HOW DO WE
COOK SUCCESS, MR. FERRAN ADRIÀ?
THERAPIST: Mm. No, actually I wasn’t going to say that. You wanna guess again?
KATE: Oh,
no, go ahead.
THERAPIST: Well, what I was going to say was, you know better than anyone. It’s the
recipes you create yourself that are the best.
LET ME TELL YA, eating is
a very complex thing.
I can’t
stand parsley. I don’t like salt cod. But I love salt cod croquettes with
parsley.
I don’t
like cooked carrots, but raw. I don’t like raw tuna, but cooked.
All
right, take your time. Laugh at me as much as you want, though it’s not me who
said that blatant statement but Ferran Adrià, the most creative chef in the
world. I say creative because you don’t go to El Bulli to have a meal but an
experience.
I would have
loved to explain you my experience in Cala Montjoi, yet unfortunately I haven’t
been one of the eight thousand privileged diners from all over the world that
passed by El Bulli year after year.
I have
read extensively about him. I listened to him at the New York City Wine &
Food Festival at The Times Center, courtesy of a dear friend of mine, last
Saturday. However, I missed the most important: to taste one of his creations.
El Bulli
Foundation will reopen his doors in two years. I guess that since they are not
admitting reservations anymore, I might have a chance. Just sayin’. Anyway, at
the meantime, I will try to cook an exquisite dish inspired by the luminary
creator, called Success.
Ingredients:
*Caramelized Passion
*Liquefied Courage
*Emulsifying Creativity
*Foamy Stamina
*Spherified Visibility
*Frozen Humility
*Airy Chance
Passion
isn’t a product easy to find. It requires conciousness and self-knowledge. One
is able to recognize that has passion about something when in the task neither
look at her watch for long hours, nor need a policeman behind to keep seated at
the desk, but when gets involved in what the psychology professor Mihály
Csíkszentmihályi called flow.
To caramelize it requires lots of hard
work, tons of very hard work. Suffice it to say, Ferran worked 17 hours a day,
345 days a year. Alles Klar tyros? And once it’s caramelized, it’s so sweet that you want to share it. Ferran is as
generous as he’s given his recipes and culinary techniques to everyone.
The
issue with this product is when you find it out. Some, as Ferran, at their
twenties; others, at their thirties, or even later. If it takes you longer to
find it out, pour more gallons of liquefied
Courage.
For emulsifying Creativity, mix confidence,
self-respect, and freedom. Ferran knew he was doing something right. He
actually allowed himself to play as children do: with total freedom, in spite
of inner and outer conditionings—Ferran has been called charlatan, pretentious,
bogus, and even harshly accused of endangering the health of his customers
through the use of additives. I got to thinking that revolutionary people will
never be totally understood in their time but a hundred years later. And
finally he gave to himself permission to make mistakes, experimenting,
learning, growing, and evolving.
Surround
the dish with great deal of foamy stamina.
Ferran explains that he had been struggling for fifteen years at El Bulli, almost
nobody went.1 But he took advantatge of
that free time by working, exploring, and growing. He never, never, never gave
up. His mission was not to have fame, but to have fun. And when you have fun,
why to quit?
Of
course, Ferran had to be creative in order to survive. He and his team worked on
his first volume “El Bulli. El sabor del Mediterráneo,” and in an outside
catering years later.
The
out-of-the-way restaurant needed just one paramount ingredient. The pure essence
of visibility was enclosed by The New York Times in late summer of
2003 in the front cover of its Sunday magazine “The Nueva Nouvelle Cuisine: How
Spain become the New France .”
That’s
it. The spherified visibility created
the myth.
And the
El Bulli hung a placard at its façade: Two-year waiting list, if lucky. The
last years El Bulli experimented a tsunami of people each year yearning begging
to dine in.
The
challenge is to keep a frozen humility—in
terms of keep learning and growing—from the day you start searching for the
products until the prepared dish will be served.
When
some people become a superstar, celebrity, whatever, they start behaving as
Divas/Divos. I have heard Ferran saying a thousand of times, “I am a normal
person. It’s impossible to learn about cuisine.” And he actually is a normal
person. But he’s a normal person who excels in preparing the current dish.
We are
not able to see the last ingredient. Call it luck, call it fate, call it airy chance, you name it.
What if
Ferran’s parents had obliged him to study a career?
What if
his first job had been at a front office bank instead of at a kitchen as a clean-up
guy?
What if
Dr. Schilling had not sold the restaurant to him?
What if
Ferran had not endured privation for so long?
Would he
still have become the best chef in the world?
Cook
Duration: A lifetime.
Bon
Appetite!
(1) “Life has many ways of testing a person’s will
, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happens all at
once.” The winner stands alone, Paulo Coelho.
Copyright © 2011 by THE
PYTHAGOREAN STORYTELLER. All rights
reserved.
