Volume 33, No.40
March 21, 2014
Ferran Adria Visits the CIA
BY: Amy Zarichnak, AOS Culinary
The Culinary
Institute of America regularly welcomes leaders from the culinary industry to campus, but some guests shine brighter than others. Their contributions to the industry, as well as their accomplishments, seem elevated based on how groundbreaking their work has been. In that respect, Ferran Adria’s visit to campus on Wednesday, March 12, 2014, felt more exciting than any other guest in the past year, including Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, and even Paul Bocuse. While students embrace all of these icons, perhaps it is Adria’s tendency to be a maverick that cause him to be so admired and revered. He is truly breaking new ground with his new projects, but yet, we are still obsessed with and talking about his past endeavors. His past endeavor, of course, was elBulli, a three Michelin star restaurant in the town of Roses, Catalonia, Spain. After working in the restaurant business and then serving in the military, Adria joined the crew at elBulli in 1983 and within eighteen months, he became the head chef. In the late ‘80’s, he began culinary experiments and used chemicals to create foams and other textures. He would deconstruct a familiar item, such as a BLT, and break it down into its parts, and reassemble it with different textures,flavors, forms, and temperatures. While here, Adria remarked, “If you don’t know the original, you don’t have deconstruction.” All of his techniques are now common in the repetoires of chefs. His restaurant was considered the best in the world and won that title from Restaurant Magazine in 2002, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. The restaurant was open six months out of the year, and would also Culinary Culture
plans a comprehensive tome on cooking. At elBulli, he examined their own dishes and put together the impressive elBulli 2005 – 2011, which systematically categorizes every dish that was made at the restaurant organized by year, and including complete recipes, techniques, and discoveries. He plans to now do this with all food, applying his analyzation and observation techniques and publishing the information online in the interest of worldwide collaboration. His final venture, elBulli 1846, is a working museum of sorts. It will also be located in the space that the restaurant occupied, and will contain information on the history and theory of cuisine. The “1846” pertains to the number of recipes that they made at elBulli, and is also a reference to the year Auguste Escoffier was born. During Adria’s visit to campus, he had lunch with students who were nominated by faculty, and also did a book signing upstairs in the Marriott Pavilion following his lecture.
famously close for six months out of the year, while he and his staff retreated to elBulli Taller, his workshop, where they researched the next season’s culinary creations. Operating at a loss for six years, Adria made the decision to close elBulli, and served the last meal on July 30, 2011. He has said that he wasn’t sad at all about closing the restaurant, because he so looked forward to his next ventures. His next ventures, as he talked about while here, are threefold. His elBulli Foundation will support all of his ventures. This foundation will be housed in the old restaurant space, and will be part creative think tank, part research facility. elBulli DNA and Bullipedia is an incredibly ambitious venture, wherein culinary research will be meticulously executed, and recorded in their DNA test kitchens, which are said to be some of the most advanced in the world. The record of their findings will be known as Bullipedia, and will be available for free online. This distribution of knowledge for knowledge’s sake is typical of research scientists in a research setting, but completely unique in the culinary world. Bullipedia is going to take on ingredients in a whole new way, explaining their origins, their relations to other foods, and even their etymology. The questions he asks are both basic and profound: What’s the different between a fruit and vegetable? What’s the difference between an empanada and a ravioli? He
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All photos courtesy of Phil Mansfield FOOD & BEVERAGE
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“All In Good Taste”
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