must be sufficiently thought provoking.
Chef Adrià also talked at length about his belief that a chef who wishes to create new dishes must understand the history of a technique before he can build on it. “If you want to make foams, it is important to know the history of foams. If you want to make spherification, it is important to know the history of spherification.” He took the audience step-by-step through his work with spherification – that is, a means of forming a liquid into a solid orb which remains liquid on the inside. The most famous application of this technique is Adrià’s liquid olives, a dish which looks like a normal olive but explodes with flavor in the mouth.
The original technique was invented in 2003 after they witnessed an industrial application of alginates at a nearby factory. A puree of food is combined with sodium alginate, then injected into a bath of calcium carbonate. But the resulting spheres only remained liquid inside for less than five minutes before turning hard, and the process didn’t work for ingredients that had calcium inside of them. In 2005, they learned inverse spherification; by adding calcium chlorate to the food and submerging drops into a sodium alginate bath rather than vice versa, they were able to create spheres that did not harden. Now, in 2006, they are learning how to do spherification with other products.
For the El Bulli groupies out there, Adrià demonstrated two of his latest techniques. The first, a very thin shell of coconut milk, makes an intriguing garnish for a dessert. Adrià took a metal spoon and dipped it in liquid nitrogen for a few seconds then coated the back of it with coconut milk. The resulting fragile frozen shell was then freeze-dried to stabilize it.
His other latest technique is also a garnish, but like the coconut milk shell, is capable of inspiring a multitude of applications. He cooked mango puree with isomalt glucose and powdered sugar, then spread the mixture in a very thin layer on a leaf-shaped mold. The sheets were then dehydrated at 55º C for 48 hours, and pressed into a traditional gum-paste mold. The resulting leaf mimicked what decorators have done with gumpaste, but one imagines that the results were far more tasty.
Ferran Adrià was the biggest draw for the day, inspiring rapt attention and the constant flickers of flashbulbs. Yet although he spends perhaps more time than any other of the Spain’s 10 chefs experimenting, what Adrià demonstrated was not nearly as revolutionary as Joan Roca’s aroma experiments or Paco Torreblanca’s sugar work. Because he is so celebrated, his work has been very well documented. Those interested in learning more about his work might view or purchase Tony Bourdain’s video Decoding Ferran Adrià.
For a good basic overview of molecular gastronomy terms, go to foodite blog.
