Modernist-Cuisine-Vol.-1-Small

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The intervertebral pads of tuna are one of
the innovations in ingredients from elBulli.
Chefs love the fine-grained texture
produced by this Microplane grater. Ferran
Adrià put this simple tool at the center of
several creative dishes.
the elBulli books are referred to as cookbooks,
they contain no recipes in the printed versions.
(The recipes are on CD-ROMs that accompany
the books.) Instead, the pages are dedicated to
Adrià’s analysis of what motivated his cuisine and
how it evolved over two decades, from 1983
through 2005. Adrià devotes almost as much
space in the books to discussing ideas that didn’t
work (the “back to the drawing board” moments)
as he does to chronicling his successes.
Most cooking is an intensely practical effort,
and that is reflected in most cookbooks, which
generally focus on specific details. When chefs
philosophize, it tends to be about things such as
quality of ingredients or their preferences for
certain techniques.
Adrià’s books are quite different: they explicitly
and self-consciously analyze the process of
culinary creativity. A new idea for a dish isn’t just a
cool trick or a good flavor combination; it is part of
an agenda to rethink the theory behind cuisine.
Happy accidents and serendipity occurred at
elBulli, just as they do at other restaurants, but the
difference is that at elBulli, these accidents were
viewed through the lens of an analytical, intellectual
approach to cuisine. The menu at elBulli isn’t
just what’s for dinner; it is cuisine as art.
Adrià’s creative journey was a long one. The
dishes that he produced in the late 1980s and early
1990s were nothing like his later creations, but
each dish provides an insight into the evolution of
his thinking as a chef.
Many elBulli innovations were related to
discoveries or revelations. In one of my favorite
passages in the elBulli books, Adrià writes about
visiting his friend José Andrés in the United
States. He stopped by a kitchen storethe kind
found in any suburban shopping malland
bought a Microplane grater, well known for years
to American chefs. Microplanes are excellent
graters; they are very sharp and yield a finegrained
and fluffy result, even from ingredients
like hard cheeses and nuts. Adrià was enthralled.
He enthuses in his book about the unique texture
and flavor that the Microplane grater gives food.
His discovery of this humble tool led to the
creation of many new elBulli dishes, including
cauliflower “couscous” (see page 3·388).
Although Adrià is known for his exotic and
science-inspired techniques, his real interest is in
how the act of preparing food can transform the
art of cuisine. Exotic laboratory equipment is but
one means to that end; another is a humble little
handheld grater from a suburban kitchen store.
His mission isn’t to create a scientific cuisine, but
rather to give diners a new experience with food,
using whatever tools are available.
Other elBulli innovations revolve around new
ingredients. For example, while breaking down
tuna for a dish, Adrià noticed that these fish have
intervertebral pads. The small, circular, translucent
pads are the tuna equivalent of the discs that all
vertebrates, including humans, have in their spines.
Adrià and his team painstakingly removed the discs
from tuna spines and learned to cook and serve
them in various dishes. A similar thing happened
when the staff was experimenting with green
pinecones: the chefs discovered immature pine nuts
(at first they thought they were insect larvae) and
immediately created several new dishes with them.
The elBulli books are filled with hundreds of
such instances. A new ingredient (a fruit or
vegetable from Asian cuisine or a new hydrocolloid
gel from the world of food science) or a new
piece of equipment (a cotton-candy machine or
the ISI whipping siphon) serves as the point of
departure for new dishes. In some cases, new
ingredients and techniques allow Adrià to do
something that was previously unheard of.
In 1994, for example, he developed his first
savory foam: a white-bean espuma served with sea
urchin in an urchin shell. Foams have, of course,
long been used throughout classical cooking.
Whipped cream, sabayon, mousse, meringue,
soufflés, and even bread are all examples of foams.
Bread, soufflés, and some meringues are cooked
foams that are served stiff. Other meringues,
whipped cream, mousse, and sabayon are served
soft and have traditionally been relegated to
dessert and pastry use; dishes such as fish mousse
or sauce mousseline are rare savory examples.
Yet some unwritten law of culinary tradition
had kept foams in those well-defined niches; using
a foam outside those bounds was heresy, which is
exactly what attracted Adrià. Foam has a familiar
and very popular texture. Everyone has had a
traditional foam such as whipped cream, and most
people have liked it. When Adrià cast foam in a
savory role, he created a new and unexpected
experience, at once familiar and surprising.
Dining as Dialogue
Along the way, Adrià developed perhaps his most
important piece of culinary philosophy: the idea
that dining is a dialogue between the chef and the
diner. In haute cuisine up to that point, the
vocabulary of that dialogue was constrained by
tradition and convention. Diners come to a meal
with a tacit understanding of what is possible and
familiar, based on their previous dining experiences.
The chef, at least in traditional cuisine, comes
prepared to cater to diners’ preconceptions. Adrià
broke those constraints by creating novel foods
that could not help but provoke a reaction, forcing
diners to reassess their assumptions.
This intellectual approach to cuisine became
central at elBulli. It wasn’t enough for the food
to be delicious; it also had to elicit thoughts and
feelings. While other chefs might work to
optimize the purely gastronomic qualities of
their food, such as taste and texture, Adrià had a
higher goal. Did the food make people think,
make them react emotionally? How did it
change the dialogue? Adrià’s preferred term for
his culinary style, “techno-emotional” cuisine
(first coined in 2008 by Catalan journalist Pau
Arenós), reflects this dual goal. Culinary technology
produces the effect, but the ultimate
impact is emotional. In sharp contrast to the
overly serious formal cuisine of Escoffier, one of
the central emotions that Adrià sought to elicit
is humor. Laughing with surprise or seeing the
wry humor in a culinary joke is a central part of
the elBulli experience.
Before Adrià, chefs focused primarily on making
dishes that were unique in their detailstheir
specific combinations of flavors and textures. Only
rarely did chefs seek to make a dish that was the
first of its class. Instead, they tended to focus their
creativity on developing a small number of signature
dishes that marked their careers. Usually
those dishes would be served for many years. We
have been enjoying Joël Robuchon’s mashed
potatoes at his various restaurants for more than
two decades.
Adrià took culinary creativity to an extreme
and came to view unprecedented novelty as the
cornerstone of his cuisinesomething that
should occur in every dish, every night. This is the
direct opposite of the “signature dish” approach.
At elBulli, each dish is supposed to be a new
creation. And that dish generally is not repeated
after the first season in which it is served. If you
really like a dish at elBulli, enjoy it now, because
chances are you will never have it again (unless
you make it yourself).
Changes in menu structure, which had started
with the elimination of bread and the dessert
trolley, continued. Every aspect of the culinary
process was examined and reimagined. Why are
dishes served late in the meal sweet, while others
are not? What is the role of cocktails in the dining
experience? Why should food be served with
traditional silverware?
The reexamination led to conceptual advances,
such as the notion of “deconstruction.” Adrià
started to create dishes that had familiar flavor
themes but were presented in entirely unconventional
ways. Here is what he says about deconstruction
in his book elBulli 1994–1997:
It consists of taking a gastronomic reference
that is already known, embodied in a dish,
and transforming all or some of its ingredients
by modifying its texture, shape, and/or
temperature. This deconstructed dish will
keep its essence and will still be linked to a
culinary tradition, but its appearance will
be radically different to the original.
For this game to be successful, it is
essential that the diner has gastronomic
memory, since the absence of references
turns the concept of deconstruction into
mere “construction” based on nothing.…
The result has a direct relationship with the
diner’s memory, in that although he may not
see that he has been served a familiar dish,
he later establishes a direct connection
between the flavor of what he is eating and
the classic recipe; in other words, he recognizes
it.
This a passage that would be more at home in a
book of literary criticism than in a cookbook.
Adrià’s deliberate theorizing was new to the art of
cuisine. Other chefs had played tricks on diners
for example, baked Alaska was a 19th-century
invention in which a meringue served hot from the
oven hid the surprise of cold ice cream inside.
Many chefs had created new takes on old dishes.
But the systematic invention of new concepts like
Immature pine nuts from green pinecones
are another example of innovative
ingredients at elBulli.
Many chefs throughout history
have created dishes that have an
element of surprise, like baked
Alaska, but they did not build a
cuisine with the goal of eliciting
emotion at its foundation. As a
result, their most innovative dishes
were considered as nothing more
than parlor tricks.
36 VOLUME 1 · HISTORY AND FUNDAMENTALS
HISTORY 37