The photo is a “margherita” from the restaurant el Bulli.
Like electricity, Impressionism, Cubism, and the internet, the first moments of creative genius can at first appear strange, ugly, useless, and/or absurd.
Ferran Adria is the chef at el Bulli in Catalonia, Spain. To many, his food may fall into the “all of the above” category, but know that Restaurant Magazine declared el Bulli “The Best Restaurant in the World” five times.
Adria is much more than a chef; he is someone whom, even if you will never eat his food, you should know about, think about, listen to. Adria is sitting at the crest of a mountain looking out to what is beyond, while the rest of us are down below not sure we even want to climb.
Two years ago the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) invited Adria to give Their Holiday Lecture on innovation. This fall he and the select chefs around the world who are following his work – Roca, Barber, Achatz, DuFresne and more - were invited again by Harvard SEAS to teach the physics of soft matter (food is soft matter) by demonstrating their innovative culinary methods to Harvard undergraduates. (700 students showed up for a fraction of that in spaces.) Recipes are included in the course. Electrostasis will be demonstrated by making ricotta cheese. Foams and emulsions will be studied with aioli and vinaigrette. Gelation will be studied with yogurt spheres with pectin and agar jellies. Non-equilibrium processes will be studied with molten chocolate cake. Protein denaturation? – ceviche.
Because the press and public responded with such a roar to the news that Adria and company would be Cambridge teachers this fall, a series of public lectures was added to the schedule, a mirror of the undergraduates’ syllabus.
Last night I had the priviledge of attending the introductory lecture introducing Ferran Adria as the master of this culinary movement. Adria spoke impishly in Catalan while his good friend and protogee Jose Andres, chef at minibar and Jaleo in Washington D.C. and host of the public television show Made in Spain, translated.
“Have you seen the film ‘Ratatouille?’” Adria asked, “I’m Remy and my friend here, Jose, is Linguine.’”
Truthfully, we saw a demonstration of gelation with those yogurt spheres, and were tantalized to learn that Adria would soon be selling his olive oil caviar – jarred versions of the little droplets – but there was more philosophy than food, all of it deeply inspiring.
“In ten years we’ll be saying, ‘remember when we were all sitting in that room at Harvard talking about cooking?’”
Bringing cooking to a university is one of the visions Adria discussed that seemed so simple it wasn’t really worth remarking on. Just the way he first took a glass of water, the simplest of ingredients, and began to break it down into complexities and abstractions, he spoke about this virgin collaboration, and one began to understand that cooking at a university is a very big deal: It makes cooking a creative science. It forces it to keep up a dialogue with other disciplines. “No one argues with a professor about matter,” Adria said, “but everyone argues about cooking.”
Adria spoke of how important it was to always be willing to learn, about not teaching people to cook but teaching people to think. “If you can’t think well you can’t create well.”
At one point in the evening Jose Andres paused, put his hand over Adria’s head as if pointing him out behind his back, and emotionally said to the audience that ALL the experiment, research and hard work that has gone into the development of the poorly named “Molecular Gastronomy,” a cuisine so novel and innovative it passes as Art, high technology, and physics class, has been done by Adria, and from the very beginning he has generously shared his ideas and results. This is not a maestro squirreling away his secrets; this is a genius so excited by his work he sees the world enriched and enlivened by it, and he wants to share. At one point Adria quoted Brilliat Savarin: “The future of nations is how they will feed themselves.”
To better explain the innovation of his work, Adria directed us to a three-egg omelet. No one knows when the first three-egg omelet was made, but if you asked everyone in the room (Loeb Drama Center- full to capacity) to come up with a new omelet, there would probably be at least 300 new omelets. But the omelet itself, the method, is the “concept.” If you asked people to come up with a new concept, almost no one could. That’s where critical thinking enters Ferran’s work. And that is why his food looks strange. It is produced with concepts we have never seen before with ingredients like Lecite, Xantana, Algin, Isomalt, and Glice. Instead of missing the moment when the first omelet was tasted, Adria now dates every innovation; He documents the evolution of every dish with sketches, notes and photographs, and has a timeline of recipes.
What I am doing, he says, is like “creating a new language of cooking with a new alphabet, but no one understands it.”
My last favorite quote from the evening: “The Japanese love raw fish; Most Germans don’t. The fish is not responsible.”
