Hi everyone, welcome to Potluck Food Talks. Today's topic is iconic dishes.
Iconic dishes, yeah. I mean, you know, like, what do you think makes an iconic dish? Like,
that kind of transcends time and space.
I guess it's a dish that people talk about and that are representative about a chef and
his identity. For instance, Sex on the Beach, you know that dish?
Yeah, unfortunately I know that dish.
This dish is the most bizarre dish I've ever seen. It's called Sex on the Beach and it's
a dessert and what you get is like something that looks like sand and then you have like
this used condom that it's edible that has milk inside like a creamy thing. And the way
to eat it is that you have to lift the condom and open your mouth and put it into your mouth.
And this is a dessert. It has a creamy thing and strawberries and this and that. But I
think it's pretty crazy. Like, it's almost humiliating for the guests to make them do
that to enjoy the dessert. But at the end of the day, something really punk, I would
say, memorable, maybe in a bad way. And it's a dish that people talk about.
Yeah, I mean it is. And then I think it's made him famous now. Whether you like it or
not, it has shock value.
Okay. All right. So I would say iconic dish. One of the most iconic dishes is the gaugu
yu from Michel Bra.
Oh, amazing dish. Yeah.
Gaugu yu is a riff on a traditional stew from the Obraq region that Michel Bra reinterpreted.
And it's basically a dish consisting of, you know, like 30 plus different vegetables and
herbs and flowers that are cooked in a certain sequence so that they have different textures
depending on the vegetables, in mineral water with a bit of ham. And it then plated like
a very, very elaborate salad of different textures. Also, there's a couple of sort of
sauces on the plate. The dish is constantly changing, constantly evolving. But this is
one of the most replicated dishes in the culinary world without a doubt. I think almost even
like the very well-known Michelin star chefs today, most of them have a dish that's sort
of an homage to this gaugu yu.
Yeah. You will see this dish if you Google Michel Bra. It's usually the cover of his
book of the same name. And when I was working in Mugaritz, we had one of these variations
of that dish. And I was working in the station that was producing the dish. So I would have
to go to the garden and pick up, it was over 30 different herbs, just a leaf of every herb.
And every leaf had to have its own specific size. For instance, you wouldn't have a very
large leaf of sage because it's very powerful, just a very little one. But for instance,
a basil or coriander, you could have a bigger one because you can eat this like a salad.
So we would know how many bookings we had every day. So if we had like, let's say 30
bookings, I had to pick, let's say 35 leaves of each single, it was like over 30 herbs
and about 12 flowers, like flower petals. And this was served just with an emmental
cheese water, which was made by mixing emmental cheese and mineral water on the thermomix
and then just strain it. And on top there was just a beurre noisette and that was the
dish. It was amazing. Yeah. So my next one would be Robuchon's potato puree, mashed potatoes.
You know that dish? Of course, everybody knows it. I think it's the benchmark of any potato
puree around the world. It's what is always referenced. And I mean, it's also a sort of
representation of that sort of, you know, French cooking that I mean, dictates so much
of the cooking that's going on in the world. To make this puree, you pass the potato first
with a thicker kind of a strain and then a finer one. And then you emulsify it with sheets,
lots of butter and that's what makes it so nice. And so it has this texture that it almost
falls from the spoon. Yeah, really nice puree. I heard him say once you need really good
potatoes, you need to boil them with the skin on, not skinned, like you don't peel them
before you boil them. That's very important. And I think he said it's two parts potato,
one part butter. It's a lot. It's a lot of butter. Yeah, it's almost yellow at the end.
All right. For me, one of the really good signature dish, iconic dish is Martin Beresategui's
foie gras with green apple and eel. Ah, that's a classic. Yeah. Yeah. It's such a classic.
It's also been replicated quite a lot. And it's just such a like back when he because
it's been on his menu for a long time, but it was a very modern sort of interpretation
and a mix of ingredients, you know, it had a little bit of a Japanese influence, I feel
like. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the fattiness from the foie and the eel,
the texture together with the green apple, I feel like kind of is a symbol of that sort
of like new wave of cooking, you know, kind of like a little bit more fresh, a little
bit more vibrant, more modern that kind of emerged together with Beresategui, especially
it's been. I would say next, Fergus Henderson's bone marrow dish. I mean, that's that's an
all time, all time classic. And it's so simple. Just cook bone marrows that you spread on
a good loaf of toasted bread. And it comes with a parsley, lemon salad. And that's it.
Yeah. With capers in the salad. Yeah. It's just like a yeah, like a small salad. It's
just kind of like parsley that you lightly chop. I mean, I think Fergus says you and
he doesn't say you should chop the parsley, he says you should discipline it a little
bit, which just means kind of running your knife through it a little bit. Fergus is such
a poetic guy. Yeah. You want the leaves of the parsley to be there, but of course not
like a complete one. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, why is it an iconic dish? You know, I mean,
I the first of all, it's delicious. I ate it many, many times actually at St. John.
And it's so simple. But I mean, again, it's a kind of encompasses a movement that Fergus
Henderson started this whole nose to tail cooking, you know, and it really is the sort
of like flag for for this movement that he did. I remember once Anthony Bourdain wrote
that if you would see this dish on a menu, you would know that that chef was a good fellow.
He was one of us. Yeah, it's true. It's true. And it's kind of like that in London also,
like people who work for St. John, you know, they're like a clique, they're like a family.
OK, I think I mean, one of the most old school signature dishes is the truffle soup by Bocuse,
which you know, it's like it really is like it just encompasses like Bocuse cooking, you
know, I mean, Bocuse is very old school and the dish was pretty full on and had like whole
truffles in the soup, you know, like cooked and cooked in the soup. And it comes in this
like classic white porcelain dish with a puff pastry lid. And it's just everything from
like a bygone era, you know, that's sort of like turning point of sort of like, you know,
the Bocuse era of cooking to sort of like nouvelle cuisine to like a fresher sort of
less heavy style of cooking. But I think the fact that like this is pretty badass putting
a whole truffles in your soup. So my next dish is Old Mole from Enrique Olvera. And
I really like this dish because it's so minimalistic and it tells a story because you have like,
it's just like one dot inside of a bigger dot. The dot on the center is the young mole
and around it is the old mole. So it's you're basically doing like this principle of mixing
an old sauce with a new sauce, which is the same you see with mother sauces or mother
doughs or sour doughs or these kind of things, but made with mole and that's a dish. You
get it just like that. I didn't have this mole, but I went to Cosme, which is one of
Olvera's restaurant run by Daniel Sotoines in New York. And I had the mole they made
there with burrata cheese with wood, which was an amazing combination, man.
Yeah, I actually had the dish in the original Peugeot before they moved. And it's like
to say it's such a cool dish because it's so minimalistic. The mole itself, I mean,
both moles are super delicious. You just get a couple of tortillas on the side and you
just like scoop it up and eat it. And I think this dish is pretty cool because it makes
you understand a very sort of complex cultural aspect of Mexican cooking, you know, because
people like if you get a stew, like if you get chicken in mole, you know, you'll eat
it and you think, oh, this is delicious, but you won't necessarily think about that sauce
and all that goes in it and the cultural background of it, you know, and the complexity of it
also that it's, you know, so on so many days old and that keeps evolving and evolving and
evolving. And I think it's that's really why this dish is so cool because it draws, it
teaches you something about what you're eating and where you are.
That's amazing. Yeah. I think that's one of the most difficult things to do to tell a
story through a dish.
Yeah, for sure. Okay, so my next one on the Idiya Saba Anyoki from Bulgaria. Quite a while
ago now that they had this dish on. But for me, it's like quintessential Bulgarian dish,
you know, it's like a mix again of sort of like sense of place and technique. I mean,
for people who don't know, these are fake gnocchi that are made from Idiya Saba. The
Idiya Saba cheese is a very traditional cheese in the Basque region. And you basically make
a, you make a water from this cheese and you mix it with kuzu, which is a Japanese starch
from, from tubers, from mountain tubers. And it's basically why you then pipe it into a
liquid and it gelifies into the liquid while you kind of cut off these gnocchi. So what
happens is that you have these potato gnocchi that when you eat them, just like completely,
they're completely creamy in your mouth. I think it gets served, like it used to get
served with just like a very light ham stock, like a very clear ham stock, if I'm not mistaken,
and a couple of herbs on top, that's it. And it's, it's this mix of like ingredient driven
cooking and like super forward thinking technique that really embodies the Leipzig-Garrett spirit,
in my opinion.
My next dish would be pineapple and ants from Alex Atala. And again, this is just a two
ingredient dish and it's amazing. It's just a, a dice of pineapple and on top are, it's
just a piece of ant that tastes like lemon. We, we have similar ants in Venezuela. We
call it lemon ants. And yeah, and that's it. I think this dish also tells a story. You
see this and you're probably seeing that these are two ingredients that come from America.
You think about Amazonian cuisine. I mean, it evokes many things just by seeing it before
you taste it.
Yeah, definitely. And then again, it's like, when he put it on, you know, like, entomophagy
in these Indian sects wasn't like so much of a big thing. I mean, it still isn't, but
again, it's kind of like, especially for, you know, you're in Latin America and then
you have guests that come to your restaurant that are like a little bit more how to say,
they're like a little bit more used to safe things. And then you really get sort of like
pulled out of this like safe, like fine dining environment, get really put into a place where
sort of like, yeah, this is here, you know, like this is here. This is the Amazon, you
know, like, like people, Indian sites, right? But that's really cool. That was really brave.
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
Okay, so my next dish is the Salmonette de Gaudi from very early days of El Bui, which,
you know, is the cover picture of the Mediterranean cookbook from Ferran Andrea and is, I think,
you know, one of the most iconic dishes from early days of El Bui. I think like before
they really took off, it was like the most iconic dish that they did.
Probably. Yeah.
And I mean, it's actually a very simple dish. It's a red mullet fillet that gets cooked
with a crust of very finely diced mixed vegetables like peppers, mixed peppers mainly. What else
is in there?
I think peppers, zucchini, like the typical dishes you get in Catalan cuisine. And they
resemble this mosaics you see in Barcelona from Andorra Gaudi. And yeah, it's pretty
cool actually. This also tells a story.
Yeah. And it was so forward thinking because actually it's quite a traditional sort of
like flavor combination and dish. I mean, it's a piece of fish with vegetables on top.
But what made it so interesting was the beginning of the approach that they took to using new
techniques in that kitchen. The fact that they achieved this like really even thin crust
of vegetables is because they stuck the vegetables to the fish using a gelatin that activates.
Normally gelatin activates when it cools down, when it gets dissolved hot and then cools
down and it gelifies. But this gelatin is the opposite. You mix it cold and then when
it heats up, it binds. So they would brush the fish with this gelatin, add the vegetables
on top very, very neatly and then carefully place the fish skin side down. And as the
fish was cooking, this gelatin would stick the vegetables to the fish, which I mean,
it was completely unheard of at that time, you know. And I mean, for me still today is
an amazing technique.
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