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Ferran Adria is considered by many to be the greatest chef in the world. Certainly he is one of the most original and creative. Gourmet magazine called him the Salvador Dali of the kitchen. His El Bulli restaurant was named by prestigious Restaurant magazine as the best restaurant in the world; and in 2006 it was named the best restaurant in the world by the Restaurant Top 50, a title it has retained ever since. Unquestionably Ferran Adria will go down in culinary history. He was born in 1962 near Barcelona, Spain. He studied in Barcelona, and when he was fourteen years old he enrolled in a school of business administration. By age eighteen he was thoroughly bored and dropped out to put on uniform jackets washing dishes in a French restaurant at the Playafels Hotel in Castelldefels, Spain. It was in this restaurant that he picked up the classic French culinary techniques, and read El Practico – Spain’s equivalent of Escoffier’s classic Le Guide Culinaire.
After a short stint working at Club Cala Lena in Ibiza in 1981-2, Adria returned to Barcelona and began working as assistant chef at the world-famous Finisterre. He performed his compulsory service in the Spanish Navy at the Naval base in Cartagena, working on the staff of the captain general’s own kitchen; and it was here that he was first put in charge of running a kitchen himself. After leaving the Navy in 1983, Adria was given the opportunity to do a tryout in a chef shirt at El Bulli in Roses, Spain. He was immediately offered the job of line cook and a year and a half later he became the head chef. Prior to his arrival, El Bulli was largely unknown. Located in the small village of Roses, at the end of a narrow and winding road on the Costa Brava of Catalonia, it has garnered three Michelin stars since Adria took over the kitchen and is only open from mid-June through late December. The other six months of the year Adria is traveling the world looking for new creative ideas.
In the late eighties Adria began cooking experiments, which have come to be known as Molecular Gastronomy – the application of chemistry to cooking and culinary practice. His creations are always a surprise and enchantment to his clients, but superb taste is ultimately the final criterion, and Adria himself refers to his cuisine as “deconstructionist” rather than molecular. The goal is to delight the diner with surprise and novelty, by contrasting flavors, textures, and temperatures, served in up to thirty-course meals. He says that El Bulli’s patrons don’t come there to eat, but to have a unique experience. His best known invention is culinary foam, now employed by gourmet chefs throughout the world. Culinary foam is made from natural flavors, either savory or sweet, which is mixed with a natural gel agent and packed in nitrous oxide-powered whipped cream canisters. The most popular culinary foams are foamed beet root, foamed mushrooms, and foamed espresso. In addition to working in a white apron in his restaurant and scientific investigations, Adria has published a number of cookbooks, including A Day at El Bulli, Cocinar en Casa, and El Bulli 2003-2004.
write by Giselle