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Good morning Vietnam!
That's the wrong intro.
That's the wrong podcast.
Yeah, well unless we're in Vietnam that would be really cool.
Hello everyone, welcome to Potluck Food Talks.
Today I'm here with my homie Phil Walter and we're going to talk about terroir.
So what's the deal with terroir?
What is the deal with terroir?
What a mysterious and strange word.
I mean, what do you think of when you think of terroir?
Well it's a word commonly associated to the wine world, but I think in the last decade
it has also been adapted in the gastronomy world and the chef world to explain that there
is this common tag called time and place, which means what grows at what time and what
place, meaning basically plants and animals, edible plants and animals.
And this whole ecosystem, how it feeds itself and how it nourishes itself from the water,
the plants that eat the animals, the animals that die and feed the soil and all this, how
to say, life cycle that occurs there and generates...
The circle of life.
Exactly, that generates basically wonderful flavors.
The more rich this ecosystem is, the richer it will taste whatever is produced there.
That's my thought about it.
Yeah, and just like you said, this term time and place really got coined and I think it's
kind of become like a phrase that's overused by every little bistro says, oh yeah, there's
a time and place.
What were you thinking when you made this decision?
Like, man, I really wanted to evoke a sense of time and place, but yeah, it's crazy how
the locality and the thing that restaurants have been trying to evoke in people has really
kind of evolved.
Because it used to be kind of like, well, this is an Italian, this is a restaurant in
Emilia Romana, for example, you know, and it makes dishes from Emilia Romana.
So that's the terra, you know, that's the region.
But nowadays the term means not just that, you know, but like a lot of other things as
well.
Yeah, absolutely.
Also going back to the wine, because it's interesting, the wine world, because it's
all about one product, right?
The grape.
And everybody talks about the soil, the climate, the minerals in the soil, the, if it's near
the sea, the altitude and all of these different aspects just about the grape.
But if you expand this to all the vegetables that are around and all the resources that
you could have, that you could incorporate into a menu in a restaurant or even into a
food identity of a country, for me, that's the wine.
Because I mean, I come from an ex-colonial country, which is all of the Americas, and
you will clearly see that in the Americas, there is not a sense of the war as strong
as you will see in Europe.
For instance, things that have become like new trends, like eating local products in
season is something that has been done, for instance, here in the Basque country for the
last 25,000 years.
Precisely because of this, because of all of the aftermath that generates a process
like a colonization that destroys the local identities and new identities emerge.
I think that those are kind of challenges where the rock comes into play.
And it's something that we have seen not only in the Americas with projects like what Virgilio
is doing in Peru and other chefs like Borago also that are working only with things that
grow around the restaurant, but also even in projects like, well, we'll get into that
later, like Noma that had also incorporated into their menus and cities like Copenhagen,
you would see products like olive oil and chocolate.
And suddenly they said, okay, let's make a restaurant concept that do not include these
ingredients because of a philosophy that will only work with local produce.
And that reshapes the food identity of a city, a country, or let's say like a whole gastronomic
movement, which is what happened in the Nordic countries.
But I think I went too far in history to forward, let's go step by step.
Yeah, no, but you're totally right.
It's super, super interesting.
It's a very complex thing because like you say, Terrah, it doesn't just talk about the
type of product, but also, like you said, for example, if you take the example of a
grape with altitude, altitude also will affect a region's ancient techniques, and like how
they prepare food, the weather, the seasons, they all affect what's the traditional products
are and the techniques that are used to elaborate those products.
And so it's kind of like when we look at like Nordic food, for example, it's like, oh yeah,
there's lots of like ferments and preserves and plants and stuff.
It's like, yeah, that's not because they wanted to do that.
It's because it was a necessity and the necessity then became like the rule, you know, and then
got refined and refined and refined and out of like a difficulty, people started exploring
the possibilities inside of what is possible in those parameters and refined it to find
really, really great things that they then adapted as their own.
So that's super, super interesting.
I want to mention just something really quick because that's nothing to do with Terrah,
but I think it's super interesting because you mentioned altitude and I lived two years
in La Paz in Bolivia, which is one of the highest cities in the world.
Then you have El Alto, which is even higher.
I think it's 4,000 meters.
I think El Alto is one of the highest cities in the world.
Wow.
So what happens there?
The atmospheric pressure changes.
So all the physics laws change, which means water boils at 80 degrees and bread needs
50% more water and rice needs 40 minutes to cook and all these kinds of things.
All the rules change because you're in like in a different physical environment.
So imagine that this is what happens with cooking and there are like specific books
about this, about altitude cooking, like cities like also in Switzerland, there are a lot of
very high cities that also have to have these kinds of things in consideration.
But yeah, I imagine the same happening in the soil with the food, with everything that
grows, with all the animals, with everything.
And that of course has an impact on the flavor profile that develops in a microclimate basically.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's super, super interesting.
There is this saying from Jose Andres that really stuck to me.
He said, if it grows together, it goes together.
And I think that applies not only regionally, but also seasonal.
You know, like if it grows in the same place in the same season, I mean, you can randomly
put those things in a plate with a very simple seasoning and it should work.
You know?
I think that's a very, I'll have to think about that statement for a little bit.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
It does seem to make sense.
I mean, that of course that there will be like error ranges that, oh, oops, we added
like this super aromatic thing that also grows here.
It sounds good, definitely.
But you know, Jose Andres is very good at saying things that sound good.
Yeah, that's true.
I take everything that he says with a pinch of salt now, since he's been going on about
the peeled strawberry.
Ah, yeah.
Yeah, that's something worth watching.
So everybody can pause now, this podcast, go to YouTube, watch Jose Andres talking about
strawberries and come back to understand the joke.
And compare, what did he do?
Compare a peeled strawberry.
Have you ever had a peeled strawberry?
I love to peel the strawberries.
There's nothing like when your lips content a skinless strawberry.
You understand that the strawberry was created to be loved by you, by all.
It's like a passionate kiss from your lover.
Yeah.
Okay.
Going back to the row.
Going back a little bit.
But yeah, what I think is super interesting is that like jump from, you know, when restaurants
were kind of like in a place, you know, with not that much sort of infrastructure, cooking
the dishes that were, you know, their own, because usually the people that cook in the
region are from the region.
Or if not, they want to, you know, serve something that is familiar, you know, where there's
a connection.
And for me, like in the sort of like, you know, novel cuisine, it was really Michel Bras
who kind of like really went in depth on the terroir.
And of course, like he also started out cooking, you know, traditional dishes from the Auvergne
and you know, still did until like the very end.
But he then went like a step beyond where he just really looked at the ingredients,
the seasons and just the landscape itself and really like dove into the nature and got
super, super inspired by that.
You can really see like Michel Bras is super interesting because on one side, his dishes
look like a white canvas and also everything like in his restaurant, all the tables and
everything.
And then he actually, that crazy statement from Jose Andres that if it grows together,
it goes together.
I think that's kind of like what Michel Bras puts on a plate are things that grow together
around his restaurant.
Some of these are wild plants that have been foraged and put in the menu.
And yeah, I think he was, like you said, the most radical in this sense of cooking terroir.
But I think terroir existed since food exists because people used to eat what they had around
basically, you know, like and the modern concept of restaurant chef comes from castles where
they would make this fancy dinners for royalty and they would also cook with what they had
in their surroundings.
But I think like our civilization evolved into something so bizarre that you go to a
forest with a beautiful river with the most delicious water in the world and you're drinking
imported water from Italy, you know, which is in a plastic bottle, which is an absolute
bullshit, you know?
And that's the way a lot of people think because nobody thinks about it, you know, about this
kind of thing, about where stuff comes from and these kind of things.
So one of the protégés, I would say, or someone who was super influenced by Michel
Bras is of course Andoni from Mugaritz, where we both work.
And he also got radical into at least in one of his periods, I would say.
I wouldn't say so bold that that's what he's doing still, but I would say in the mid 2000s,
which is the season where I was there, we would go to the forest and forage, we would
serve also water from the river at the restaurant.
I mean, why would you bring water from a river from Italy if you have a river just in front
of you, you know?
Yeah.
And all these kinds of things of working with the surroundings is super interesting.
Flowers, herbs, mushrooms, pieces of wood.
I mean, that there are so many things that can be transformed into delicious food.
Yeah, totally.
And then it goes beyond that, and then it's not just the ingredients, but it's also just
the impression.
In the case of Michel Bras, the beautiful Armenia with the little rivers and the white
fields and stuff, and the lush green and that sort of stuff.
Or if you take the Basque mountains with the rocks and also the rivers and the sheep, the
pastures, the coast, all that sort of stuff.
Because obviously in this sort of level of cooking, we're talking about a very artistic
approach in cooking.
And I feel like that was one of the big steps also in that sort of time where there was
an artistic interpretation of the terroir, not just in the ingredients, but in the impressions
and in an emotional and sort of feeling side.
Yeah, I absolutely understand what you mean.
Like, if you see dishes from restaurants like Borago, Noma, Mugaritz, or Michel Bras, you
will notice that somehow the dishes visually communicate the surrounding.
It's kind of like a landscape on the plate.
Yeah, like not Nari Sawa, you know?
Exactly.
Like look at the dishes from Nari Sawa.
It's like a forest, you know, but it's not in a sort of molecular way necessarily, or
you know, like a gargayou.
That is like a snippet of that day, you know?
Yeah, like you have really like this forest feeling or this nature feeling.
If we go to the opposite radical of this, the complete opposite would be, for instance,
Timbawa.
You know, he's like anti-terroir.
Like, he will cook with ingredients that come from Asia and combine them with whatever is
in the city.
And it's a completely different approach for a restaurant proposal.
I have nothing to say about Timbawa.
I'm not going to talk about Timbawa.
Yeah, but like even, you know, it's kind of like this like green and vegetable and plant
and herb thing is one thing.
But like, for example, when I, you know, like Muguriz, you know, with the walnuts, right?
Yeah, with the elechos.
No, and not the elechos, no, the one that's after that.
And it was like filled with like, ah, what was in there?
Was it like cheese, cream or something like that?
But basically it looked like a walnut.
And it was so evocative of like the siderias and stuff like that, you know, where you eat
walnuts at the cider houses afterwards with ingredients that are, you know, very, very
much, you know, representative of the region and of the feeling of wood and dairy and obviously
nuts and all that sort of stuff.
Yeah, so that dish with the elechos ferns in English, I mean, you look at that dish
and you feel like you're seeing, I don't know, like a landscape with snow and plants and
something like that.
It really tells a story somehow, you know?
Like just with the plating.
Yeah, it really does.
Absolutely.
Same with narizawa.
I see narizawa dishes and I feel like I'm in a Japanese forest.
Absolutely.
Oh yeah, for sure.
And I mean, like, I mean, that is actually one of the perfect examples for Teruera, his
soil soup.
Have you, you've heard of the soil soup, right?
No, no, I don't know that soup.
Describe it.
Tell us about it.
So he, he, um, this might sound really bonkers.
And I mean, it is because he's a bonkers guy in the best possible way, but he basically
goes to this one part in the countryside where there's really high quality soil and picks
it up.
And this is really pure, dark sort of humus sort of soil.
And he makes a soup with that soil.
You know, when you dig into the ground and you have this smell of like deep, rich, healthy
earth, and he wanted to put that sensation into a dish.
Well, you, you, you remind me of a dish.
I think this is one of the most creative dishes I've ever heard of.
And also like a super clever wordplay in Spanish, surf and turf.
It's called marimontana, which means sea and mountain.
And John Roca, he made this dish where he desolated a soil like the one you described
with, you know, like a soil, this dark soil that you take in the forest and you smell
it and you, it smells like forest.
Yeah.
And he made a desolation out of it.
So he had a, just a very pure water with that aroma.
And he would add that to oysters and that's marimontana.
You know, brilliant.
That's really cool.
Yeah.
That's, that's crazy, you know, and that's kind of like just really thinking about evoking
a really deep felt sensation of a place, you know, and that's really kind of like a very,
very uniquely like unique to cooking expression of terora, you know?
And that's why I get back to the, these ideas that I started talking about post colonization
and blah, blah, blah.
Because as I said, I come from Venezuela and in Venezuela, I think I've said this before,
there are many traditional dishes that are based on imported products.
Of course, this is a consequence of colonies, but why do we have like the one of our most
traditional dishes need raisins, olives, capers, and some wine from South Spain.
And you know, those are all things that are not produced in Venezuela and the ones that
are sent there are not the highest quality, are the cheapest, you know, like we're buying
the cheapest things from other countries to produce our own traditions.
I think that's just wrong.
I think that should just be reinvented, especially if we're talking about one of the countries
with the richest biodiversity in the world.
And there has to be so many ingredients that haven't been used to its full potential.
And that's something that I found really interesting with the Nordic movement, just to say a short
introduction.
So we talk about Nouvelle Cuisine.
This is something that happened in the sixties.
Then in the seventies, there was a movement here in the Basque country called the New
Basque Cuisine.
They brought a manifesto and they also incorporated traditional recipes from grandmothers into
high end restaurants.
They kind of replicated the Nouvelle Cuisine.
Then in the nineties, we had the Spanish Avant Garde led by Ferran Adria.
What they did is they started making very creative and crazy combinations on technique
and flavor combinations to just do all things that was possible and try everything, all
possible combinations of techniques and flavors and everything to a point that it became really
baroque.
And then there was a saturation of over information, of over combinations, of over things in the
plate.
And then suddenly everything got plain again with the Nordic movement that said, okay,
let's just focus on the Tehuar, on the surroundings, on time and place.
And one thing that I found super interesting is once I tried a Whey ice cream, Whey, just
something that is usually thrown away, it's usually garbage.
Nobody would cook with that.
And then they aromatized like a milk and make an ice cream with that.
And it's delicious and a completely different flavor I've never tried before.
And they use that, but for instance, vanilla is forbidden.
And I think that's so clever because it's much cheaper and has so much identity and
so much sense like socially, economically, like in so many senses.
Sustainably.
Yeah, totally.
And creatively also, it's kind of like you set yourself limitations and it's kind of
like, well, why wasn't Whey used?
Whey is an amazing product and nowadays it's like really, really used in kitchens.
But it's kind of like people weren't looking at it.
People weren't not using Whey because it's bad.
It was just sort of like, well, we're not doing anything with this.
We're just going to throw it away.
And it was just not the trend.
It wasn't a trend.
It wasn't what people are used to, what the routine was.
And these sorts of limitations, they really push the creative boundaries to look at
things a different way, to kind of take a few steps back and broaden your horizon and
look at things with a fresh perspective.
And that opened up, you know, infinite options.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I think again, this is something that has always existed.
The person that first ate an artichoke had to be really hungry to do that, you know,
to see something.
Okay, let's cook this.
Maybe it's delicious, you know?
And that's what the new Nordic movement just brought to a completely different level.
Looking around, then influential chefs around the world started imitating all the things.
I remember Grant Akats from Chicago, he once wanted to do a stock with wood.
So he called it wood stock, you know, but then taking just logs of wood and throwing
them into water and cooking them to eat that, it's not common sense, you know?
It's something that you have to come up with that and also pull it off and do it correctly.
So it's something really worth doing, you know?
Yeah, totally.
Tell us about Fabikin.
You work there, right?
Or you visited?
Yeah, I starved there for a few months.
Yeah, that was also a restaurant with an incredible sense of terroir, you know, very, very, very
local in both the ingredients and the techniques and also in the research of old techniques
of that region.
So Fabikin was located in the very north of Sweden on the border of Norway in an area
called Jämtland and it was close to like a ski resort in the middle of the forest.
And the chef, Magnus Nilsson, amazing chef, he started it there on an old like hunting
estate.
There was nothing really there and he just started cooking, you know, like going out,
shooting, game.
It was really, really beautiful because he just focused on getting, it was very simple
really, but like incredibly complicated in its like simplicity.
He just focused on getting super, super good ingredients throughout the season and then
preparing them, putting them together in a creative way with incredibly, incredibly sharp
technique.
And so, you know, drawing on the meat elements, drawing on the seafood elements, you know,
that it's sort of like river fish, the seafood he would get from Norway, you know, and then
just like really, really just focusing on the basics.
Like I've got a really good king crab.
Just cook that king crab perfectly, get the best king crab you can, cook it perfectly
and then just add one or two things to complement that.
He did that with a lot of things, you know, get a really good retired dairy cow, you know,
cook that piece of meat absolutely perfectly, one or two things to complement it and that's
it.
And it was like one of the purest and also one of the best restaurants I've ever been
in.
Yeah, I feel it was one of the best restaurants in the world when it was active.
For sure.
Yeah.
How long did it go?
Like four years already, I think so, right?
Well, I think you're right.
Seems like a long time, but I think you're right.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a shame.
Yeah.
It's a real shame.
Another good example is Cox in the Faroe Islands.
That's again, that's a restaurant that literally has only its surroundings because it's in
the middle of nowhere.
Other examples could be Boragoen, Chile, Gusto where I worked in Bolivia.
Yeah.
There was also Pedro Schiaffino in Peru.
He had like this restaurant called Amas.
Well, the restaurant was in the city, but everything from that restaurant would work
with Amazonian produce.
Yeah.
But I think like the concept of having the restaurant not in the place already breaks
the terroir concept.
Totally.
You can't do like how to say, imagine like a terroir from some forest in New York.
You know what I mean?
Like it doesn't work like that.
Yeah.
It has to be in the place.
Yeah, totally.
Totally.
And I think it's a trend that's like really cool, you know?
I mean like trend is kind of like calling it a trend doesn't really do it justice because
it's kind of going back to basics, you know, and to it makes sense sustainably, you know,
it makes sense.
Logistically, it makes sense.
But like even like smaller restaurants, you know, my restaurant does the same thing, you
know, we're based in Berlin and we only use products from the region.
We only, we don't go outside of Brandenburg and which is the area outside of Berlin.
And you know, that means no olive oil, no lemons, you know, fish, like we can't get
fish from the North Sea or from Brittany or whatever, something that's like normal for
other restaurants.
What does that do?
Like we said before, you know, it's kind of like, well, first of all, you put a lot of
time and effort into finding the best products from the region.
And like, what do you find?
You find like a small guy who runs like a lake community that does incredibly high quality
soft water fish, you know, like trout and stuff, a sturgeon, amazing best sturgeon
I've ever had, you know?
And you know, you find people that make cold pressed rapeseed oil, you know, rapeseed oil
that's usually like a cooking oil, but like cold pressed, super high quality, intensely
yellow, super fragrant.
And you find all these interesting things.
Of course you can use olive oil, but it's actually really, really interesting to find
these sorts of things.
And then kind of like, and it has a lot of, you know, it's very real in a way and then
it's very authentic in its own, because like it doesn't really matter like how you put
these things together.
They're always going to be authentically from that place, you know?