Oriol Castro and Eduard Xatruch (Disfrutar**, Barcelona) cooked a complete menu on the stage of Madrid Fusion, a menu with their latest developments in processing fats, creating fish eggs from poultry or cooking with sugar.
Oriol Castro and Eduard Xatruch, chefs at the ninth best restaurant in the world, once again surprised us at Reale Seguros Madrid Fusión with a master class in gastronomy. On this occasion, they took a step forward in their work with fats to create new textures, which they had already presented at San Sebastian Gastronomika 2019, and finished it off with several avant-garde gastronomic offerings.
The duo from Disfrutar (Mateu Casañas, the third member of the team stayed in Barcelona to run the business) started with a thought for their customers: How many people wash their hands before they eat? Concerned, they did a study and “we realised that 80% of customers do not do so. It worried us, partly because a large part of our current menu is eaten with your hands”, so, since December, “we give customers a gel before they eat to wash their hands”. It is a disinfectant that does not leave an aroma and that the restaurant’s cooking team also uses after discarding latex gloves “also for sustainability reasons”, they explained.
After the service announcement, Castro and Xatruch started cooking and showed their latest inventions. “It’s not an invention, it’s not avant-garde, but we wanted to show how a cut can change a dish”. To this end, they started their gastronomic presentation with a master class on cuts, with which they served up three different dishes but with the same ingredients: barnacles, oysters, dead man’s fingers and caviar.
The avant-garde arrived with the continuation of the work with fats presented at Gastronomika 19, through which they have achieved new textures such as foams and “sponges” from, for example, butter. They had already presented their work with oils, and now it was the turn of butters, with which they presented a “very large area sponge before passing it through the vacuum machine”. It is “a frozen foam with a taste of caviar”, a foam that is achieved thanks to the fat in butter.
The resulting foamy butter is served to the customer along with focaccia. “How else could we serve bread with butter?” But this is Disfrutar and it is not just any bread, of course, it is focaccia that melts butter on contact, focaccia made with broccoli purée obtained thanks to the OC’OO machine that was presented at Madrid Fusión in 2018. “It’s the first time we have made our own bread at Disfrutar”, they explained
Their penultimate dish was a version of fish roe. “We love fish roe and, using alginate, we have created bird’s ‘roe’ with bacon textures”. “It’s like a poultry mojama but more oily, an egg curing that can last up to two months in perfect condition”, Xatruch explained in detail. On their return, they also made a mullet roe but using egg, “a match that achieves a creamier texture than the original but less buttery”.
To end with, the dessert: A mango volcano. A dish made from the typical coal candy with mango, which they cooked with sugar instead of salt. This dessert is finished with honey and apple water bubbles, “taking the idea from Arzak’s strawberry air bubbles”. “A tribute to Juan Mari and also to the Canaries, the volcanic land”. A complete menu full of innovation.