The Sorcerer's Apprentices - A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adria's Elbulli

Zusatztext “Anyone interested in the very vanguard of creativity in any medium! aside from the ever-growing ranks of foodies and celebrity-chef watchers! is certain to be enchanted.” — Booklist (starred review) Informationen zum Autor Lisa Abend has been Time ’s correspondent in Spain for the past three years. Her work has also appeared in Bon Appetit , Gourmet , Food and Wine , The Atlantic , and other publications. Klappentext Now in paperback— Kitchen Confidential meets Heat in the first behind-the-scenes portrait of the world’s most influential restaurant and the aspiring culinary geniuses who toiled to make it so exceptional. WHAT GOES ON BEHIND THE SCENES AT ELBULLI? Elected best restaurant in the world by Restaurant magazine an unprecedented five times, elBulli is where chef Ferran Adrià’s remarkable cuisine comes to life—with dragon cocktails that make the drinker breathe smoke and caviar made from tiny spheres of olive oil. elBulli is also the object of culinary pilgrimage—millions clamor every year for a reservation at one of its tables. Yet few people know that, behind each of the thirty or more courses that make up a meal at elBulli, a small army of stagiaires—apprentice chefs—labor at the precise, exhausting work of executing Adrià’s astonishing vision. In The Sorcerer’s Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià’s elBulli, Lisa Abend explores the remarkable system that Adrià uses to run his restaurant and, in the process, train the next generation of culinary stars. Today, food has become the focus of unprecedented attention, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentices explores the strange evolution—in less than two decades—of a once-maligned profession into a source of celebrity.The Sorcerer’s Apprentices one ] June, or the Machine “Quemo. Quemo. Quemo, quemo, quemo. Quemo. QUE-mo!” The most important thing the stagiaires learn on their first day at elBulli is this word: quemo. Literally, it means “I burn.” The ones who don’t speak Spanish don’t know that, however, and so, as they mouth the strange word in the early days before it becomes reflex, it comes out a question, one often formed, it seems, in their own language: Kay-moh? Quémeau? At the restaurant, quemo is an all-purpose warning: behind you, coming through, hot stuff, watch your back. There is no room for variation in this kitchen, where forty-five chefs and cooks and stagiaires and dishwashers from different countries are constantly moving, and so one word must carry the burden of many kinds of caution. If you listen closely, you’ll hear it in the background of the louder, more obvious din created by the Thermomix whirring and coconuts being cracked and orders being fired and marrow bones being sawed apart and the occasional plate crashing to the floor. It is always there, like a looped soundtrack, this steady chorus of quemos. The cooks are supposed to say the word as they round the treacherous bend between the small kitchen and the main one or step through the portal that divides the hot stations from the cold—an alert on a blind curve. Some, however, repeat it as they pass through any crowded area of the kitchen, rhythmically announcing each step—“QUEmoQUEmoQUEmo”—so that the word becomes a mantra against accidental bumping and other calamities. Admittedly, this produces something of a boy-who-cried-wolf situation: how do you know when something really is hot? For that, the kitchen has spontaneously devised variations: quemo mucho for when a cook takes a hot pan from the flattop and turns around to empty its contents at his station—in other words, when something really is hot. Except for when it isn’t. Aitor Zabala, the chef de p...

Product details

• Authors: Lisa Abend
• Publisher: Free Press USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 07.02.2012
• EAN: 9781451626629
• ISBN: 978-1-4516-2662-9
• Dimensions: 141 mm x 215 mm x 21 mm
• Series: Atria Books
• Subject: Guides > Food & drink > International cuisine