The new frontier
By Matt Preston | theage.com.au | 02 May
Madrid Fusion is the slickest and biggest of them all - a frenzy of foodie demos, lectures and discussions with culinary leaders. A chance for the world's most innovative chefs to gather over four days and share their latest ideas and discoveries. It is here that the globe's number one, Ferran Adria , chooses to reveal his latest advances in thought and technique each year.
Last week Adria's restaurant, El Bulli in Spain, was named the world's best restaurant for the third year in a row. (The prestigious international poll of industry experts is run by Restaurant magazine.) According to the Madrid Fusion program, it's mandatory that guests have a new "technique, a new philosophy, or a new story to tell" to take part.
Earlier this year the event lined up innovative French, Swedish and Danish chefs alongside Adria and the most creative Spaniards. There was mischievous young firebrand Andoni Luis Aduriz, from the world's fourth-best diner Mugaritz, and Juan Mari Arzak, the 65-year-old pioneer of modern Spanish cuisine.
A few days later, the Identita Golose congress in Milan featured Gualtiero Marchesi and Carlo Cracco from Italy and Britain's Heston Blumenthal whose restaurant, The Fat Duck, was honoured with second best in the world again this year.
The trends identified here are an interpretation of ideas expressed over the nine days - they are not universally held across Europe and by all chefs. Some trends may persist; others may evaporate as fads. Some are old and resurfacing; some are new and brain-frazzlingly radical.
The ideas
Don't call it Molecular Gastronomy
"Molecular Gastronomy", that's just so '80s. In Spain, the culinary movement that brought you foams, savoury ice-creams and hot jelly is now called "Vanguard Cuisine" - or even better "Technoemotional Cuisine". It's all about rebranding.
Kaiseki krazy
Japan has inspired everything from France's nouvelle cuisine of the '70s to Italy's greatest chef Gualtiero Marchesi who's done "Italian sushi" for 20 years. Ferran Adria is excited by how, in Japan, "they cook with their soul". This perceived spirituality is, for Adria, marked particularly in the country's kaiseki cuisine. "It is a matter of the whole experience. It is a ritual that involves your soul," he says.
"The menu is 1000 euros ($1690), your table is alone in a large room with a view of the landscape. The jug your sake is poured from may be a 20,000-euro antique, the plate from the 15th century."
The kaiseki approach of perfecting all elements of the dining experience - right down to the view out of the window - is gathering great credence in Europe. Super chef Heston Blumenthal neatly sums up the thinking: "Context is so important for eating anything."
The brains trust
Almost as important as "a philosophy" is enlisting the help of a white lab coat. If you want to cut it with Europe's best, you need to drop the words "our biologist" or "developed with the university" into conversation. Spain's Juan Mari Arzak explains: "We have to go everywhere - the chemist, the perfumiere, the engineer . . ." Arzak's latest engineering discovery is the Proxxon Thermocut - a heated metal wire used to cut intricate stencils from styrofoam and thermoplastic materials. "This hot, fine thread is great for cutting shapes from jellies that are too hard to do with a knife," he says.
My philosophy
It's not enough to be just a good cook these days. You must have a philosophy to underpin your cookery. A couple of years ago Adria and Blumenthal issued a "manifesto" outlining the principles behind their food. Today, Adria sees new cuisine as the evolution of technique, concepts, new products and new philosophies NOT technology.
The senses
Sweets that aren't sweet
One of the key principles of "technoemotional" cuisine is that "frontiers disappear between sweet and savoury, between the main ingredients and the complementary ones". Generally desserts are getting more savoury or salty.
Taste is not important
Taste might no longer be universally held as the pinnacle for a dish.
"People have accused my food of being flavourless," says Spain's Andoni Aduriz (pictured right), who introduced notions of serving food lukewarm and has worked at lowering salt in his dishes.
"With very delicate flavours, however, you need to try and preserve that. I want you to taste the true taste of the products not the salt," he says. It's an interesting exercise to try and think of ingredients that are popular for reasons other than taste - shark fin and bird's nest are two that leap to mind. Aduriz says some Basque peas are tasteless but prized for their texture. The basic rule according to Britain's Blumenthal is not that food must taste good but that "it must give pleasure to at least one of the five senses".
He cites traditional Tudor banqueting dishes such as the "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" baked in a pie as a famous dish celebrated more for its theatrical effect than its flavour. Pushed on whether food without (good) taste should be part of a top culinary restaurant, he hesitates, and then suggests "maybe we need different restaurants that would deliver pleasure in different ways".
Not everyone agrees with this radical assessment on the waning importance of taste. "That's bollocks - putting technique over taste. If you are cooking eggs, the egg should be the king not the chef," says Britain's Sat Bains.
Touch
Whether assessing texture or temperature, there is an increasing interest in touch as part of the dining process.
Chefs such as Copenhagen's Bo Bech make people eat with their fingers to temper the formality of dining. "To eat with our hands is to enjoy food with our five senses," says Spain's 2007 Chef of the Year, Ramon Freixa, during a demonstration of modern tapas highlighting the Spanish tradition of finger food. It's a tradition that Ferran Adria is also embracing; of the 35 dishes in his demo at Madrid Fusion, about 20 were to be eaten with hands.
The good acid
Italy and Scandinavia have always had a penchant for giving dishes a little spritz of acid, but this love is being embraced more widely. Frenchman Michel Troisgros, son of the man who invented the degustation menu, explains that "tartness is the spirit of taste. It allows the other flavours to reveal themselves." Troisgros travels the world looking for "new expressions of tartness" such as glass-jar fermentation. Other contemporary expressions of acidity include freeze-dried vinegar, mohos (thick sauces of bread with vinegar) and soured milk.
Bitter and burnt is fine
The most sophisticated of the traditional four tastes - bitterness - is also on the rise. European chefs such as Stefano Baiocco, from Villa Feltrinelli on Italy's Lake Garda, express this in dishes such as chocolate and coffee with piglet, and, more radically, in a fish dish where he marries capers in caramel, sorrel, orange foam and Tasmanian native pepper with a cream made from the super-bitter pith of lemons. Others use burnt flavours to enhance the complexity of a dish. Young Italian chef Niko Romito emulsifies burnt onions into a gravy to serve with tongue. Smoking is a common technique in Scandinavia - Rene Redzepi smokes everything from yoghurt and cheese to flour. A signature dish is hay-smoked egg with truffle and asparagus that's dusted with hay cinders. "Hay gives a more astringent flavour," he explains.
Aroma-ntic
Jordi Roca of Spanish gastrotemple El Celler de Can Roca outside Barcelona works with perfume companies to create desserts based on their fragrances. Angel by Thierry Mugler and Eternity by Calvin Klein have both been on the dessert menu, while Carolina Herrera's signature perfume transfers to the plate as a heady mix of passionfruit, caramelised red berries, tonka bean, rose water, orange blossom water and caramel. In Britain, Blumenthal creates a Christmassy feel with fragrances of leather, tobacco and wood smoke as a soundtrack of a wood fire crackling plays.
Bistronomy
In contrast to Melbourne's highly priced gastro-temples comes a wave of modern European bistros that may be cheap but have serious gastronomic aspirations. The trend started in Paris and is now spreading to cities such as Barcelona. Often small, they are defined by puny prices - such as set lunches costing 14-18 euros ($23-$30) and are often run by young couples. At Barcelona's tiny Gresca, owner-chef Rafa Pena's partner is also his maitre d' and his second chef.
"We make little money," admits Inaki Aizpitarte of Paris' super-hot Le Chateaubriand (world's 60th-best restaurant) referring to his 14 euro set lunch. Losing money is avoided by using cheaper ingredients and a selective menu. Rafa explains: "Dishes have to be quick to prepare and easy as we can't afford a huge kitchen staff."
Extreme terroir
As Spanish chef Carme Ruscalleda observes: "You have to eat the landscape you see when you travel." The idea has become ''extreme'' with a group of chefs who want to measure food miles in metres. For example, Italy's number one chef Fulvio Pierangelini keeps his own rare-breed pigs for lardo, pancetta and salami.
Sap is sooooo cool!
Oyster, sorrel and hare are cool ingredients. Cooler still are tree saps and resin used by all from Rene Redzepi in Copenhagen to Heston Blumenthal and Sat Bains in Britain and Peppino and Angela Tinari in Italy.
Trash cookery
Bistronomy popularises cheap peasant ingredients such as horse mackerel, salt cod or tomato seeds in gastronomic dishes. Fergus Henderson of London's St John has popularised "nose to tail".
Now chefs such as Spain's Marcos Moran, from Casa Gerardo in Asturias, has extended Ferran Adria's 1996 concept of "trash cooking" - using bits of fish others throw away such as salmon blood, anchovy skins, swordfish bladder and tuna hearts and cooking them with a blow torch.
New Nordic
The culinary awakening of Scand-inavia to embrace a modern version of its traditional cuisine is hot, hot, hot. "We have woken up from a French dream," explains Sweden's Magnus Ek from Oaxen Skargardskrog, the world's 48th-top restaurant.
Simplicity and an expression of terroir underpins much of the thinking of the loose confederacy of chefs that make up the New Nordic movement. His "culinary cringing" mates and peers in Copenhagen teased Rene Redzepi that his restaurant celebrating Danish food and ingredients should be called "The House of Boiled Veg" but last week Noma notched up the honour of the world's 10th-best restaurant.
Matt Preston travelled to Madrid Fusion as a guest of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce.
First published by TheAge.com.au on May 02 2008
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