Chicken curry ice cream and why it can work
An interview with one of the world’s greatest culinary thinkers on how we need to change the way we think.
“Forget about cooking… 99% of my time I do not talk about cooking. I speak of connected knowledge.”
At 57, the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià is widely considered one of the best chefs in the world. His great ambition for “connected knowledge” had me wondering if the press team’s claim in their email that “Ferran can interview, but it is important that you know he does not speak Spanish,” was indeed accurate. Had he given up his mother tongue as part of his bid “to expand horizons”? Was this all a part of the incredibly convoluted and confusing “El Bulli” mantra, always to question things? Given that he didn’t speak English either, I was glad to learn that this was a typo. But, after my interview with him and a deeper look into his mission, it made me wonder again.
Growing up in Barcelona, Ferran’s culinary career began in 1980 as a dishwasher at a local hotel. He served as a cook in the military, and in 1984 he joined the kitchen staff of El Bulli, near the Catalonian town of Rosas, as a line cook. Eighteen months later, he’d become the head chef. Under his reign, the restaurant received the prestigious World’s Best Restaurant Award five times and boasted three Michelin stars.
Ferran speaks proudly of his time at El Bulli where he created 1,846 dishes. “Harvard is God-Tier, but El Bulli has produced more talent than Harvard,” He said. “I know there are Nobel Prizes at Harvard, but professors at MIT, Stanford, and Oxford all have these too. Looking at the most influential chefs in the world in the last 25 years, almost all of them are from El Bulli.”
Smoked mousse, chicken curry ice cream, taco salads, “the liquid olive,” passion fruit caviar and chocolate coral. His dishes challenge the conventional and have raised controversy. Other great chefs have labeled his cuisine as pretentious and claimed it includes chemicals that actually put diners’ health at risk. Ferran used to close his restaurant half of the year and devote the remaining six months to “innovation and recipe perfection” in his workshop in Barcelona. In 2011, much to the culinary world’s surprise, he closed the restaurant for good. The financial troubles associated with extreme experimentation and reduced opening hours had taken their toll. Ferran also felt he had reached his limit with what he could bring to the world through cooking.
After his restaurant, he wanted to direct his efforts towards something that would expand the spirit of what El Bulli represents. Since 2011, he has worked tirelessly to keep his philosophy of cooking in the public eye, through culinary think tanks (“El Bulli 1846”), vast interdisciplinary mentorship rings, theories of innovation, archives of El Bulli’s works (“La Bulligrafía”) and great internet encyclopedias of Western haute cuisine (“La Bullipedia”). There is much clearer information on what these projects are not than what they are, and clearly they do not include a restaurant.
Innovation has dominated Ferran’s approach to food and life. He has brought culinary foams, molecular gastronomy, deconstructivism and reconstructivism to the plate. And the way he saw this was possible was through constant questioning. Why, in the Western world of gastronomy, did we neglect China, Japan and the rest of Asia for so long? Why did haute cuisine have to spend 400 years dominated by the French? Deconstructivism and constructivism were two techniques he thought he could use to differentiate himself. Deconstructivism, he says, transforms all the ingredients in a dish, while maintaining the essence of that dish through changes in texture, form, or temperature. The point is to play into the diner’s gustatory memory while completely surprising them:
“I can make a beet curry ice cream. But what is the problem? There is no gustatory memory. So it’s strange — a curry ice cream plus beets. If you make a curry ice-cream with chicken juice, with coconut milk, when someone eats it, they will say: ‘This, I remember.’”
Picasso in food
Picasso is an endless source of inspiration for Ferran. “When you do things avant-garde, then you think of Picasso.” Ferran felt that the Spanish artist’s focus on decomposition in Cubism needed imitating — but in the culinary world. “Cubism in painting fragments things and breaks them down in interesting ways. We are doing the same thing in the kitchen right?” Still, Ferran recognizes that these are two very different worlds, not least because he can’t exactly call it the same thing. Incorporating Picasso’s “decomposition” technique would risk a disastrous response from diners. “In Spanish you know that decomposition is not pretty,” he said. “It’s when you have diarrhea and have to go to the bathroom. We couldn’t call a culinary technique ‘Decomposition’. Not in a kitchen.”
So instead, Ferran chose deconstructivism’ which, he found out later, is a term that comes from philosophy and is applied to architecture.
We need to be interdisciplinary
This ambitious desire to unite all disciplines underpins Ferran’s every move. In the course of an hour-long conversation, we covered Economics, Agriculture, Quantum Physics, Art, Architecture, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, History, and Business. He is hungry to master it all. “So there are professions, disciplines that I can understand and others that I cannot. Quantum physics I can’t understand, but Botany? I can do.” He told me that I could still be an asset to him in the kitchen despite my limited culinary background. “The fact that you are from a different discipline means you can give me very crazy ideas,” he said. “I’m going to take these ideas and put them into action in a way that works. And then the composition of a tasting menu becomes very poetic. There’s a rhythm.”
He compares his “rhythm” to a Rolling Stones concert. He tells me there is meaning behind the song order, even if we aren’t told what it is. And this is what makes the innovation system so complex: Innovation can take place at every level without it being truly understood.
“I didn’t cook for others. I cooked for myself. I cooked to open doors and break boundaries. I shared my work with others, but it wasn’t designed for them. If I cooked for people, I wouldn’t have made a smoke mousse,” he said. While his motives might seem self-interested, what he really wanted was to open up the minds of his diners and show them what was possible.
Ferran believes that when people begin to open up their minds, innovation becomes easy.
“Ice creams are sweet, right? Why?”he asks. “Why are they sweet? Why do they have to be sweet? What’s the difference between a cold soup and an ice cream? Eight degrees of temperature!”
His contribution to the culinary world was to insist on this questioning dialogue. The bread and butter that had so long rested beside plates in French restaurants. The cheese cart that accompanied fancy entrees. Why had these customs persisted for so long? If he wanted fantastic bread and butter or fancy cheese, why couldn’t he go to a gourmet store? “If I am a cook, the important thing is not to create dishes, the important thing is to question what cooking is.” Because the diner also has a huge influence on food. “Who cooks? The cook, right? Yes, but the client as well. If you are eating steak and potatoes, you decide how you cut, you decide if you mix potatoes, and for how long. The most important example is a shabu-shabu or a fondue.” In Ferran’s inter-connected universe, the cook and the diner are eating off the same plate.
Cultural identity in food
I wondered, with all this questioning and constant drive towards progression, whether it was possible to maintain cultural identity in food. The French came to be defined by their culinary contribution to the world. Don’t many countries now pride themselves on unique cuisines?
“Don’t manipulate my ideology!”
Ferran took me back to the beginning of time and tried to debunk the modern perception of identity. Spain is Spain now, but it was inhabited by Greeks, Romans and Arabs. It wasn’t just Columbus, but a group of Arabs too that discovered America. This crossing of cultures is necessary for development. “There were no cows in America. There was no milk.” To accurately interpret reality, you have to understand the history of everything, such as how China was the global power a couple hundred years ago. When we understand how the world has come to be and how cultures have intersected, only then can we understand the whole story: “What is important is knowing your story.”
So, how do we actually understand this web of connections?
Sometimes the most amazing people aren’t the ones who make it onto the big stage. This is what piques Ferran’s interests. He wants to revolutionize everything, from hairdressing to farming, to management in small businesses. “Everything is connected. Everything!” And so, through a taxonomy of everything, he’s creating a contextual lexicon that will include categories like Comparative, Classificatory, and Historical. And with this, the idea is that we can actually begin to understand something much more holistically and therefore accurately.
COVID
Encouraged to think more holistically, we touched on COVID’s impact on Spain. “From a health perspective, it is more or less controlled, but economically we are suffering. 15% of Spain’s Economy comes from tourism, so it is very hard.” Asked about the restaurants, he responded with typically Ferran grandeur: “Disaster, barbaric!” But it does seem that COVID is doing something for the culinary world: lockdown has forced people back into their kitchens, some of them to practice Ferran’s teaching, even if unconsciously. “It is a phenomenon. It is a very important social change because they are now staying at home, and they have to get takeaways — or cook.” And Ferran views this particular period as having incredible importance for highlighting where “Sapiens” can step in, an opportunity for empowering everyone through accessible knowledge. He highlighted how the pandemic had finally brought issues like those faced by small businesses, namely insolvency and inadequate management, into the limelight. And how “Sapiens” will ensure that innovation and efficiency don’t remain limited to those with extreme technical competence.
