Spain has produced a generation of young chefs for whom immersion circulators, soda siphons and hypodermic needles are basic tools of the trade.
While testing the boundaries of the culinary arts, these heirs of the innovations of such chefs as Juan Mari Arzak, Martín Berasetegui, the Roca brothers and, the most famous of all, Ferran Adrià, are not turning their backs on tradition, but finding fresh uses for traditional ingredients and deconstructing classic dishes.
At a summit of Spanish chefs hosted by the International Culinary Center in New York last October, chef Alberto Chicote of Nodo restaurant in Madrid demonstrated his technique for making a carrot broth. He filled the base of a stovetop espresso maker with fresh juice and then packed the filter with smoked carrot pulp. As the juice heated and was forced up through the filter, it became a rich, deep orange liquid.
For Chicote and other up-and-coming culinary artists in Spain, it’s almost a rite of passage to work with Adrià, and many restaurants in Barcelona hang his picture in their dining rooms.
A look at the menu of Adrià’s elBulli shows why—it contains more than 30 dishes served in procession, each with a mysterious name and intricate preparations and presentations. Dishes include Fever Tree tonic meringue, beetroot and yogurt meringue, tangerine bonbons with peanut and curry, and tiger nut milk flowers. Adrià also continues to show a penchant for the liquid center with his liquid wonton of mushrooms, one of his early trademarks.
Working on creations such as these is an ideal jumping-off point for a rising chef. Part of the point of this style of cooking is to change food perceptions, yet it is also meant to tweak sentiments.
At the same New York summit, the idea of tugging at the emotions with food—or the “cuisine of memory”—was invoked by Joan Roca as well as Daniel García, an Andalusian chef who rhapsodized on the subject as he shot tomato water and olive oil through a siphon into a vat of nitrogen, retrieving little white knobs that resembled popcorn but tasted like distilled frozen tomato.
Roca’s menu carries footnotes such as “cuisine of contrasts,” “cuisine of the seasons,” or his own “cuisine of memory,” a dish of clams with blood grapefruit and Campari sorbet. His younger brother, Jordi, pastry chef at the family-run food temple El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, where a third brother, Josep, is sommelier, has become known for desserts that recreate the scent of commercial perfumes, such as Eternity by Calvin Klein and Trésor by Lancôme.
Engaging all the senses also plays into the microregional cooking that Quique Dacosta, self-taught chef of El Poblet on the eastern coast of Spain, labels the cuisine of “terroir,” a term usually reserved for wines. It weaves together foods that would co-exist in the wild. In essence, he deconstructs and then reassembles elements from a natural habitat.
With his foie gras Cuba Libre with frosted lemon peel and wild arugula, for instance, the duck might have been raised in a region known for its citrus and might have eaten local arugula. The three elements come together to represent the locale.
Jordi Vilà, at his Barcelona restaurant Alkimia, calls this part of his menu “Paisajes,” loosely translated as “landscapes,” where the food is returned to its roots, sometimes with a twist. He describes a dish that begins with an element from the sea, grilled monkfish, which he dresses with flavors from the earth— sautéed wild mushrooms, truffle, white asparagus, and a dried crisp of smoked tea leaf powder he crumbles to resemble dirt.
“It looks like smoked earth and has a bit of a tobacco flavor,” he says. The crumbled earth theme reappears in a dessert he is developing: grilled sliced pear on a bed of black coffee cookies crumbled to look like coal, and then dressed with cream, evoking the hearth and nurture of home.
Foods that are black in color are emerging on a variety of menus, from black rice to crumbled black olive powder to carbonized vegetables. At the New York event last year, Juan Mari Arzak, the grandfather of new Spanish cuisine, made a jet-black sauce of charred leek and then puréed the mixture with orange juice and olive oil.
Another Spanish chef, Carles Abellan, worked with Adrià for over a decade before opening Comerç24 in a former salt-fish shop in the gothic quarter of Barcelona. He also likes smoky flavors—his natural-hued “eggplant smoked with fresh cheese, mushrooms and piñons” calls for smoking the olive oil with coal.
For another dish, he reworks a classic xato salad into a gelled combination of Romesco sauce, tomato, escarole, black olive oil, salt cod and tuna.
Abellan’s “kinder egg,” also the name of a popular European candy, is more of an upscale comfort food, with two soft-boiled poultry eggs that have been scooped out of their shells, whipped with potato purée, returned to the shell and topped with potato foam.
Sergi Arola worked with Adrià for nearly eight years and has since opened two restaurants: La Broche in Madrid, and Arola in Barcelona. His cookbook and recipe names belie the complexity of his dishes. A recipe from his cookbook, “Cooking Is Fun,” for warm lobster soup with coastal fish and mollusks calls for eight kinds of seafood and six preparations, two of them using the seaweed agar-agar as a thickener, one using a food dehydrator and three of them requiring the use of a food processor/cooking unit.
Arola also honors Adrià’s adage that “the barriers between sweet and savory are being broken down” with his peach confit with lemon verbena ice cream, caramelized coconut, curry caramel and amaretto gelatin. The dish is dusted with dried, candy-coated slivers of leek.
The merging of sweet and savory is a movement whose biggest champion, perhaps, is Jordi Butrón of Espai Sucre in Barcelona. After years of working with Adrià as well as Jean-Luc Figueras, he opened his “sweet cuisine” restaurant in 2000 with an accompanying school and education center. A Butrón meal might start with tomato soup with Thai basil, asparagus sherbet and orange, and then move on to red mullet with peanut sponge cake, spinach and honey. Then comes “dessert,” sweet combinations that aren’t so easy to differentiate from savory. He pairs his dishes with a wine selection, often fortified: bread pudding, bacon ice cream and pineapple, for instance, is served with a small production, sweet Malvasia de Sitges.
The newest category on many menus is the tiny taste, which is even smaller than tasting plates. Abellan calls them “Apperitives” at his new tapaÇ24 in Barcelona, where he offers crisps with tapaÇ24 sauce, cured sheep’s milk cheese, or Sanlucar olives. At Arola this part of the menu is “Pica-Pica,” which could be a pair of ravioli of liver and quail escabèche or artichoke heart with garlic and parsley.
And at La Terraza del Casino in Madrid, Paco Roncero, who is often described as Adrià’s most outstanding disciple, offers “snacks” such as Lila potato chips or tempura rose petals.
On the elBulli website, Adrià lists 23 food aphorisms, as a kind of map to this culinary revolution. The first states: “Cooking is a language through which all the following properties may be expressed: harmony, creativity, happiness, beauty, poetry, complexity, magic, humor, provocation and culture.” This is tall order perhaps, for both creator and eater, but a growing army of chefs—and audiences—are doing their very best to fill it.