Ferran Adria - Mouth Full of Surprises

Ferran Adrià, head chef at El Bulli, has taken the culinary world by his strong forearms and molded it like a great slab of marble to become a reflection of his own innovative world and ideas. El Bulli, Spanish for ‘the bulldog’ seems such a perfectly fitting name for Adrià’s brawny exterior, but it wasn’t actually Adrià who started the restaurant or picked the name. Adrià, with no classical culinary training, started small and worked his way up through the restaurant and gastronomic world by way of his fervent desire to create new and fascinating dishes and presentations. These dishes, served along with twenty to forty other courses at El Bulli, are what have given him the reputation he maintains to this day.

Adrià began his culinary career washing dishes in a little restaurant in Spain in 1982, in 84’ he got a job working at El Bulli under Juli Soler, longtime chef and winner of one Michelin award for the restaurant (actually won two, but had one taken away). Just four years after Adrià’s humble start in the dish pit he was named head chef at El Bulli in 1986. We can take a closer look at his evolution as a chef once he began to run El Bulli’s kitchen. El Bulli, opened in 1962 by Soler’s family, is nestled in Spain on the coast of Costa Brava just north of France in a little town named Cala Montjol, and can only seat up to 50 diners per night. Cala Montjol is an itty-bitty coastal town that is actually an adventure just to get to, considering the winding roadways deathly close to the cliffs overlooking the water, and the scenic tour by another great innovator’s home, Salvador Dali.

El Bulli originally began as a French restaurant, and Adrià maintained that theme through the beginning of his reign (Stevens, 49). Just one year later, while attending a conference in Nice Jacques Maximin changed his life when he answered a question about creative cooking, “Creativity means never imitating.” Adrià took this to heart and began exploring the culinary world. After this the restaurant began to morph into more of a traditional Spanish theme, Adrià looked closely at traditional techniques and would put a twist on them. Many of his dishes at that time might be described by saying "this is a traditional preparation method of this small Spanish town", but it is done in a way that they would never have prepared it. He concentrates on the technique, not the chef; he learns the chemical boundaries of the food, not the replication of a dish itself. Pushing the limits, he quickly mastered traditional Spanish cooking, and in the early nineties explored other countries traditional cooking methods.

Adrià looks back on his dishes not as great dishes but as steps in his culinary education, marking technical turning points in his career, and launching him onto his newest fascination—and there is always a newest fascination. Since he took over El Bulli he has won two more Michelin awards, the highest honor of any restaurant. How does he create such innovative and extraordinary dishes? Adrià only opens El Bulli for six months of the year, April to September, and spends the rest of his time exploring the world, exploring foods, techniques, researching and reading everything he can get his hands on in the world of gastronomy and focusing on the next year’s menu. The rest of the time is spent in his workshop located in Barcelona with his brother Albert, and his other top chefs. There they focus on the technique of the dishes and then perfect the taste at the actual restaurant. If its already been done, they won’t touch it, and out of 5,000 creations, they might get 500 good dishes that they whittle to 25 to 50 dishes for the next year at El Bulli. There is even a person specifically to design the year’s plate presentations (Matthews, 36-50).

With all of this, many will still question what is so fascinating with this man. Well, try one of his many dishes in the array of courses and you will know. First, we’ll start with the dining experience. As stated earlier, a dinner at El Bulli will consist of twenty to forty courses, each course specifically designed to follow a course and to introduce you to the next course all at the same time. Adrià’s goal is “to make people happy for four hours (at El Bulli) that is a dream come true;” and he really does make this the dining experience of your life (Stevens, 50). All of the courses are tastings, no more than a couple of bites, and most dishes are meant to be eaten all at once so that the consumer gets the full burst of flavor—or surprise, all at once like an explosion in the mouth. Imagine Willy Wonka’s magical gum that imitates the flavors of an entire meal, Adrià has mastered this in the form of actual food. Thomas Matthews describes a dish served during his meal, it was served to him on a spoon by one of the many waiters (almost one server for each guest) and it looked like a crispy caramel square. The server advised him to eat it all in one bite, as they do with many of the dishes, the servers will describe Adrià’s theory on the best method of consuming the food. Matthews obediently heeds Adrià’s advice, taking it in one bite, to find out that the dish is actually a caramel covered quail egg scented with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. It’s like a sweet and salty, savory and toothsome, explosion in his mouth. These are the kinds of pairings and surprises that you encounter with Adrià, you have to trust him to eat his food, lust for the newest most unconventional pairings, forms, and techniques, and liberate your taste buds to precipitousness of the course.

Adrià is perhaps most well known for his work with foam, which he mastered in the late 1990’s, but began to ditch in 2004 because it was no longer new, conquering uncharted territory and leaving it for others to spoil. He develops foams of all kinds, fruity, salty, smoky, and omophagous. The process stems from Adrià and his chefs “throwing things into a cream canister and blowing them up,” the process concentrates the flavor of the ingredients into a light fluffy cloud. In 1996 Adrià didn’t think that it would work, but a mere year later had developed the foam that made him famous and by the year 2000 had accounted for almost 40% of his menu. He is most famous for his delicacy Spheres of Liquid Lamb Brains with Sea Vegetables and Mushrooms, where he transforms the brains into a shaving cream like substance. Adrià uses a pressurized nitrous oxide dispenser, usually used to make whipped cream, and loads it with a gelatin-stabilized base. It injects the base with the gas, which expands it much like shaving cream when ejected. Some of these dishes are more airy than others, some have a more gelatin like substance to them, but both transform in your mouth, melting from solid to liquid or visa versa, to reveal the true flavour and nature of the ingredients (Dawes, 45-46).

Ferran Adrià also has a fascination with ham; he loves the complexity of it, as well as its traditional roots in Spanish cuisine. His hog of choice, the Ibérian pig, or more specifically the jamón ibérico de bellota, raised on the southern border between Spain and Portugal. Adrià gets his ham from the best butcher in Spain, Joselito, a company based near Salamanca. Their pigs get six months of roaming and foraging in the woods, dieting on two kinds of acorns, one they eat in the summer, and the other in the winter. This acorn diet makes half of the pig’s fat monounsaturated, and at room temperature it melts into an olive oil like consistency. They are slaughtered at age two and cured for nine months, causing them to lose a third of its original weight. The entire butchering and curing process is done just as Joselito’s did it centuries ago, absolutely no machinery is used, it is the best Ibérian ham that you can purchase in the world (Lubow, 95). In one of the first dishes of the night Adrià served Tara Stevens thin strips of Toro tuna painted with jamón ibérico juices to look and taste like jamón ”while maintaining the variety and richness of the fatty tuna.” Arthur Lubow was served what looked like white chocolate covered cherries, but found out were actually cherries dipped in the fat of jamón ibérico. He described the fat as “earthy, nutty, and delicately perfumed,” a perfect combination with the luscious cherries. The use of the fat in a dish is one that Adrià holds dear to his heart, he claims that the American culture throws everything away, but he says that in Spain they use everything, it is just a part of their culture. In one of his dishes he uses the bones of Mediterranean Rock Fish fried whole and wrapped in a pale cotton candy shroud. He uses veal marrow to make his dish Sautéed Veal Marrow topped with Caviar (Stevens, 45). Adrià’s lust for food isn’t just skin deep, so to speak, he utilizes the entire ingredient, whether it be trout eggs to potato gnocchi with consommé of roasted potato skins, every part of the product is used.

Ferran Adrià creates gastronomic delicacies undiscovered in the culinary realm and infuses them with traditional ingredients and techniques from around the world to create a startling and unforeseen dining experience, consecrating ones palate with arresting delights. His endless search for knowledge of food, traditions, and techniques allows him to create such amazing dishes. Often comparing the experience of eating with that of making love, Adrià says that they are both the only things we experience will all five senses (Stevens, 43). The sensuality of his creations, affecting the guests with felicitous surprise, has established him as one of the most innovative chefs in the world.