Ferran Adrià didn’t even need to demonstrate anything to get oohs and ahhs from his audience. During the world-renowned Catalan chef’s speech in a Harvard lecture hall last week, videos of his playful, experimental cooking techniques sufficed.
“Caviar” droplets of puréed melon liquid inside a gelatinous shell provoked a subdued murmur. A shot of the melon caviar suspended in ham consommé drew louder expressions of wonderment. And when Adrià showed the melon caviar served over wide, flat pasta—made from the same ham purée as the consommé—people laughed out loud.
Adrià’s visit was part theater, but he had a serious purpose as well. During his four days on campus—in media interviews, in lectures, in lab visits—he repeated the same message: combining cooking and science is nothing new.
“Cooking has always been science—physics and chemistry,” he told undergraduates in a course on innovation in science and engineering, where he was the guest lecturer. “When you lit a fire to cook a million years ago, you were already using science.”
He seemed to be speaking indirectly to critics who have called his methods unnecessarily outlandish and even dangerous. One of his signature techniques, the use of liquid nitrogen, isn’t so different from boiling water, he claimed. He said he uses the cold liquid in much the same way—for example, coating a soup ladle in coconut milk, then dipping it in liquid nitrogen to freeze the coconut milk into a shell that can be used as a dessert cup.
People find liquid nitrogen frightening not because it is dangerous, but because it is unfamiliar, Adrià asserted. Yes, you’ll lose your hand if you plunge it into a liquid nitrogen bath for two minutes—but the same thing will happen if you plunge it for two minutes into boiling water, and yet we don’t deplore using boiling water to cook. He urged his listeners not to confuse what is complicated with what is merely new.
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