Artículo del NY Times sobre Adria, ¡Cuidado es muy grande y está en in glés!
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la advertencia está hecha, helo aquí
A Laboratory of Taste
August 10, 2003
By ARTHUR LUBOW
Several months before our defense secretary downgraded
France to the ''old Europe'' and our restaurateurs started
pouring French wine into the gutters, I was talking with
Marc Veyrat, a French chef whose two restaurants have
received top scores from the Michelin and Gault-Millau
guides. To my surprise, Veyrat told me that the most
creative cooks in Europe were no longer French; they were
Spanish. Had my source been located in the Pentagon and not
in a sumptuous auberge on the shores of Lake Annecy, I
would have taken the assertion with several fistfuls of
gros sel. However, this declaration of Spanish creative
supremacy came from one of the most forward-looking chefs
in France. I paid attention.
After a trip to Spain this summer, I'm convinced: the
effervescence that buoyed French nouvelle cuisine in the
1970's has somehow been piped across the Pyrenees. Nor am I
alone in feeling that way. A cover article in The Wine
Spectator in June proclaimed that Spain is ''the new source
of Europe's most exciting wine and food.'' Many prominent
American chefs agree. ''Spain is where the zeitgeist has
shifted,'' says Charlie Trotter, Chicago's most celebrated
chef. ''In Spain, they're pushing the envelope.'' David
Bouley, who oversees two distinguished restaurants in Lower
Manhattan, told me: ''The Spanish don't have this rigor
where they have to cook a certain way. They seem to be
totally free. Something happened in France -- they ran out
of gas. I don't hear about youthful passion as I used to in
those kitchens. The real explosion is with all the young
guys in Spain.'' Even Thomas Keller of the much-honored
French Laundry, north of San Francisco, who has some qualms
about new-wave Spanish cuisine, remarks that ''the French
work ethic has deteriorated over the last few years'' and
that compared with Spain, ''you have in France a much more
traditional, fundamental-based cooking.''
You can still eat very well in France, as you did 20 years
ago. The problem is that almost everywhere you eat in
France, it could still be 20 years ago. Nothing has
changed. The French nouvelle cuisine revolutionized the
culinary world in the 1970's. Consolidating and advancing,
the next generation of chefs maintained France's
pre-eminence. But over the last decade, French innovation
has congealed into complacency. With the advent of the
Internet, as chefs scan the globe for new ideas, France is
no longer the place they look. ''Everybody on eGullet wants
to know what is happening in Spain,'' says Grant Achatz,
the young chef at Trio, a foodie favorite in Evanston, Ill.
The two epicenters of the Spanish groundswell are both in
the northern part of the country -- Catalonia, of which
Barcelona is the capital, and the Basque country around San
Sebastián. And while there are many exciting chefs
throughout Spain, the name on everyone's lips, the man who
is redefining haute cuisine into alta cocina, is a
prodigiously talented, self-taught Catalan. Like Elvis or
Miles, he is usually known by his first name alone: Ferran.
Ferran Adrià's restaurant El Bulli in the Catalan seaside
town of Rosas, a two-hour drive north of Barcelona, is a
gastronome's once-before-you-die mecca. It's not merely the
three Michelin stars (although only three other Spanish
restaurants boast that distinction) or the top rating in
Spain's most influential food guide. The accolades from
other cooks are dazzling. He is ''the best cook on the
planet,'' the quintessentially French Joel Robuchon, who
has garnered similar reviews himself, told the press a
decade ago. (When I spoke with Robuchon, he backpedaled a
little, saying carefully, ''Ferran is the best cook in the
world for technique.'') Juan Mari Arzak, a three-star chef
who is considered a father of new Spanish cuisine, told me,
''Ferran is the most imaginative cook in all history.''
Visiting El Bulli for the first time last fall, I
discovered what they were talking about. Adrià was
celebrating his 20th anniversary at the restaurant with a
seasonlong retrospective of his greatest hits. The menu
included 30 tapas-size dishes, each identified by the date
of its introduction. Indicative of Adrià's accelerating
creativity, most were from the previous three years.
Welcoming cocktails of a frozen whisky sour and a foam
mojito were accompanied by popcorn that had been powdered
and reconstituted as kernels and a tempura of rose petals.
The Catalan mainstay of pa amb tom àquet, which is grilled
bread rubbed with tomato and drizzled with olive oil, was
deconstructed into a white sorbet made from skinned
tomatoes and topped with a dry cracker that was filled with
olive oil. A chicken croquette contained liquid consomme. A
''Kellogg's paella'' consisted of puffed Rice Krispies, to
which the waiter added an intense seafood reduction; on the
side were a small, flash-fried shrimp, a piece of shrimp
sashimi and an ampule containing a thick brown extract of
shrimp heads that you were instructed to squeeze into your
mouth. I vividly recall a cold, grainy heap of foie-gras
powder on one side of a soup bowl that contained a hot
chicken consomme. ''Don't mix,'' the waiter warned. ''Eat a
little of one, then the other.'' (Who would have guessed?)
Perhaps the most sublime dish was an array of seven warm
gelatin blocks that resembled watercolor paints, each a
vivid hue that proved to be a pure essence of a vegetable.
I was handed a fresh vanilla bean to smell while eating
vanilla-scented whipped potatoes. And so on, for three and
a half hours.
Although Adrià stands alone -- ''he is stratospheric, a
Martian,'' says his acolyte, the Madrid restaurateur Sergi
Arola -- he also rides the crest of a wave. ''It is a
movement in Spain,'' Adrià says. ''It is not only me. In a
culture with a very strong traditional gastronomy, there is
a cuisine for the first time with new techniques and
concepts. It is a new nouvelle cuisine.'' Many of these
chefs seem like comrades-in-arms, working together to
advance their country's cuisines. By contrast, the few
French chefs who are pursuing innovative cooking are
far-flung and relatively isolated. ''In France, who is
doing creative cuisine?'' says Jordi Butron, a 35-year-old
new-wave cook who runs Espai Sucre, a fascinating dessert
school and restaurant in Barcelona. He names four, then
says: ''In Catalonia and the Basque country, there are 12
or 15 restaurants that do creative food on a high level. If
you compare all restaurants, France is superior. If you
take the 12 or 15 restaurants in France and compare them
with the Spanish, I do not know.'' Many Spanish chefs have
adopted particular Adrià techniques, but what the best
young Spanish cooks value most is Adrià's fearlessness.
''El Bulli has been able to dare,'' Butron says. ''It is
easier to do that if you come after the one who did it
first.'' For his part, Adrià says, ''The important thing in
Spain is there is a lot of passion among the young.''
Spain rising, France resting. The more attention I paid,
the more I noticed everywhere this invidious comparison,
between smug, stagnant France and innovative, daring Spain.
It seemed, as Trotter suggested, a shift in the zeitgeist,
and one that is not confined to the kitchen. The
outstanding Spanish cultural figure of our time is the
ebullient filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, who finds humanity in
the most despised groups and optimism in the most hopeless
situations. His French counterpart? The misanthropic
novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose retinal cones register
nothing but despair, ugliness and shame.
In this admittedly tinted light, I went to this year's
blockbuster art shows in New York: ''Matisse Picasso'' at
the Modern and ''Manet/Velázquez'' at the Metropolitan.
They were magnificent exhibitions, overstuffed with
paintings of thrilling quality. It would be terribly crass
to think of either show as a mano-a-mano (or, to use the
linguistically neutral American term, a bake-off). And yet.
. . . For me the great revelation of ''Matisse Picasso''
was seeing Picasso's 1930 ''Acrobat'' and realizing that,
two decades before Matisse created his cutouts of
''Acrobats'' and ''Blue Nudes,'' the Spaniard issued a
template for them. Similarly, at the Met it was
enlightening to come upon Manet's large full-length
portraits (in which the mid-19th-century French artist set
his subjects in spatially indeterminate but color-graded
fields) immediately after walking through a breathtaking
array of the Velazquez paintings, created two centuries
earlier, that inspired them. Or, having examined a roomful
of Goyas, to take another look at Manet's self-conscious
models (who are so patently aware of the painter's
presence), his realistic genre scenes of life high and low
and his loose, bravura handling of paint, and wonder if it
doesn't all seem a little . . . derivative. Don't get me
wrong. The Manets and Matisses are ravishing, masterly
paintings. However, in a chronological record of
innovation, the works of Velázquez, Goya and Picasso take
precedence.
There is a cook who reminds me of Matisse, that supreme
colorist who dangerously harmonized reds, oranges and
mauves that shouldn't be capable of coexisting on the same
canvas. His name is Pierre Gagnaire, and he is the most
out-there Michelin three-star chef in France. On route to
Spain, I invited a college friend, Whit Stillman, to join
me for lunch in Paris at Gagnaire's eponymous restaurant. I
was hoping Stillman could give me another American
perspective on Spain versus France, or more particularly,
on Barcelona versus Paris. The writer-director of the film
''Barcelona,'' which follows the fortunes of a few
Americans based in the Catalan capital, Stillman hails from
New York, but he moved to Barcelona in 1991 and lived there
for two years, with his wife, Irene, who is a native of
that city. In 1998, the Stillmans, who had returned to New
York, once again pulled up stakes and relocated to an
apartment in a 17th-century hôtel particulier in the old
heart of Paris.
''The only great American I knew in Barcelona was on the
lam from the F.B.I.,'' Stillman said as the food arrived in
clusters of small dishes. Gagnaire's menu is poetically
composed around products, regions or seasons. To start, I
ordered ''the Catalan country'' and was brought four
different items, beautifully arranged on porcelain plates.
It was a flavor reverie of the region I was about to visit,
and along with some of the seafood for which the Costa
Brava is famous (tiny squid, large shrimp, cod) and Spanish
hot and sweet peppers, the dishes contained strange
ingredients, like a minuscule sea cucumber called
''espardeigne.'' There were too many flavors for me to
focus. The food shimmered in my mind, like an exotic dream.
''The other interesting person was Marc Rich,'' Stillman
was saying. ''The interesting Americans in Barcelona were
there because they couldn't be extradited. In Paris, the
people who come from all over tend to be excellent. They're
coming from achievement or a positive factor. In Barcelona,
it was the dregs.''
Raffish, scruffy Barcelona, with its seedy Gothic quarter
and its Gaudí buildings that rigorously eschew right
angles. Compare that with monumental Paris, a bourgeois
heaven, where Haussmann's boulevards radiate clearly, the
Notre-Dame cathedral has been scrubbed tan and our lunch
cost a bit over $500 for two. If you want to stay out all
night in Paris, of course you can -- but in Barcelona, you
pretty much have to. The restaurants don't start filling up
for dinner until around 10, so a meal segues smoothly into
a post-midnight round of clubbing. In the gentrifying El
Born district, which has the energy of New York's Lower
East Side poured into Barcelona's gracious Modernismo
architecture, you can toss down a few drinks with some
Sichuan-pepper yucca chips at Santa Maria, pop in to Comerç
24 for the Adrià alum Carles Abellan's onion tempura with
soy foam and stumble over to the dessert restaurant, Espai
Sucre, where my five-course menu culminated in a smoky
lapsang-souchong-tea cream served on a plate with a
chocolate-coffee cake, a black sesame-seed wafer, a scoop
of chocolate ice cream, a few grapes and a puddle of sour
yogurt. Then it's time to go dancing!
Maybe I should confess that my own stodgy predilection is
for early-morning Barcelona, particularly a stroll through
the Boqueria, the old market on the Ramblas, to ogle some
of the most beautiful fish in the world. Once upon a time,
you could have had a similar experience in Paris, but that
was before the fresh-food markets were banished to the
suburbs and Les Halles was converted into a place to buy
fast food and cheap clothing, or to log on at an Internet
cafe.
I wanted to get Stillman's take on one of the summer's most
talked-about independent movies, ''L'Auberge Espagnole,''
but for reasons of aggrieved proprietorship, which I
completely understand, he had avoided seeing a successful
movie about young foreigners living in Barcelona. Cédric
Klapisch's film follows a Parisian youth named Xavier to
Barcelona, where he is learning Spanish in preparation for
a career in business. The Paris that we see in the movie is
the Paris that has sprung up in the last two decades and
now encircles the historic quarter: massive, generic office
blocks looming over vast soulless plazas. In insouciant
contrast, Barcelona in ''L'Auberge Espagnole'' is all palm
trees and mosaic-tiled rooftops and late-night music bars.
It is young and transgressive, like the Paris of the 50's
and 60's that we fell in love with in Truffaut's ''Shoot
the Piano Player'' and Malle's ''Zazie Dans le Métro'' and
Godard's ''Breathless.'' (Klapisch's Paris is what Godard,
back in 1967 in ''Two or Three Things I Know About Her,''
warned was coming.) When a beautiful fellow citoyenne says
to Xavier, ''What an awful smell; Barcelona is such a dirty
city,'' it is a tip-off that she is horribly repressed.
Barcelona embodies freedom, Paris corporate lifelessness.
At the end of the film, having completed his language
course, Xavier returns to his mother's home for a
celebratory meal before taking up his white-collar
drudgery. One look at the conventional steak au poivre
sizzling grimly in a skillet and you feel in your gut
Xavier's panicky sauve qui peut impulse to escape Paris at
all cost. He must stay true to Spain, a country where
creativity, exuberance and personal style are valued over
money and status. For this American viewer, Klapisch's film
came as the clincher. Spain has become the new France.
Standing in Ferran Adrià's kitchen at El Bulli, it is easy
to believe that you have slipped down the rabbit hole.
Adrià, who would have been the caterer of choice for the
Mad Hatter, invents food that provokes all the senses,
including the sense of disbelief. His success is almost as
amazing as his food. Snaring a table at El Bulli is an
extreme sport of the international gourmandoisie, akin to
getting a 3-year-old into the nursery school at the 92nd
Street Y. Open for only six months a year, solely for
dinner, the restaurant can accommodate 8,000 diners in a
season. Last year, more than 300,000 callers requested a
table.
When I visited in late June, Adrià was refining a new pet
concept, which he calls ''liquid ravioli.'' During the six
months that the restaurant on the Costa Brava is closed, he
works on new recipes in a ''laboratory'' near the Barcelona
market with his younger brother and collaborator, Albert,
and with Oriol Castro, one of his two chefs de cuisine. A
stylish duplex in an 18th-century mansion, the ''Taller el
Bulli,'' as it is called, has an ultramodern kitchen that
is frighteningly well equipped -- the spice rack holds 720
jars. During the summer season, however, the laboratory is
moved to the restaurant kitchen in Rosas. There Adrià
convenes in the afternoon (lunchtime at more traditional
establishments) with Albert and Castro.
On the day I watched, Adrià and Castro (Albert was
traveling) began by spooning pea puree into a plastic tray
that was filled with a clear liquid at room temperature.
Like invisible ink, the green puree in the magic solution
began to take solid form. When it had cohered
satisfactorily, Castro scooped it out and rinsed it in a
second tray, which I guessed held water. (No one was
saying: ''It's a game to see how long it can stay in our
hands,'' Adrià said, and laughed. Later, he e-mailed the
recipe. The mysterious element in the first bath was
calcium chloride, which reacts with alginate, a kelp
extract, in the puree.) Castro put the bright green
''ravioli'' into a little dish and handed it to me. I cut
it open with a spoon, and the ravioli dissolved into soup.
''It is a revolutionary technique, and there are thousands
of things to do with it,'' Adrià said enthusiastically.
Adrià, who is 41, is a compact, dark-haired man, who speaks
a raspy and guttural Catalan, Castilian Spanish and (in our
case) French, in a voice that hisses and sputters like a
severed electrical line. ''You know 'chaud-froid,' the
classic technique of Escoffier?'' he asked. In the late
19th century, Auguste Escoffier, the chef at the Ritz Hotel
in Paris, codified and refined the recipes of French
cuisine, including one -- chaud-froid -- in which meat is
first cooked, then chilled, to be served with a cold aspic.
''This is like chaud-froid.''
As we spoke, Castro was peeling a quail egg, then placing
it in a spoon, which he dipped into a consomme. Carefully,
he slid the contents of the spoon into the mysterious bath.
''It's the new poached egg,'' he said, laughing. The new
technique is indeed very adaptable. When a liquid is
squeezed into the bath from a pipette, the droplets form
kernels with the consistency of salmon roe. Instead of
ravioli, you have caviar. ''It is not ravioli; it is not
caviar,'' Adrià said. ''It is something different.'' He was
coating individual salmon eggs with the pea puree. ''It's
caviar of caviar,'' he said. Wouldn't that be awfully
difficult to serve to the 50-odd nightly diners who consume
a tasting menu of some 30 small courses? ''Afterward, we
will devise a production system,'' he said. ''Now it is
anarchy.''
Albert Adrià came up with the concept of ''liquid ravioli''
or ''liquid caviar'' in March, after sampling a popular
Asian drink made with tapioca pearls. The Bulli creative
team has been developing and honing the technique ever
since. As I watched, Castro sprinkled black droplets of
squid ink into the solution. ''This will be eggs of
squid,'' Adrià said. ''You understand? It is not creativity
-- blah, blah, blah. It is a lot of work.'' As the eggs
congealed, Adrià flash-cooked a few tiny octopi under a
high-heat salamander broiler. Then he arranged each grilled
creature with a dollop of the faux caviar and added salt.
''It's magic,'' he said, beaming at his creation. ''For us
it's magic. You close your eyes, you're eating little squid
with its eggs. If you eat the squid first, then the caviar,
you do not get the emotion. That's why it's important that
the servers tell the clients how to eat.'' While Castro
experimented with different-size droplets, Adrià
absent-mindedly popped the remaining baby octopi into his
mouth,
''Liquid ravioli,'' aka ''caviar,'' is only one of Adrià's
new notions this season. As he and Castro worked, a young
man in preparation for dinner was boiling milk in low flat
pans, then skimming off the skin that formed on the top and
storing it between plastic sheets. Adrià took inspiration
from the soy-milk tofu wrappers in Chinese dim sum. ''The
concept is milk as a pasta,'' he said. ''That leads to
incredible things -- ravioli, cannelloni.'' He took a milk
skin and wrapped it around a little chopped basil and
garlic. We each ate one -- a pesto ravioli. He smiled.
''The aftertaste,'' he said. He swabbed another milk skin
with some melted Idiazabal cheese. ''I am making a crepe
Idiazabal,'' he said.
Castro brought over a handful of fresh almonds. ''Four
almonds, very simple: sugared, salted, acid, bitter,''
Adrià explained. ''The four basic tastes. For me, it is
very sensual, this dish.''
Castro said: ''It is very simple, and it is also very
complex.'' He dipped an almond in a coating of sugar and
handed it to Adrià. One bite, and Adrià shook his head. He
wanted more sugar. ''I don't like light tastes,'' he said
to me. ''I like tastes. . . . '' He snapped his fingers.
Then he bit into a newly doctored almond that Castro gave
him. ''No,'' he said. ''More, more.'' The third rendition
satisfied him. We cleared our palates with a little glass
of clear tomato extract, and Castro began salting almonds.
''It is either magic or it isn't,'' Adrià said. He added
some salt to his almond. ''It makes you reflect, and
cuisine should do that. The most important thing is to make
people happy, but the second sometimes is to give them
something to think about.'' He drank a little juice and
tasted a very sour almond. He nodded vehemently. ''That is
the limit,'' he said. ''We are seeking the limit.'' He
suggested to Castro that they serve the dish with ice
water, rather than tomato extract, so that people will not
be distracted from the concept. The four almonds will be
presented on a black block. ''White and black, very
minimal,'' Adrià said. ''Four little things -- four basic
tastes -- and just cold water. People will remember this
all their lives.''
Adrià, the son of a Barcelona house painter, is entirely
self-taught. He was working in the kitchen at El Bulli 21
years ago when the executive chef quit, and Juli Soler, the
farsighted manager, promoted him. Back then, El Bulli (the
name means ''bulldog'') was merely a good seaside
roadhouse. Adrià began cooking classic French cuisine. In
the archives at the Taller Bulli, I saw an old menu:
saffron-mussel soup, entrecote with morels and cream, roast
leg of lamb for two. ''I was a conventional, traditional
cook,'' Adrià told me. ''I made langouste salad in many
ways.'' During the off season, he would travel in France,
often with Soler, to critique the leading restaurants. He
credits his conversion to a day in Nice in 1986 when he
attended a cooking demonstration by Jacques Maximin, a
brilliant and influential chef renowned for respecting no
boundaries. Adrià recalls that someone in the audience
asked, ''What is creativity?'' and Maximin replied, ''Don't
copy.'' The words became Adrià's mantra. With Soler's
support, he transformed El Bulli into a restaurant unlike
any other. Since 1990, they have owned it jointly.
With Adrià, I walked across the huge kitchen (at 3,000
square feet, it is the same size as the two dining rooms
combined) to the cold section, where frozen packages of
commercial mandarin-orange juice were slowly thawing. The
thin liquid that rises to the top would be discarded,
leaving an intensely flavored residue. ''Everyone mixes it,
but they are not looking,'' Adrià said. He had observed the
separation late last summer but waited until this season to
make something of it; inspirations that strike after July
are postponed a year. ''It's not a concept -- O.K., it's a
concept, reducing the essence of tangerine -- but it's a
little path,'' Adrià said. ''The caviar is a big path.''
Castro appears with some spring onions and a canister of
powdered green tea, and they discuss what else to add. The
discussion consists of Castro making suggestions and Adrià
rejecting them, until the idea of walnut oil finds favor.
However, when Castro returns with some, Adrià shakes his
head. Too heavy and strong. Castro fetches hazelnut oil.
Adrià delicately brushes a spring onion with hazelnut oil
and places it alongside a puddle of tangerine essence that
is the color of egg yolk. He tastes. Like the No. 2 wolf in
the pack, Castro takes the second taste.
''It needs something,'' Castro says.
''It needs a little
more onion,'' Adrià said. ''I love this dish. There is
nobody who will ever have eaten something like this
before.'' He turned to me. ''There are clients who look at
things, and those who don't look at anything,'' he said.
''There are those who think, This is magic, this mandarin,
and those who will not notice. Our work here is to make new
things. That simple. No one makes a plane trip to eat
classic cuisine. It is very good, a tournedos Rossini, but
it is another emotion.''
On the plate, he sprinkled a mixture of granulated sugar
and green-tea powder. He tasted it. Then from the canister,
he added a little of the bitter green-tea powder and tasted
again. He was satisfied.
The other starring concept to make its debut this season is
something Adrià calls ''air.'' I had encountered air
earlier, on my previous visit to El Bulli, in September of
last year. At that time, I talked with Adrià about some of
his more celebrated and influential creations, including
''foam,'' in which he aerates sauces with a nitrous-oxide
siphon that is ordinarily used to whip cream, and ''warm
gelatin,'' in which he adds a seaweed powder called agar to
stabilize beef gelatin without chilling it. ''April 14,
1994, was the day of the first foam,'' he said last
September. ''Hot jellies date from June 20, 1998.'' His
dark restless eyes looked tired, as if oppressed by the
weight of all this history and the responsibility of
maintaining his position as the world's most creative chef.
Then he smiled. ''Another day is Sept. 18, 2002,'' he said.
I looked at him quizzically; that was just two days before.
''Foams are out -- for us,'' he said. ''I have created
something
five times lighter than the foams. The new texture that I
create is air. In the bathroom there is the bath foam. This
is the same texture.''
A few more questions and his discretion dissipated. ''You
will be the first journalist to see it,'' he said. He asked
Castro to make preparations in the kitchen. ''It is only
done with the product, nothing else,'' he explained. ''For
example, the carrot is only carrot juice, nothing else.''
When Castro was ready, we went into the kitchen. Like a
magician, Adrià had me taste a bowl of celery juice to
verify that it contained nothing else. Then he applied an
electric mixer. Within a minute, the liquid had turned into
bubble bath. He brought it out onto the patio. He beamed
happily, his cares temporarily evaporated. I couldn't
decide whether he looked more like a father whose child had
uttered a first word or a little boy who finds a bicycle
under the Christmas tree. In my mouth, the new ''air''
lacked almost all substance, but embodied the essence of
celery.
On my visit in June, Adrià served a carrot air with
mandarin-orange concentrate -- an intensified, gossamer
version of chilled carrot-orange soup. The next day, we
repaired to the small apartment and office that he keeps on
the hill above the restaurant. (His wife lives in
Barcelona, where she is an aquarium administrator. They go
back and forth between Barcelona and Rosas on their days
off.) Pulling photographs out of shoebox-size files, he
showed me some of the ''airy'' dishes he had made earlier
this season. Baby artichokes with pumpkin-seed oil drops on
a mandarin-orange coulis with vinegar ''air'' looked
especially appealing. ''Now that is over,'' he said. ''No
more little artichokes.'' When he says over, he means it.
Next year's menu will consist entirely of new plates.
Adrià has every dish photographed, dated, archived and
numbered. (There are now 1,200.) Using the archive, his
team has been able to realize one of his most ambitious
schemes: a huge three-volume work, with an even more
complete CD-ROM, that describes each dish. Volume 1,
cataloging the most recent dishes, appeared in Spanish late
last year; the next volumes, as well as an English
translation, are in the works. The tome is organized like
Adrià's mind -- methodically. It has copious
cross-references and charts that resemble genealogical
trees. ''There must be a great deal of order -- and then
you can be an artist,'' he says. ''With anarchy, there is
not artistry.'' Charlie Trotter told me of a dinner he had
with Adrià at the Smith & Wollensky steakhouse in
Washington. Adrià ordered eight different steaks to be
presented at 10-minute intervals, then took a few bites of
each one, studying the difference between a porterhouse, a
tenderloin, a New York strip.
In the kitchen of El Bulli, I browsed through the
loose-leaf book in which Adrià records ideas to explore.
Recorded in a minuscule, penciled hand, the notes are
organized in categories. Under the label ''Products,'' for
example, he has jotted ''Ventresca pescados.'' The
ventresca is the most prized belly meat of the tuna;
wondering whether he might find its counterpart in other
fish, Adrià has written ''salmon, sardine, mackerel.'' The
subhead of ''Combinations'' listed honey-potato,
coffee-tarragon, salmon-coffee and wasabi-roses. Other main
categories in the notebook were ''Techniques and Concepts''
(quinoa risotto, chestnut couscous) and ''Elaboration,''
which went on forever, with such subcategories as waters
and infusions; juices; consommes and soups (there were
about 40 of them); liquid creams; purees; gelatins; and
cheese and other milk products (the milk skin was here,
with sub-subheadings of ''filled or ''plain,'' and
different variations on crepes and stuffed pasta).
The aspect of the published book of which Adrià seems
proudest is its historical preciseness. ''It is important
to talk about an evolving analysis,'' he said. In his
office, he picked up a worn copy of Michel Guérard's 1978
cookbook, ''Cuisine Gourmande,'' a bible of nouvelle
cuisine. ''For me, Michel Guérard's book is the main one,''
he said. He leafed through the pictures and recipes. ''What
year is this dish? What year is this?'' he said. ''It's as
if one were talking of art and they say, 'Picasso, what
year was that painting?' and you say, 'I don't know.' If we
want to talk seriously of creativity, it is necessary that
all cooks make a catalog for people a hundred years from
now. People ask: 'Where did nouvelle cuisine come from?
Bocuse, Guérard?' No one can say. Frédy Girardet, for me
one of the great cooks, has this book. . . . '' He pulled
it off the shelf. ''One looks at it and doesn't know if
this dish is from '83 or '96.'' In other words, who could
tell if the recipe was ahead of its time? ''It is like the
cinema. If you see 'Terminator 1,' you think it is amazing,
but when you see it after 'Terminator 2,' the special
effects don't seem so fantastic. When you talk of cuisine
relatively, you must know when it is done.''
While much culinary history may be murky, the birthdate of
nueva cocina in Spain is not. At the end of 1976, Paul
Bocuse visited Madrid to speak at a conference. The
chef-proprietor of a restaurant outside Lyon, Bocuse was
the most exuberant exponent of nouvelle cuisine, the
renaissance that transformed French cooking by making it
lighter (more olive oil, less butter and cream), fresher
(local and seasonal products), broader (ingredients from
Asia and other exotic lands) and prettier (plate dressing
as elegant as a Japanese flower arrangement). In Bocuse's
audience in Madrid were two young Basque chefs working in
San Sebastián who were exhilarated by what they heard: Juan
Mari Arzak, who was cooking at the restaurant Arzak,
established by his grandfather, and Pedro Subijana, who had
just started working at Akelarre. When they introduced
themselves to Bocuse, he invited them to come stay with him
in Lyon for 10 days. ''He is the best ambassador France has
ever had,'' says Subijana, a charming, courtly man with a
big handlebar mustache.
The timing was auspicious for a new culinary movement in
Spain. One year earlier, the death of Generalissimo Franco
had released the country from a repressive dictatorship.
Everything new was welcome -- and the fresh wind that
stirred up Spanish film, literature and design also swept
into the kitchen. Although the Basque country had a rich
gastronomic tradition and an unsurpassed supply of seafood,
meat and vegetables, chefs in the restaurants were backward
compared with their counterparts across the border in
France. ''There were grand traditional restaurants,'' says
Subijana, whose Akelarre now has two Michelin stars. ''All
the menus were the same. They were lies.'' Back in San
Sebastián, he and Arzak organized a group of a dozen chefs,
who met regularly to discuss how to create menus that would
renovate forgotten traditional dishes and invent new ones,
all based on regional products. Every month or two, each
cook invited four progressive customers to attend, free of
charge, a group dinner of new Basque cuisine at one of the
restaurants. Before the chefs realized what was happening,
they had created a movement. Subijana knew the new cuisine
had arrived when other cooks in the area began asking if
they could join up.
Blessed with proximity to the sea (and, as that patriotic
French chef Robuchon emphasizes, ''profiting from being
near the best cuisine in the world''), the Basque country
and Catalonia have nourished the new Spanish cuisine from
the start. Behind Arzak and Subijana came Hilario Arbelaitz
of Zuberoa, near San Sebastián, and Santi Santamaria of El
Raco de Can Fabes, near Barcelona. In the next generation,
the leaders are Adrià and the Basque three-star chef Martin
Berasategui. The ranks grow larger among the young. Two
Basques -- Andoni Luis Aduriz of Mugaritz and Isaac
Salaberria of Fagollaga -- struck me as most impressive,
but I also had several remarkable meals cooked by young
chefs in Barcelona.
Going to Spain now evokes the excitement I felt in the
80's, dining in France at the nouvelle cuisine restaurants
of Alain Chapel and Alain Senderens. Can you still get that
frisson in France -- the sense that you are eating
something both new and authentic? Olivier Roellinger and
Pierre Gagnaire both create delicately spiced, artfully
constructed, personal dishes, but without providing for me
any real thrills. Marc Veyrat is, if anything, too flashy:
the Adrià influence is very evident in his recent plates,
such as a coddled egg that a waiter injects with a syringe
full of sour oxalis extract; or an ''Irish coffee'' of duck
bouillon topped with corn foam that you sip through a straw
while sucking on little bon-bons made of wild caraway. It
is usually delicious, but it can get a little forced and
exhausting. Only Michel Bras, in his Zen-like restaurant in
the remote Aubrac, maintains the tradition of originality
and purity that animated nouvelle cuisine. Tellingly, so
many of the best young Spanish chefs cite him as their hero
that I suspect he may have more acolytes in Spain than in
his native France.
It's hard to explain what happened to nouvelle cuisine in
France. Maybe it just got old. Certainly, French cooking
rests on an enviable base, with more solid, midlevel
restaurants than exist in any other country. There is also
a French public that has been eating in fine restaurants
for centuries, ever since the Revolution forced cooks out
of their perches in aristocratic residences. Even the
irascible and powerful Spanish food writer, Rafael García
Santos, who is scathing about the quality of contemporary
French cuisine, respects the taste of the French populace.
''They have the best public,'' he says. ''But they haven't
got cooks who want to change the world.''
Culinary bravado is essential in Spain, where most of the
public appears to be baffled, not unreasonably, by the
restaurants that have captured the critics' approbation.
Jordi Vila, the talented 29-year-old chef at Alkimia in
Barcelona, says that he offers ''two lines -- one for the
great public, with mutton, monkfish, artichokes, and one
with gastronomic dishes.'' The best thing I ate at Alkimia
was a clear green-apple gazpacho, which contained a perfect
briny oyster, cockles, green-bean puree and yogurt dots.
''Gazpacho with oysters, two or three will like it, and two
or three won't,'' Vila explains. ''I am very happy with the
experimental things; the public is not always. You have to
do it slowly.''
There were not many other people in the dining room the
night I ate at Fagollaga, near San Sebastián, but there
should have been. Isaac Salaberria is a post-Adrià chef
with a style of his own. As part of the movement toward
lightness that began with the emulsified blender sauces of
nouvelle cuisine and continues with Adrià's foam and air,
Salaberria, 32, a large man with a small voice, has taken
the sauce off the plate entirely and reimagined it as a
shot glass of juice or soup. Most memorable was a small
slab of fatback from an Iberian pig, served with almond
milk, in a brilliant marriage of richnesses. ''I like to
have the original flavor of the product,'' Salaberria says,
in a credo I heard from other chefs of his generation. ''I
am looking for the maximum lightness and the maximum
flavor.''
If it is true, as García Santos claims, that unlike their
Spanish counterparts, young French chefs are primarily
looking for money, the reason may be a social problem, not
a character flaw. Taxes and labor benefits make France a
very expensive place to run a restaurant. It is hard, for
proprietor and customer alike, to disregard money. A dinner
for two chez Marc Veyrat, with modest wines, will easily
exceed $800. ''The social charges are too heavy,'' Veyrat
says, as an explanation for his nosebleed-inducing checks.
In addition to the benefits that the proprietor provides
for his staff, which the customer pays indirectly, the
state slaps on a blatant 19.6 percent value-added tax to
the bill. The comparable Spanish tax is 7 percent.
Furthermore, France in 1998 legislated a mandatory 35-hour
work week as an antidote to an unemployment rate that had
exceeded 12 percent. Not implemented until 2000, the
35-hour rule has enraged restaurateurs, who traditionally
work long hours. In France it would be unthinkable to have
a labor-intensive establishment like El Bulli -- even if it
weren't closed for lunch. For its one daily service with
about 50 customers, El Bulli employs 30 or more cooks (a
number that includes many unsalaried short-term
apprentices, as is the custom throughout the high-end
dining world).
How can a French chef turn a profit? Robuchon addressed the
challenge this spring by opening simultaneously, in Tokyo
and Paris, a new concept: L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon.
Behind a handsome rosewood bar (I ate in Paris, but the
Tokyo restaurant is reported to be identical), either
Robuchon personally or one of his distinguished fellow
chefs prepares and serves the food to the patron, as in a
sushi or tapas bar. There are 20 people working in the
kitchen, with 200 people showing up daily for a seat at the
counter. (By comparison, at the three-star restaurant that
Robuchon closed in 1996, a kitchen staff of 25 fed 45
clients at each meal.) The food I ate at the Atelier de
Robuchon was delicious, but it was hardly innovative or
particularly creative. How could it be otherwise? The
Atelier concept is designed to be rolled out profitably in
big cities around the world. And the average bill, it
should be noted, comes to about $75 a head.
Adrià and Soler charge about $150 a person, without wine,
for dinner at El Bulli. Not cheap, but once you see what
goes into it, you realize it's not overpriced. Adrià
observes that he could follow the law of supply and demand
by doubling or tripling the price, but he doesn't want to
limit the restaurant to obscenely rich people. As it is, El
Bulli just breaks even. Adrià supports the operation with
product lines, consulting projects and a nascent group of
El Bulli Hotels. (So far there is just one hotel, in
Seville.) ''I don't want to be a millionaire, but I want to
be able to live,'' he says. ''I have 60 employees. It is
impossible without the businesses. Here at El Bulli, I do
not think of money. I make zero. If tomorrow the lottery
gives me $10 million, I close the businesses.''
The belief that cooking is more than a means to nourish the
client and enrich the cook -- that it can be an art form --
propels the best chefs in Spain. Unlike such surviving
grand old men of nouvelle cuisine as Paul Bocuse and Michel
Troisgros, the founding fathers of nueva cocina have
continued to reinvent their styles. At Akelarre, I ate a
mollusk soup that bubbled when hot broth was poured over a
white foam in the bowl. Arzak's restaurant was closed for
vacation when I was in Spain, but where was the chef taking
his holiday? In Rosas, where he could hang out in the
kitchen of his friend Adrià. There I met him -- an
infectiously jolly man of 61. I had eaten at his San
Sebastián restaurant, but that was years ago, and in the
meantime, his daughter Elena had moved into the kitchen
alongside him. ''I began by evolving the cuisine of my
mother, very gently,'' he told me. ''My évolution forte
began four years ago. I was looking for a new path.'' He
and Elena now serve such avant-garde dishes as smoked tuna
with warm tomato-licorice-pistachio gelatin triangles and a
fig-pine nut garnish. They espouse the tradition of
inventing new traditions.
<img src="http://graphics.nytimes.com/images/a.gif"
align="left" alt=<object.title class="Movie"
idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="177633">"A"</object.title>> year
ago, Ferran Adrià's younger brother, Albert, told me: ''For
me, Andoni Luis Aduriz is the future of Spanish cooking.''
So I cannot say I went to Aduriz's Mugaritz restaurant, in
the countryside a half-hour from San Sebastián, with no
expectations.
My lunch companion was the food critic Rafael García
Santos, 48, who along with writing a weekly column for the
national newspaper group Correo, publishes the best
restaurant guide to Spain and coordinates an annual food
congress in San Sebastián. He has been instrumental in the
rise of the best Spanish chefs, and he is not bashful about
letting you know it. Aduriz is one of two former El Bulli
chefs who have gone off to make a great success. The other,
Sergi Arola, runs the Michelin two-star La Broche in
Madrid. My meal at La Broche had disappointed me. A
carpaccio of scallops, shrimp and duck liver, with a dollop
of green apple puree and a ring of smoked aioli, typified
the problem. ''When you eat this in your mouth, the texture
is raw,'' explained Arola, who is 35. ''But at the same
time, I trick your brain with the flavor of the mayonnaise
that is roasted.'' My brain was not tricked. The mushy
textures of the three components trumped any suggestion
that they had been roasted.
''It is like an exception in Spain that he is not doing
something better,'' García Santos said harshly, when I
mentioned my meal at La Broche. ''He wants too much to be
in every place. He is not in the kitchen. That is the
illness of modern chefs.'' Arola cooks in a style that is
recognizably Ferranista. He says that he is most influenced
by the cooking of El Bulli from 1985 to 1993, when Adrià
was deconstructing traditional Spanish dishes. Like
Picasso, one of whose fertile periods could spawn an entire
career for Henry Moore, Adrià keeps changing. Chefs who
cook in his style are not cooking in his spirit. Adrià
speaks fondly of both of his proteges, but he distinguishes
between them. ''Sergi makes his own cuisine, but in this
style,'' Adrià says. ''He is very honest. He says, 'My
cuisine makes a reference to El Bulli.' I am very content
with him.'' As for Aduriz? ''Andoni wants to create a style
of his own,'' Adrià says. ''He is a great, great cook, with
great possibilities. It is difficult to create a new style,
very difficult. He is trying.''
When Santos and I arrived at Mugaritz, which is a handsome
modern dining room in a pretty, rural setting, Aduriz, a
shy, boyishly handsome man of 32 who looks about half his
age, came to greet us. He recited the menu he had prepared
to García Santos, who knitted his brow, rubbed his beard
and scowled. ''And the bacalao, no? It is very good,'' he
said. Aduriz nodded. He would substitute salt cod for
another fish on the menu.
From the outset, it was evident that Aduriz had not been
oversold. Most of the dozen items on the menu were
presented in a shallow bowl, into which the waiter poured a
hot soup. ''I try in every dish to have something that
envelops it,'' the chef explained. ''I love the feeling of
an integral taste. And there are two different smells --
one when it comes, and then different when they drop the
liquid on it.'' A slow-cooked piece of beef rested in a
clear broth redolent of roasted peppers. ''This is a
revolutionary way of doing a rustic taste,'' García Santos
said. ''Roasted pepper is a usual taste here, it is in all
dishes -- but not in this form.''
Aduriz worked both for Adrià and for his major rival,
Martin Berasategui, the Michelin three-star chef of the
same generation, whose restaurant is in a suburb of San
Sebastián. Another self-taught chef, Berasategui cooks in a
style that is more identifiably French, making use of
cream, for example. He is less revolutionary than Adrià,
but also very influential. On the new menu of the
well-regarded young American chef Wylie Dufresne, at WD-50
on the Lower East Side, I spotted two dishes -- a foie gras
terrine topped with anchovies and a thin sheet of pounded
oysters -- that were modified renditions of Berasategui
plates.
Aduriz has been cooking at his own restaurant for five
years. ''The first two years I had to decontaminate, in a
positive sense,'' he told me. ''I come from two places with
a very strong identity, El Bulli and Martin Berasategui.
Sometimes you think, What would he do? You have to take
that off, to start doing your own cuisine.'' In his
cooking, the radical breakthroughs in technique that are so
obvious at El Bulli are less apparent. What he has taken
from Adrià is a guiding philosophy. ''I met the most
passionate people I ever met in the kitchen,'' he says.
''In '93, when I was first in El Bulli, the real important
thing was the gastronomy. They were losing a lot of money,
there were no customers, but people were every day thinking
the most important thing was how to do a foam.''
That idealism is what I find so compelling at the best
Spanish restaurants, and so sadly missing in France. The
nouvelle cuisine movement burgeoned at the end of the
hopeful 60's, nurtured by a belief that honest cooking --
mindful of culinary tradition, natural products and
individual creativity -- could make a better world. That
optimism has curdled. Besieged with soaring costs and
smothering regulations, French chefs think more
imaginatively about brand extension than about recipe
invention. They cling to past glory, to a tradition of
nouvelle cuisine that is becoming as hoary as Escoffier. In
Spain, as García Santos says, young chefs still touchingly
believe that they can change the world.
Aduriz realizes that most of his patrons fail to recognize
his ambitions. ''If I thought people were just coming to
eat, as 95 percent of people do, I wouldn't do this,'' he
admits. But a creator cannot think that way. ''The Spanish
cooks understood they have to do an artistic cuisine,
whether or not people understand,'' García Santos says. He
is the Ortega y Gasset of the food world: like the Spanish
essayist, he loathes the mass taste that predominates
around him. ''Picasso would never have painted as he did if
he cared whether people liked his painting,'' he continues.
''There are only a few people who know about food. Do you
think there are more than 10,000 people who like Ferran
Adrià's food? The difference in Spain is, nobody likes or
understands what El Bulli does, as nobody understands the
way of painting of Picasso, but nobody says it is just
nothing. In Spain, a minority cuisine can convert the
ideology of a country and become the dominant ideology.''
He looks around the Mugaritz dining room. ''Tell me, how
many restaurants are there in France where you can eat this
way? There are seven or eight in Spain. In France, there
are one or two. But in Spain there are a lot of young cooks
who want to do this, and that is the important thing.'' He
shakes his head. ''It's a great shame what has happened in
France, because we love the French people and we learned
there. Twenty years ago, everybody went to France. Today
they go there to learn what not to do.''
Arthur Lubow is a contributing writer for the magazine. He
last wrote about Goya's Black Paintings.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/magazine/10SPAIN.html?ex=1061597469&ei=1&en=3fadff6e8aee4af3
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
saludos
Ángel AT
huertanica
Que traduzco el inglés con un Collins y musha imaginaçao .... !!!
Claro que da una idea de lo mucho que han resumido el artículo a la
hora de traducirlo en los periódicos de aquí.
Y elevarlo a mejor cocinero por encima de los franceses, alabando al
mismo tiempo el compañerismo con que se tratan los españoles, fuera de
divismos, es para ponerse contento.
¡En fin!, en nombre de lo bien que se está portando el Adriá (ideas,
ideas e ideas en artículo diario de El País, sobre todo para evitar
los fogones con estos calorines), que me alegro el reconocimiento que
le hacen y a través de él a nuestro país. ¿ Nos habremos librado por
fin de los toros, volantes y castañuelas a la hora de que nos
identifiquen con Spain ....? ¡es que me cuesta tanto, sujetarme la
peineta con papel celo ... y no veas la teja y la mantilla ... ;D Las
castañuelas tenía que ponerlas en los tobillos, porque una mano en la
muleta y la otra el abanico .... total que prefiero mil veces
transportar los cubiertos ó el Isi sifón ;D.
Solo falta nuestro reconocimiento, así que, mi enhorabuena por todo lo
que significa el espaldarazo de los EE UU y no voy a poner "peros"
como es habitual.
OT: ¿Alguién ha visto las Perseídas estas noches? Mi salida nocturna
para su contemplación ha sido infructuosa, demasiada luz de luna ha
impedido ver el fenómeno. Así que me quedo sin ver "llorar" a
S.Lorenzo este año.
Un saludo
María Josefa
Steve Warson
Ángel AT wrote:
> Saludos a la barra:
>
>
> la advertencia está hecha, helo aquí
>
>
--
Saludos,
Iñaki Azpiazu
____________
mel
Hola, hola:
Yo no he recibido el mensaje de Iñaki Azpiazu que citas pero estoy muy
interesado en ese artículo y no pude hacerme con la edición dominical del NY
Times, por favor si pudieseis alguno contestarme de seguido con alguna
información os quedaría muy agradecido. Lo de las prisa es pq hoy mismo, a
media tarde, salimos de viaje, Mallorca, por varios dias y allí no creo
poder conectarme a este Grupo.
Gracias anticipadas. Salu2,
mel
"Steve Warson" <iazpi...@MIELDAattglobal.net> escribió en el mensaje
news:3F3B58C7...@MIELDAattglobal.net...
Apicius
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/magazine/10SPAIN.html?ex=1061597469&ei=1&en=3fadff6e8aee4af3
saludos
Ángel AT
"mel" <mlo...@telefonica.net> escribió en el mensaje
news:bhfn2h$7ku3$1...@ID-78642.news.uni-berlin.de...
mel
Hola, hola:
Casi contestas antes de botar la pelota. Muuuuchas gracias, muy interesante
el tal artículo, del que había leído referencias en la prensa de aquí.
Personalmente me llama tmbn la atención la cita que hacen de Marc Veyrat
quien estuvo hace pocos años en SS haciendo demostraciones de su técnica
cuando el tema de LMG. Tiene, escribo de memoria, dos restauarantes, ambos
de temporada, uno en su pueblo a las orillas del Lago de Annecy y otro en
Megève, una estación de esquí alpino donde él mismo fue monitor de esquí
hasta los 30 años, y puso este restaurante, dicen, en honor de su padre
quien nunca consiguió llegar a propietario de una Granja como al parecer era
su afán, y el tal restaurante se llama La Granje de Mon Pere. Es el único
Restaurante francés al que Gault et Millau han concedido el mítico "20
puntos" que antes decían estar reservados a Dios como único Ser Perfecto.
A la recíproca, repito las gracias. Salu2,
mel
"Apicius" <Api...@telefonica.net> escribió en el mensaje
news:bhfnrf$q4v$1...@nsnmpen2-gest.nuria.telefonica-data.net...
> A Laboratory of Taste
>
> August 10, 2003
> By ARTHUR LUBOW
>
>
> Several months before our defense secretary downgraded
> France to the ''old Europe'' and our restaurateurs started
> pouring French wine into the gutters, I was talking with
> Marc Veyrat, a French chef whose> - - - - - - - - - - -
Pedro luis
En sus 2 restaurantes sus creaciones son siempre a bases de hierbas y
plantas más o menos salvajes y lógicamente, descubrir su cocina cuesta uno y
más de la mitad del otro.
No soy devoto de este tipo de cocina, no me gustan las fantasías de estos
señores, por ejemplo la tortilla de patatas de Adriá que fue comentada hace
poco. Creo que estos señores se aprovechan muy mucho del snobismo de sus
clientes.
Saludos
Pedro luis
"mel" <mlo...@telefonica.net> a écrit dans le message de news:
bhfupd$aqcs$1...@ID-78642.news.uni-berlin.de...
huertanica
burbujas a la leche? ó ¿ la patata y el huevo no es producto natural ?
Por mi "bolsillo" no me puedo permitir la visita, pero, quien pueda y
le guste no tiene porque ser un snob, si no, estaríamos todavía
haciendo hogueras en la calle y asando al espetón porque rechazar toda
innovación nos habría llevado a eso.
Para a quien le apetezca, os cuelgo una de las ideas que ayer daba
Ferrán Adriá, referente a las sardinas, en cuantico que mañana abra el
C.I. me "agencio" las frambuesas a ver que pasa:
""SARDINA. Tengo que admitir mi debilidad por este pescado. Si no es
mi preferido, está sin duda entre los mejor situados. Con las sardinas
hemos hecho muchas recetas en El Bulli. Son un ejemplo que comento a
menudo de que cuando hablamos de calidad no todo se reduce al precio,
sino al valor gastronómico que le demos. Una receta que me encanta es
la de filetes de sardinas no demasiado grandes puestos en un plato. Se
le vierte encima aceite caliente aromatizado con ajo y se culmina con
unas gotitas de vinagre. Lo comeremos tibio, pero casi crudo. Una coca
de pan (elaboración típica de Cataluña) con berenjena escalibada y
filetes de sardina salteados a la sartén, acabada con un aceite de
oliva negra, resulta un buen bocadillo abierto. Otra opción es tratar
las sardinas como unos boquerones en vinagre, pero sin poner ni ajo ni
perejil y añadiendo un poquito de puré de frambuesa. No se
escandalicen, ya que la frambuesa sustituye la función ácida del
limón.""
Deseando un buen chaparrón que acabe con los incendios y traiga algo
de frescor.
Un saludo
María Josefa
Pedro luis
mucha relación.
Pienso que si esa leche tiene éxito, es un buen paso aunque dude del éxito.
El hábito de consumo está demasiado arraigado y hoy todo lo que se toma
tiene que ser dulce, hasta el biberón con las consecuencias que ello tenga
para los dientes de los niños.
Con los cocineros como Adriá y Veyrant pasa como con Picasso y Dalí. Todos
se pasman ante sus obras pero pocos las entienden. Pero nadie se atreverá a
decir no me gusta por no quedar fuera de onda. Después de mi visita al
museo de Dalí en Figueras salí convencido que el maestro se ría del mundo
con sus obras y además las vendía caras.
No obstante gusto ir a comer a restaurantes de cocina contemporánea,
"nouvelle cuisine" ya pasó a la historia. Yo diría "cuisine de marché" que
corresponde más a la realidad. No muy a menudo por que la "buchaca" no da
para tanto. Tuve el placer de ir 2 veces al restaurante de Frédy Girardet,
en su momento reconocido n° 1 de la cocina europea y esas cenas las
recordaré siempre. Contrariamente a la opinión de muchos, es un placer
placer visual y de sabores logrados. Sin embargo no me gastaré un dineral
para probar sardinas crudas con o sin frambuesas. Con lo que me gustan a mi
sardinas y boquerones.
Para darte un poco de envidia, aquí está lloviendo y hay una fuerte tormenta
sobre las montañas. Hemos perdido 14° de temperatura.
Para almorzar al fresco en nuestro balcón, medio melón de Parma con unas
lonchitas de jamón patanegra de bellota.
Saludos
Pedro luis
"huertanica" <murciasolo...@hotmail.com> a écrit dans le message de
news: _q%_a.38211$FN3.2...@news.ono.com...
huertanica
¡Eso no es problema! ¡será por grados!, yo te envío tus 14º y 14º más
por si les da miedo ir solos, para que se hagan compañía .... Y si que
me das envidia, que hasta hemos dejado de llorar para ahorrar agua, y
usamos para regar las plantas ..... el agua que gotea de los aparatos
de aire acondicionado.
Yo tengo hoy, gazpacho y ensalada César con pollo asado, salsa de
anchoas y parmesano (ó algo parecido) y de beber Agua de la Sierra del
Espadán.
Hale, voy a deconstruccionar un poco a ver que sale ;D.
Y sobre la leche, creo que me pasaría como con los sesos, seria
incapaz (de hecho los batidos que venden con frutas y leche, no he
podido probarlos), a no ser ¡claro, faltaría más! que le llamen
"champagne de vache" ó "lait de vache al vent, vent y vent", porque
entonces no tardaría en probarla (¡aggg!) ó bien que las burbujas
fuesen rellenas de chocolate puro, queeee ya cambia la cossaaa.
Por lo pronto, pá mí el Adría, pá ti la leche burbujeante.
Saludos a Ruth
Una "minisnob"
María Josefa
Angel AT
Aparezco y desaparezco misteriosamente.. se ha juntado la desaparición
del alemán con unos problemillas míos. Después de cambirle la caja al
ordenata y sustituir el disco tieso por uno supermegaloblástico (tarea
facilitada por la imagen guardada en CD) me puse a probar una
enciclopedia (gran) de la cocina que me escoñó el sistema, con lo que he
vuelto a instalar la imagen del disco.
Respecto al articulillo mi primera intención era traducirlo pero la
extensión del mismo me ha quitado las ganas.
Me gustaría incidir en el hecho de que no todo le gusta al periodista
del NYT, de Sergi Arola no emite una opinión favorable: su comida en La
Broche le disgustó, lo cual realza más los elogios a los otros
cocineros. No se trata de comer cualquier excentricidad y pagar por
pagar, hay algo más detrás de todo. Tal como yo lo entiendo, y creo que
no soy el único, tradición e innovación pueden y deben coexistir.
saludos y abrazos
Ángel AT
huertanica
Desde que comenzó Agosto, estoy recogiendo todas los artículos de
Ferrán Adriá (los tengo en "su" carpeta, junto con los de otros años)
así que la noticia ya la había leído en las dos reseñas que en días
sucesivos publicó El País y esta mañana cuando las tenía medio pasadas
para colgarlas, también se "defuncionó" el Explorer y bloqueo todo,
con lo que se borró hasta la receta que estaba traduciendo de la
portada del magacine, que, para conseguirla, hasta me he dado de alta
en The N Y Times. "Espuma de zanahoria con mandarina".
Estoy de acuerdo contigo, convencida, que, ni todo lo pasado es la
quintaesencia de las maravillas, ni todo el devenir tampoco, pero,
entre probaturas de uno, recuperaciones de otro, en la criba, siempre
queda algo bueno.
Cuando recuerdo el sabor de las naranjas que comía de niña, el de los
tomates ó un simple frito de tomate con pimientos y pollo, conejo ó
emperador de complemento, me parecen geniales, y el maravillo color
que tenía de un rojo oscuro, casi casi, terciopelo, pero ¿no le
ocurriría lo mismo a mis padres con respecto a su niñez? Sus sabores,
en el recuerdo, eran distintos ¿mejores? no sabría decirlo, quizás
esos sabores en la época actual no les gustases a nuestros hijos y
prefieran por ser los "suyos" en "su época" los actuales.
Precisamente, una de las puestas en práctica de El Bulli y de
cualquier cocinero actual, es que sus, llamémosle invenciones, no
siempre quedan en la carta del restaurante, pues las ponen a prueba
con los comensales, si las aceptan, pasan a la carta, pero, otras
muchas quedan en el camino.
Recuerdo aquella frase de "la imaginación al poder", yo la cambiaria
por la de "la imaginación siempre, en todo momento, en cualquier
parte", porque lo bueno es avanzar, nada vuelve y no se puede renegar
del futuro, porque, si quedas parado mirando solo al pasado, no vives
la realidad. Otra de las máximas es llevar la cabeza "limpia" cuando
visito cualquier sitio, esto es, no tener una idea preconcebida, ni el
ánimo indispuesto, porque de esa forma podré apreciar lo que veo y
como. He encontrado platos exquisitos en una pizzería y otros para
presentar reclamaciones en restaurantes de categoría.
Recuerdo en un viajecito a Grecia, un señor que se pasó todo el viaje
hablando de lo bien que se comía en su comunidad y lo mal que guisaban
los griegos. En Bulgaria, otra viajera, cada vez que llegaba al
comedor, pedía una tortilla de patatas con lo fácil que era .....
La cocina, la reinventamos diariamente todos y de ahí surgen esos
"toques" que la hacen diferente y tan particular (por lo menos a mí,
nunca me salen dos platos exactamente iguales). Lo cierto es que
nadie habla del día que comió lentejas ó alubias "pegadas" con sabor a
quemado, pero estoy segura que mas de uno/a las hemos comido y eso
también forma parte de la culinaria del pasado ;D.
Saludos
María Josefa
Angel AT
México: unos levantinos levantiscos sentían que su existencia en este
valle de lágrimas no se podía sobrellevar sin la "omelete de papas".
Consiguieron que les hicieran una, claro que era una tortilla a la
francesa con papas fritas en su interior :D
Viajar o vivir en tierra extraña y no participar de sus sabores y
aromas, por malos que nos parezcan, es una auténtica pena: condenamos a
una parte de nuestros sentidos a una ceguera voluntaria, atroz..
un abrazo
Ángel AT
Rosanna Aguilar
coincido con lo que dices. Quizas se lo recuerde con el tiempo a Adriá como
revolucionario en texturas y deconstrucciones. Un artista supercreativo y
unico pero lo que dudo que perdure es su cocina.
He visto varios que queriendo imitarlo hacen verdaderos desastres.
Te cuento uno.
Aqui existe un canal Utilisima con un programa que se llama Escuela de
Cocina, uno de los tantos expertos nombro a Adriá y a su tecnica de
deconstruccion, a la cual se disponia a explicar con una receta propia.
Los sabores del puchero criollo (cocido vuestro -bollito italiano) pero
frio!
Entonces hizo hilachas la falda , piso la verdura y con eso relleno un
moldecito cuadrado, cubriendolo con un poco de caldo del cocido.
Lo sirvio como entrada en el centro del plato y al desmoldarlo lucia toda la
grasa fria en la superficie. Un asco!
Vi tambien a un cocinero español que estuvo dando una clases por aqui que
usaba la espuma para todo .
El amigo Rocaberti nos conto que cierto dia tuvo ganas de conocer el tan
mentado Bulli y viviendo relativamente cerca decidió gastarse unos euros
como para ponerlo a prueba. La cuestion es que ya estaban cubiertas las
reservas por varios meses y no tuvo ganas de ponerse a esperar.
La verdad es que a mi me gusta la comida mas sencilla, los sabores y
texturas conocidas. Quiero encontrarle sabor a hinojo a un hinojo y listo.
Por eso me gusta tanto la cocina italiana tradicional, la que comi desde
niña y sigo cocinando.
Un beso
Rosanna
Santiago G.H.
lo primero, aclaro que no he comido nunca en El Bulli, lo cual me
deslegitima bastante para hablar de su cocina. Por eso, no lo haré.
Sin embargo, creo que debemos reconocerle el mérito de haber sabido
proyectar la cocina española hasta lugares donde mucha gente no sabía
siquiera si España estaba en Europa. Eso significará, espero, más
oportunidades para muchos cocineros españoles de atraer a sus restaurantes
a turistas que, de no ser por la repercusión generada por Adriá, habrían
terminado en Francia (por poner un ejemplo).
En cuanto a las dificultades para lograr mesa, creo que tiene una doble
lectura. Que 300.000 peticiones de mesa anuales se repartan apenas 5000
servicios de mesa puede parecer una aberración, y seguramente lo es. Que
para solventarlo hayan decidido efectuar una especie de sorteo puede
parecer el capricho de un divo: "soy tan bueno que puedo sortear las mesas
de mi restaurante". Sin embargo, a mí me parece una postura más ética (si
cabe) que la de ajustar oferta y demanda a través del precio. Me explico:
un menú de El Bulli viene a costar unos 100 euros por comensal, bebidas (y
supongo que IVA) aparte. Si cobrara 1000 euros por comensal, seguramente
tendría 10.000 peticiones anuales en vez de 300.000, pero ingresaría 10
veces más, con el restaurante aún lleno.
Adría prefiere hacer un sorteo y que sea el azar el que decide quién come
allí y quién no. De la otra manera, sólo los verdaderamente ricos podrían
hacerlo allí.
Saludos,
Santiago
Pedro luis
No creo que la gente que no sabe que España está en Europa se enteren por
Adriá y su Bulli.
Además de los millones de turistas que visitan cada año a España, muy
poquitos los habrá que reserven en El Bulli u otro restaurante de su
categoría.....Lo mismo ocurre con eminentes cocineros de otros países. No
creo que Bucuse o los hermanos Troigros en Francia o Girardet en Suiza hayan
aumentado el flujo turístico.
No discuto ni pongo en duda las cualidades de gran o mismo de inmenso
cocinero de Adriá. Me choca personalmente que sus fantasías de divo que son
ensalzadas por gente que paga, pero que no necesariamente son gourmets. Pero
queda bien.
Saludos
Pedro luis
"Santiago G.H." <san...@correo.uniovi.es> a écrit dans le message de news:
Xns93D97DB5249F3sa...@130.133.1.4...
Santiago G.H.
news:bhlapb$mnrl$1...@ID-20919.news.uni-berlin.de:
>
> No creo que la gente que no sabe que España está en Europa se enteren
> por Adriá y su Bulli.
Espero que compartas conmigo que el simple hecho de que Adriá sea
portada en el suplemento dominical de un diario tan influyente como el
New York Times, y que este diario haga un reportaje de 10 páginas sobre
la nueva cocina española es una manera fantástica de proyectar una buena
imagen sobre España.
> Además de los millones de turistas que visitan cada año a España, muy
> poquitos los habrá que reserven en El Bulli u otro restaurante de su
> categoría.....Lo mismo ocurre con eminentes cocineros de otros países.
> No creo que Bucuse o los hermanos Troigros en Francia o Girardet en
> Suiza hayan aumentado el flujo turístico.
Llevando tu argumentación al extremo, podríamos decir que los flujos
turísticos son aleatorios. Evidentemente, no se podrá estimar cuál es la
influencia de un artículo del NYT sobre el número de turistas recibidos
en España a lo largo de los próximos meses, pero todo ayuda ¿no crees?.
>
> No discuto ni pongo en duda las cualidades de gran o mismo de inmenso
> cocinero de Adriá. Me choca personalmente que sus fantasías de divo
> que son ensalzadas por gente que paga, pero que no necesariamente son
> gourmets. Pero queda bien.
Respeto tu postura pero no la comparto. ¿Fantasías de divo? Hay unos
cuantos cocineros en España de un cierto nivel que logran bastante más
exposición a los medios que Adriá quien, por cierto, no es un gran
comunicador.
¿Por qué consideras que Adría tiene fantasías de divo?
Saludos,
Santiago
huertanica
diario de Ferrán Adriá que publica hoy El País, creo que precisamente
es de una sencillez asequible a cualquiera y la reflexión final, da
muestras de su talante, exento de cualquier engolamiento, al
contrario, a mi me parece un gran tímido cuando lo he visto en TV.
"Está claro que para hacer una buena cocina hay que contar con buenos
productos, pero ¿qué es un buen producto? Aunque parezca una pregunta
sencilla, tiene una respuesta compleja. Saber de productos, entender
la frescura del pescado, la madurez de la fruta o la calidad de la
carne no es una tarea fácil, y aunque a los cocineros nos pueda
parecer sencilla, mi experiencia de ir a comprar al mercado me ha
hecho ver que es mucho más complicada de lo que parece. Lo primero,
una vez decidido si vamos a un mercado o a un supermercado, será saber
qué presupuesto tenemos y, en función de éste, decidir qué productos
vamos a comprar, siempre con una filosofía muy clara: es mejor una
buena sardina que una langosta congelada: es mejor un huevo fresco de
corral que una ternera de dudosa procedencia. Por suerte, la mayoría
de frutas y verduras son asequibles a todos los presupuestos. La
creencia de que sólo los productos caros son buena cocina es algo que
está cambiando en gastronomía y es una de las asignaturas pendientes
de la cocina en casa. A la hora de cocinar, habría que poner a la
misma altura a una patata que a una lubina, a unas lentejas que a unos
langostinos. Esto nos indica el camino de qué comprar. Otra cosa
básica es contar con buenos proveedores. Recomiendo que tenga su
proveedor de confianza, aquel que sabe que siempre le va a indicar la
mejor opción y que, algo importante, le irá enseñando poco a poco a
diferenciar la calidad de los productos, que es algo que sólo se
aprende con el tiempo. Aquí sólo me queda hacer una reflexión que ya
he hecho otras veces: así como reconozco que sin un buen producto no
puede existir una buena cocina, también tengo que decir que no estoy
de acuerdo cuando se dice que el 80% de la alta cocina es el producto,
ya que considero que es una obligación de los restaurantes de este
tipo de cocina tener la calidad que se merecen los clientes. No
podemos vanagloriarnos de algo que es una obligación.""
Indudablemente si ha conseguido que se hable ( y bien) de España a
través de su cocina, merece el mas encomiable de los aplausos. No
entiendo, porque se ha de desconfiar del paladar de aquellos que
quieren volver y porque les gusta, podremos estar de acuerdo ó no en
lo que a nosotros mismos nos gusta, pero, ¿juzgar el gusto de los
demás poniendo como listón en el nuestro? cuantas personas hay que no
soportan el caviar ó delicatessen parecidas y no por ello ha de
desconfiarse que sea un gourmet. Como en la pintura, la música y la
escultura hay gustos para todo, me parecen fabulosos, Praxíteles y
Botero, me puedo quedar extasiada con Boticcelli, Velázquez ó Miró y
estar en el septimo cielo, con Schubert, Duke Ellington ó Camarón, lo
uno no quita lo otro y me gusta desde un caldero a una mousse de foie
a la naranja, ¿porque no una espuma de mar, si cuando tomamos una
almeja sorbemos justo su jugo?
Saludos
María Josefa
Apicius
Como siempre muy acertada y creo que objetiva en tus apreciaciones.
Estoy muy de acuerdo con lo que has escrito tanto en días pasados como en el
presente.
Como el Sr. Adria es uno de mis favoritos, solo por sus publicaciones y
trayectoria, no he querido, ni quiero dar mi punto de vista ya que serian
tal vez juicios muy subjetivos. Seré un "snob"? ya que entre mis ilusiones
esta la de poder sentarme en su casa.
Hasta la fecha no he tenido la oportunidad, ya que la reserva es con mucho
tiempo de antelación y hoy por hoy no me es posible planear a un año vista.
Como a partir del próximo 1 de Enero estaré, casi seguro, libre de todas mis
obligaciones, planearé visitar El Bulli y así poder hacerme "In Situ" como
es, según mis cánones, gustos y conocimientos, la cocina del Sr. Adria.
Saludos
Apicius
huertanica
Como digo por ahí arriba, colecciono y archivo -entre tropecientos mil
artículos que me llaman la atención por algo- los de Ferrán Adriá,
este año llevan artículos sobre como debería ser la cocina, formas de
compra, utilización de productos envasados y alegrías del monedero, p.
ej. hoy propone un menú por menos de tres euros, donde el toque está
en unos tomates pasados por la licuadora con añadido de, aceite, sal,
agua de rosas y poquito de guindilla; molde untado de aceite, huevo
entero y un poco de nata, cubierto todo con laminas finitas de bacon y
3-4 min. horno solo para cuajar la clara y que la yema quede líquida;
unas alitas de pollo salteadas con ajo y cuando estén casi hechas
añadirles unos pimientos de Padrón y de postre , como dirían las
gitanas que venían de "comprar" de la huerta hace años "malacatones
baaratoos".
Bueno, pues creo que no hace falta decir, pero esta a vuestra
disposición, aunque lo ideal seria enviároslo a primeros de
septiembre, por aquello de que así quedarían recogidos los artículos
de este año.
Y abundando en los sabores de hoy, recordé que en Málaga, hace un par
de años (visto en TV) un heladero promocionaba helados salados (sabor
de pizza, tortilla, etc.) y precisamente fue porque suelo congelar
empanadillas, pasteles de carne, etc para momentos de apuro. No hace
mucho, deje, por olvido, fuera del frigorífico unas pechugas de pollo
que acababa de sacar del congelador, para cocinarlas a la vuelta del
trabajo, al volver, tenía mi troupe felicísima, pero de las pechugas,
solo el papel del envoltorio. Fui al "archivo" y saque un par de
empanadillas, las metí al microondas, pero, no el tiempo suficiente
... tenían el corazón congelado, (y yo mucha, mucha hambre), como no
estaba malo, me las comí pensando que eran como un helado salado.
Hoy he googleado y he visto varias páginas web, donde aparecen, desde
helado de berberechos, al de ajo blanco, pimientos de Calahorra, ajo y
perejil, tomate ó zanahoria. Y tienen gran demanda, aunque de los
últimos, dicen, son para untar sobre pan.
Pero es una innovación que quizás haya que tener en cuenta, porque a
veces, te apetece un helado, pero no el dulzor que le acompaña y seria
una solución. (me relamo pensando en un delicioso cono relleno de
crema de anchoas y recubierto de chocolate, o mitad/mitad de serrano y
queso siempre recubierto de chocolate, uhmmmm placer de dioses
!!...... ;D)
María Josefa
http://www.eniac.es/calahorra/
--->
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:no4qGFB2DvsJ:www.el-mundo.es/metr
opoli/2003/682/restaurantes/top.html+helados+salados&hl=es&ie=UTF-8
<----
luisa cayetano
Hago pocas intervenciones en las tertulias pero esta vez me veo casi en la
obligación de opinar.
En Enero del 2002, hice reserva de mesa en El Bulli para agosto, eramos 2
parejas de economía media (estuvimos de acampada en Gerona) y que
compartimos el placer por la comida y por los nuevos sabores, y no solo como
espectadores si no también como cocineros de "entre casa" para sorprender a
los amigos. Decidimos darnos el gusto de gastar nuestro dinero de vacaciones
en esa cena.
Abreviando, nos ha sorprendido todo, desde el bombón helado de whisky como
aperitivo, pasando por la desconstrucción del pan con tomate catalán, hasta
una especie de bombón de huevo líquido (que no recuerdo su nombre). El año
pasado la cosa iba de menú degustación con las mejores creaciones, así que
la comida fueron mogollón de platos (no recuerdo si 20 o 30.. tendría que
buscar el menú y fijarme).
Todo nos resultó sorprendente, y los más llamativo "la puesta en escena",
los camareros vestidos de negro de los piés a la cabeza y las luces bajas
sobre la mesa con los pasillos en penumbra, evitaba ver el gran despliegue
de personal que hay en el salón, llegamos a pensar que hasta los
moviemientos del personal de sala está estudiado "por que no se chocan ni se
pisan... se esquivan con sutileza...etc...". El sumiller (mmm. estará bien
escrito?) acertó con los vinos, incluso con el vino de postre ( un Olivares,
que aromas justo a eso... a aceituna negra). Y de la comida... un derroche
de color, texturas... etc... El gran fallo lo noté en que a la hora de pedir
"agua mineral" NO había carta de aguas. Y en el café... que tampoco había
elección.
Resumiendo: la cena costó a razón de 150 euros per capita, con vinos
normales (albariño Veigadares etc.. etc... fueron 3 botellas y una de vino
de postre), coindimos los 4 que fué como asistir a una gran obra de teatro
de la cual también formabamos parte. Todo muy bueno, impecable. Pero.......
pero..... los cuatro coincidimos que aunque nos lo ofreciesen de forma
gratuita a ninguno nos apetecería ese tipo de comida a diario, como MUCHO
una vez al mes. Yo dudo que vuelva, ya me sorprendió la primera vez. A mi me
gusta comer, y la comida del bulli para mí es como salida de un laboratorio
de experimentación (la parrillada de verduras eran barritas multicolores de
gelatina tibia con sabor a apio, cebolla...etc....) Aprecio muchísimo su
trabajo, y es la creatividad elevada a límites insospechados. Pero en mi
caso, con una vez me ha llegado para ver e imaginar toda la obra de este
gran artista.
Un saludo a todo
Luisa
"Pedro luis" <m...@privacy.net> escribió en el mensaje
news:bhlapb$mnrl$1...@ID-20919.news.uni-berlin.de...
Puri Lukisan
Por partes: poner de maravilla a Adriá es jugar con la cartas marcadas; no
hay error posible y es un viaje para el que no son necesarias alforjas.
El periodista no encuentra otra originalidad que la de poner mal a Sergi
Arola; es más fácil meterse con él y así , frente al vulgaridad de adorar a
Adriá,, criticar a Arola da un toque de autoridad.
Podrá gustar o no, como todo. Pero técnica, creatividad y oficio no le
faltan al Arola No es fácil hacer una relectura de las ángulas a la
bilbaína, no lo hace cualquier patanatas.
El Arola no es Adriá: las comparaciones son además de odiosas, ociosas.
Pero su crítica a Arola no tiene el más mínimo fundamento, y sobre todo, no
viene a cuento.
Que entre lo periodistas, por mucho que sean del NYT hay mucho
marisabi.dillo.
Saludos, peña
Puri
"Angel AT" <pepo...@wanadoo.es> escribió en el mensaje
news:3F3CEFD8...@wanadoo.es...