Jordi Roca, pastry cook at El Celler de Can Roca: “Science and cuisine keep a relationship of mutual enrichment”
Last June, the Food and Nutrition Campus of the UB hosted the course Cuisine and Science. Several experts from the University of Barcelona (UB) and other higher education institutions participated in the course together with prestigious chefs like Jordi Roca, the best pastry cook in the world according to the ranking of top restaurants published by the British magazine Restaurant in 2014. In 2015, the magazine selected El Celler de Can Roca as the top restaurant in the world.
Last June, the Food and Nutrition Campus of the UB hosted the course Cuisine and Science. Several experts from the University of Barcelona (UB) and other higher education institutions participated in the course together with prestigious chefs like Jordi Roca, the best pastry cook in the world according to the ranking of top restaurants published by the British magazine Restaurant in 2014. In 2015, the magazine selected El Celler de Can Roca as the top restaurant in the world.
The cook conducted a practical session about the techniques of smoking and blowing. To start, he remembered his beginnings at the bar his parents owned, where he grew up with his brothers. Then, he explained how he translates this world into cuisine. He showed a pop-up that represented this bar and included five tapas: the first one, squid rings in batter frozen with liquid nitrogen to be crumbled then. Roca showed a creative world in which controlling temperature, pressure and humidity is crucial to achieve desired textures and tastes. For instance, the chef described one of the projects on which they are now working which is based on melon frozen at -18 ºC. A liquid cooled at -5 ºC is poured on the melon. When the liquid touches the melon, it takes places a phenomenon known as ʻnucleationʼ and it begins to freeze creating a stalagmite structure.
Moreover, the chef described the creative process of El Celler de Can Roca. It begins with a blackboard, placed in the kitchen, where ideas are written down: some of them are never developed, but others take shape and become new recipes. A small kitchen included in the main kitchen is the place where the team devoted to the creation of new dishes works. It includes a dehydrator, vacuum machines and other pieces of equipment which are usually found at laboratories.
El Celler also has a cross-curricular area, La Masia, where the team makes training once a week and receives experts on every subject field: science, botany, philosophy, etc. And poets: words also play a key role in achieving interdisciplinarity. For example, every dish is tagged with a word that has a particular meaning for Can Roca chefs: landscape, memory, interdisciplinarity, innovation, magic, freedom, etc.
The session continued with a practical demonstration of sugar blowing. But, in this case they used isomalt, a polyalcohol which is thermally more stable than sugar. Pere Castells, expert from the Educational and Research Unit of Science and Cuisine of the UB, described the characteristics and proprieties of this sugar substitute. The sweet sphere ended full of smoke over a basis of mushroom carpaccio with pine nuts and aromatised olive oil.
During the session, the chef Roca stated that “science and cuisine keep a relationship of mutual enrichment”. Roca said that chefs have always been committed to research and innovation, by including scientists in their teams and working together with research centres like the Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology (IRTA) or the Alicia Foundation.