QUALITALY 141

August /September 2024 XII MAGAZINE and take time for a vegetable to evolve according to quality criteria. It takes the same patience that we are willing to give to the meat processing procedure. The cherry tomato you will eat tonight was prepared five days ago. If you think about it, the next day’s pasta is always better. Just a saying or folk wisdom? Folk wisdom that hides a maceration concept according to which starches absorb the sauce better over time. A cucumber or aubergine marinated today and served immediately is much less tasty than an aubergine left to marinate a few days. If we know how to wait, the taste explodes. A CUISINE THAT BECOMES RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTATION. A COOK WHO INCREASINGLY RESEMBLES A FOOD TECHNOLOGIST. There is no modern vegetable cuisine without a continuous dialogue with scientists. I collaborate with researchers from the Universities of Messina and Catania whose fields of expertise are the Gastronomic Sciences and Agricultural Sciences. We concentrate organoleptically active molecules to obtain ultra-sensory matrices from the vegetables in our garden. If the dialogue with science ceased, culinary research would stagnate. I am fascinated by the Spanish avant-garde. YOU HAVE A BEAUTIFUL CHEF’S TABLE OVERLOOKING THE KITCHEN AND THE MEDITERRANEAN. DOES IT EMBARRASS COOKING WITHOUT FILTERS? It depends on your nature. Vanity and self- centredness, albeit in different doses, are part of all competitive people. I am very competitive and vain and being visible while cooking allows me to be a prime mover and having direct interaction with customers is a nice challenge that satisfies my vanity. But my being vain should be read according to the concept of self-love taken to the extreme that makes me be orderly in my timing and manner of execution, clean in my choices. Mine is a vanity that I want to lead me to perfection. PRESSURE AND ADRENALINE AT THE SAME TIME. I SEE YOU AS ATLAS LIFTING THE EARTH AND CARRYING ITS WEIGHT. I see myself well covered in vegetables as if they were a tattoo covering my naked body like a second skin. Inscribed in a circle like the Vitruvian man. This snapshot would say a lot about me. MODERN KITCHENS ARE OFTEN VERY QUIET. Mine is reasoned cooking, studied down to the smallest detail. If I did express cooking the chef’s table would be madness. Express cooking brings more excitement but less control. Do you know what it means to express cook a turnip? Browning it gives off smoke. It does not lend itself to being seen. Pigeon on a carcass is insanity. The unexpected is just around the corner. HOW MANY MISTAKES ARE ALLOWED IN SUCH A KITCHEN? None. But also because I have dishes that I work on constantly and development is continuous. So you go from cardoncello to cardoncello 2.0 and cardoncello 4.0. There is a path of refinement. Every morning I have ten phrases that I read before I get up. The first one is ‘kaisen’. SEIRI, SEITON, SEISO, SEIKETSU, SHITSUKE (SORT, SET IN ORDER, SHINE, STANDARDIZE, AND SUSTAIN): THE 5S KEISEN METHOD FOR CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT. NO, THANK YOU. You know it? Does it scare you? No, I just can’t work with 5S. I don’t improve. Why? BECAUSE IF MY DESK IS TIDY I DON’T TAKE ANYTHING AWAY. IF MY DESK HAS A THOUSAND BOOKS, A THOUSAND NOTES I TAKE SOMETHING AWAY. IT’S THE CONCEPT OF MANURE FERMENTING. WE HAVE A DESK AS CLEAN AS A WHISTLE AND I BECOME STERILE. You lose creativity in perfection EXACTLY. SO I WAS WONDERING WHAT KIND OF ORDER YOU NEED TO BE CREATIVE. I need a thousand pages but they all have to be catalogued. I go into cataloguing mode. It’s natural for me to do it. It’s spontaneous. I have a thousand pages divided between preliminary ideas, first idea, second idea, third idea, variations of ideas, final recipes. UNABLE TO CANCEL ERRORS. All right: something can happen. Especially if I did express cooking. I WOULD SAY. When you take everything to the extreme to achieve perfection, and I have this need in life, the risks of error increase. TO ACHIEVE PERFECTION, ONE CHALLENGES ERROR... That’s how it is, even though in my reasoned cooking the capacity for control is high. With a kitchen full of maceration, fermentation and oxidation everything is standardised like an industrial process. I weigh by the gram, look at the Brix degree of the sauce, measure and correct the pH. The margin of error is very low. SO, IN THE KITCHEN THERE CAN’T BE THAT UNFORESEEN FACTOR, AND I QUOTE, “OOPS, I’VE DROPPED THE LEMON TART!” Of course there can. And when the unexpected is of quality you have to standardise it. Bottura’s tart happened unexpectedly, but this fortuitous event was then brought back into a standardised preparation where the dropped cake became became a recipe. It is crucial for a professional to make the flash of genius replicable in the kitchen. SO ONCE THERE’S A RECIPE FOR A STROKE OF GENIUS EVERYONE CAN BE A GENIUS? They could take my recipe and remake it but it would remain a copy, maybe perfect but still a copy. I think, you know, that even if they had my recipes they would still not have my dish. Guidara would be missing. ALL ARTISTS USE YELLOW BUT VAN GOGH’S YELLOW IS UNIQUE. Because the hand that uses it is unique. I am convinced of this. Steal it from me, you won’t get my sunflowers. GENIUS IS NOT REPRODUCIBLE EXCEPT BY THE GENIUS, ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS, GUIDARA? Exactly. I am interested in uniqueness of cuisine, uniqueness of thought. I don’t give