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Bulli boys

Two brothers changed the way we think about gastronomy.

Joanna Savill

Pineapple fennel.
Pineapple fennel.Supplied

It is 2001, Adelaide, and a three Michelin-starred Spanish delegation is in town for the Tasting Australia festival, including a band of brothers from Catalonia.

We have heard about Ferran and Albert Adria and their avant-garde cooking, but nothing quite prepares us for their stage demonstration. In a whirl of culinary wizardry (a bit of gelatine, agar agar, a siphon), they prepare a multi-textured dish - a sticky sauce, a wobbly jelly, a crisp frozen wafer and an airy cloud, all made of water.

There are cynics among the audience of journalists and chefs, but there is no denying this is a new world of cooking, one where concepts such as freeze-drying, nitro-cooking, isomalt caramelisation, spherification and strangely named setting agents would become common culinary parlance, not to mention foam.

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''We were already using siphons to make foams here,'' recalls Adria's long-time friend, Tetsuya Wakuda, of Sydney.

''We called them 'cream guns' and they used them in coffee shops to make whipped cream. But Ferran was the pure genius who created that element of surprise - with texture, flavour and taste, and he made a lot of people interested in food. He completely changed people's mind about cooking.''

Like a long-running cult television series, the elBulli story began in the 1960s. Ferran Adria came into it in 1984, when the 22-year-old Catalan secured a stage (French for internship) at a two-Michelin-star restaurant on the Costa Brava, named for the owners' French bulldogs. Fascinated at first with the greats of French nouvelle cuisine, he took over as sole head chef in 1987, and began to experiment.

Plasticine food models to ensure perfect replication and presentation.
Plasticine food models to ensure perfect replication and presentation.Supplied

By the early '90s, he and his team, including his brother, Albert, had turned the tables, inspired by luminaries such as French legend Michel Bras.

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''All roads lead back to Michel Bras,'' Ferran Adria said recently. It was Bras and his work with, mostly, little-known plants and flowers that taught the Adria brothers that, in cooking, ''everything is possible''.

Like Bras, high on a plateau in southern France, Adria now feels elBulli's relative isolation was an advantage. ''Being slightly 'away' helped us create our own world of cooking in a free way, no strings attached, and to find our own culinary language.''

Sketches form the current volume of <i>elBulli 2005-2011</i>.
Sketches form the current volume of elBulli 2005-2011.Supplied

And so to the elBulli workshop (''probably the first ever professional gastronomic laboratory,'' says Adria) radical riffs on taste and texture, and the birth of a ''techno-conceptual'' approach to cooking (forget ''molecular gastronomy'') that turned everything into something else.

Dining at elBulli, as I finally did in 2009, I ate a ''rose'' of real petals, with rosewater-scented artichoke, fanned out like a split artichoke heart; a sheet of fine ice covering a bowl of ''water vapour'', dotted with green tea, mint and sugar; morsels that were ''one bite'' (bursting in your mouth); pine-cone oil, sea anemone and sea cucumber; Thai flavours, dashi and miso; and a very challenging final savoury dish of rabbit brains, tongue, kidney, ear and white caviar. It was all great fun.

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''What distinguished Ferran … was his willingness to question, even interrogate, convention,'' says United States journalist Lisa Abend, who has written about elBulli and Ferran over many years. ''As a chef, he would ask questions like, 'Why do we eat savoury before sweet?' or 'Does soup have to be liquid?' and, by pursuing answers to those questions, he pushed the boundaries - or even broke them - of what cuisine means.''

Experimentation, however, was constantly tempered by organisation. ''ElBulli was very much run with military precision, and Ferran was omnipresent.''

Australian chef Christine Manfield staged briefly at elBulli in 2001, leaving with an extraordinary respect for the systems and split-second timing that went into serving more than three dozen dishes to 50 select diners each night.

''It was all orchestrated for a reason,'' she recalls. ''The length of time between courses. How long things lingered on the palate.'' And the food? ''It was playful and,'' she adds, ''by 2001, there wasn't a foam anywhere!''

With experimentation came documentation. By 2002, there was the first boxed set: the General Catalogue of recipes, techniques, sketches and concepts. Two more sets followed, covering back to 1984.

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''It occurred to Ferran, quite rightly,'' says his biographer, US journalist Colman Andrews, ''that we know very little really about the history of the food we eat, about the development of dishes, who made them and why and how, through the centuries.

''He determined early on to keep detailed records of the dishes and creative processes around elBulli, imagining, probably with good reason, that this will be valuable information for posterity.''

So to the latest work: the extraordinarily detailed, seven-volume, 18-kilogram mega boxed set that is elBulli: 2005-2011 (Phaidon, RRP $750), which Adria launches in Australia next week, full of recipes, ingredients, notes and sketches, including the last menu ever served.

When the restaurant closed in 2011, there were those who thought elBulli the maxi series was over. Instead, there is a sequel - the ambitious, still nebulous elBulli Foundation, planned as a kind of multi-disciplinary think tank, online resource, laboratory in three parts: elBulli 1846, elBulliDNA and Bullipedia - an open-sourced gastro-history project. Building work continues on the former restaurant site, to which (it is hoped, by 2016), guests from many fields will come to collaborate on Adria's fascinating concept of creativity and ''what it means to cook''.

''The concept for the foundation keeps changing,'' says Andrews, who has just taken part in a global round table on gastronomy designed to contribute to the Bullipedia.

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'' … Bullipedia is an incredibly ambitious project, almost on the scale of an Oxford English Dictionary, but if anyone can bring it off, it's Ferran and his team.''

Adria, meanwhile, says he is, and always will be, a cook. ''But one who has dedicated his life to cooking using creativity as a language. That's what has made me a little 'atypical'. I'm interested in other disciplines, always looking for synergies elsewhere so that I can learn, improve and continue to enjoy my work.'' (Albert Adria has a number of restaurant projects in Barcelona, but Ferran rarely mans the stoves, mostly cooking only for his wife ''and a few friends at the [elBulli] workshop''.)

Meanwhile, there are the 2000 to 3000 chefs who passed through the restaurant's two kitchens. Stagiaires included Noma's Rene Redzepi, Italy's Massimo Bottura, Brazilian star Alex Atala, and Brisbane-based chef Jake Nicolson (Blackbird Bar & Restaurant, ex Circa and Lake House). Nicolson spent part of 2004 cleaning mountains of sweetbreads (that rabbit dish!), plucking tiny leaves from mint stems and occasionally helping plate a dish, every element replicated in plasticine.

''To be honest, that cooking doesn't relate to my food now,'' he says. ''Perhaps I'd go as far as a few soils here and there, but it was an absolute honour to be there. Ferran Adria was able to dictate the way people think about gastronomy and the future of cooking. If we could take even a little piece out of his mind and put a little bit in every one of our kitchens, I reckon we'd be pretty happy with what we've done.''

What hasn't been done yet in cooking? Somehow, we suspect Ferran Adria is onto it. ''Ferran will keep moving,'' says Nicolson. ''He will always be an ambassador for our culinary future.''

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Colman Andrews is the author of Reinventing Food, Ferran Adria: The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat (Phaidon).

To read more about elBulli stagiaires, see The Sorcerer's Apprentices by Lisa Abend (Simon & Schuster).

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