When Oriol Castro, Eduard Xatruch & Mateu Casañas enter the kitchen at Disfrutar*** (Barcelona, Spain), they have a clear objective: "to enjoy the concept in order to find the paths". A secret that Oriol revealed during his talk at Fusión Alimentos de España in Madrid, confirming the immense creativity and quest for excellence of a trio of chefs with unrivalled technical levels. In fact, this combination of talent and their cuisine is a gastronomic heritage that has allowed them to be named the best restaurant in the world in 2024.

In this search for new paths through a concept, Oriol presented five new proposals from Disfrutar that have not yet been tried by his guests and that have led them to start this 'search for new paths'. We have started to work with enzymes, which we have only just begun to use, to make a drink that we haven't given to anyone at Disfrutar and that can't be called mead because it doesn't contain honey," said the chef. In this proposal, which they have called "hydrocarps, because it is water and fruit", almost any fruit or vegetable can be used, and at Disfrutar they have already tried "pineapple, strawberry, banana, fig, pomegranate, Saturn peach and sweet potato".

After peeling and crushing the bananas, he adds 3% pectinase to break them down and, after several boiling processes, he obtains banana water "with the flavor, depth, aroma and taste of bananas". This water is reduced until it has a texture similar to honey (11 kilos of bananas yield 1.2 kilos of honey). ”We put the water through a centrifuge to clarify it, add water and then brewer's yeast,” explains the chef. Then we put it in a decanter, cover it and leave it to ferment at 20 degrees for between 2 and 4 weeks, depending on the sugar content.

His next suggestion was a dish they call 'stalactite and stalagmite', a dessert with a certain elasticity to which biscuits and bicarbonate of soda are added. “We used to do it in the oven, but now we do it on the slimmer grill at 150 degrees”. Then we make an opening at the top so that it has a stalactite and stalagmite texture until we get an airy biscuit, “very fragile but magical,” he confesses. Finally, they add condensed coconut milk and serve it on a unique plate.

Can you imagine eating a steak in the shape of a sausage? Everything is possible at Disfrutar. We work with many sausages, but we decided to focus on the butifarra (Catalan sausage) and from this idea we worked with six fats, three Spanish: Retinta, Morucha and Rubia Gallega, and three foreign ones, from Poland, Germany and Iceland,' says Oriol. This minced meat with a butifarra texture is incorporated to decontextualize the steak to a rare degree' and a little potato foam, a roasted pepper ball, a grilled roasted pepper and a dried pepper juice are added. Finally, we add a drop of truffle oil, smoked oil and a potato soufflé.

As part of this search for different ways to approach a concept, Oriol presented “pasta made with alginate to make a pasta without flour (ideal for coeliacs) and only with potatoes”. With this proposal, "which we have not used in any dish at Disfrutar", they have created potato spaghetti.

Ferran Adrià's creative system

Many years later, Ferran Adrià returned to the stage of Madrid's Fusión to talk about cooking. Cooking was a vehicle for creation, which is what I liked," confessed the founder of the elBulli Foundation (Cala Montjoi, Girona, Spain). I loved to eat, and I used it for that,' he added with a laugh. But Adrià's talk on the creative system, based on the experience of the Bulli restaurant, did not follow a script.

In his experience, it is essential to know 'how to measure creation', because the difference between imagination and innovation is not easy to make, and these are words that everyone talks about when it comes to gastronomy. For Adrià, of the 10 million restaurants in the world, “only 80 per cent of the 200 restaurants that move the world have tried to lead the way. That is what is called innovation,” he said, explaining what life was like at El Bulli. “We worked as a team, we had a lab when there were no workshops, we closed for six months of the year, we didn't work at night, we spent 600,000 euros on innovation and we were under brutal creative pressure.”

A situation that led him to close the restaurant, but without losing "this obsession with improving the process of creation". In his own words, Adrià wanted to show "that the process of creation is very hard" and tried to explain "the difference between culinary action and culinary creation". Rubén Zubiri, from the Enigma* restaurant (Barcelona, Spain), helped him with his explanation, using a digital tool that is being implemented in his restaurant "after two years of work". A catalogue of recipes has been created with a digital file where all the dishes are uploaded. “We organise them every year, by menu structure and by preparation, to help us manage the purchasing process," says Zubiri. This allows them to group together "preparation system files such as a roadmap, the main product file, the classification of culinary resources, the explanation of the room, direct searches by terms, texture, colors, aroma, taste or customer satisfaction", she concludes. A whole process to facilitate creation in the kitchen.