KEY POINTS:
The last time I saw the El Bulli team in action was in Adelaide. The genius master-chef Ferran Adria and his co-chefs stumbled on to the stage at the unheard of hour of 9am, wondering what had struck them. In Spain you get up at midday.
They launched into their amazing, non-stop, three-hour demonstration with five o'clock shadows, bleary eyes and cigarette-stained voices.
I was up with them the night before - I can testify they danced as well as they cooked and there was nothing molecular about it.
In Auckland recently, the El Bulli's research and development chef, Alain Devahive, gave a seminar on "spherification", "gelification" and "emulsification", all scientific techniques Adria has developed over the years in his cooking. El Bulli has been voted the best restaurant in the world for the past three years, is only open in summer and has a waiting list of a hundred years.
Devahive, who speaks Catalan, started us off with that old classic - cured ham and melon. Using spherification (turning gelified globules of liquid into membrane-covered spheres) he turned melon juice into tiny caviar-like balls and suspended them in a glass of cured-ham consommé. Quite aside from the beauty, the smell was of pure cured ham. We all gasped.
Using the same technique, mango was made into what looked and felt exactly like egg yolks. Sitting in a spoon, the "mango yolks" had a fine outside membrane and when you pricked them the delicious interior ran out.
Spherified food can also be heated without any damage.
As we were munching on gin and tonic sorbets, Devahive conjured up parmesan spaghetti by gelification. He heated milk, grated parmesan cheese and the special gel powder, then injected it by syringe into a long thin tube which he then coiled and set in iced water. Once set (it took about five minutes) he pushed the "spaghetti" out of the tube with a syringe of water: absolutely sensational.
Sometimes people say they are sick of foam this and foam that in restaurant food, but that must be because they've never eaten it done properly. Foam is very important in experimental cuisine.
Simon Gault and Michael Meredith both use this molecular technique beautifully and Devahive demonstrated how to make sparkling, stable foam from things such as lemon juice and soy sauce with the emulsification technique. He made little beetroot footballs which he had dehydrated so the taste was very light but intense, then treated us to a passion-fruit souffle containing no eggs, butter or flour. All done by emulsification.
This is haute restaurant cuisine so you might not do it at home, but it would be a lot of fun if you gave it a go. Here are a few recipes that are not molecular but simple derivations of the ideas I saw demonstrated with such passion and discipline.
To eat at El Bulli is a once-in-a-lifetime event and to cook like this is to take a closer look into the future of food.
- Detours, HoS