monica
January 13, 2020

The Russian twins presented a squid trompe l’oeil at Madrid Fusion on a 3D machine for “allergy sufferers who cannot eat seafood”. The new Russian cuisine was also on show with water as a “flavour concentrator”.

The brothers Ivan and Sergey Berezutsky (Twins Garden, Moscow) presented their work with water, “the main element in the world”, at Reale Seguros Madrid Fusión 2020. Using water, the Russian twins, who trained alongside Ferran Adrià, Dani García, Grant Achatz and Joan Roca, showed “how we enhance flavours and achieve that first-time sensation on a plate”. In addition, the Russians surprised everyone on stage by applying 3D technology to “produce a plate of squid for people who are allergic to seafood”.

Although they are the standard-bearers of traditional cuisine, at Madrid Fusión the Berezutskys have delved into the “Russian avant-garde”, which likes “to impact on the product even before cooking”. For this reason, they have presented their work with water in all its states, “with which we manage to concentrate the flavour of some products”.

Using that concentration, we put emphasis on the memory and the sensation of the first few times you try something. This is what they have done with scallops and lard, “very Russian products such as mushrooms”, which they have grown by changing the vaporised water into crab broth created from crab waste. “That’s how we get a double umami taste, from the mushrooms and the crabs”.

3D printing to help allergy sufferers

“Why shouldn’t an allergy sufferer eat fish?” Faced with this idea, the brothers set to work and devised a bean paste that they inserted into a 3D printer. So, they created a texture of squid in its own shape, which included cavities where they inserted a hydrogel with algae, garlic and parsley. “And it’s like a squid but without squid, with the shape and taste of a squid but made with beans, garlic, parsley and, of course, water”. It is grilled and presented with baked pepper. “It’s a dish we presented seven days ago in Moscow, a dish made using a very powerful machine for the future of gastronomy, as is hydrogel”.

Exponents of the best of current Russian cuisine, Ivan and Sergey Berezutsky – the latter being the best young chef in the world in 2017 – run Twins Garden in Moscow, one of the most acclaimed gastronomic offerings in the Russian capital in just two years. Not surprisingly, The World’s 50 Best Restaurants has elevated it to number 19 on its global list. “Russian cuisine is evolving. There is avant-garde cuisine but also an appreciation for our own products, which we use, for example, in a honey dessert made from sea urchins”.

Ivan and Sergey Berezutsky also make wines from vegetables and mushrooms, “in a process identical to that of traditional wine”. Thus, they explain, “the taste of mushrooms and vegetables is enhanced by fermentation”. The new Russia in a dual format.
The twins, who own a 50-hectare farm three hours from the capital, from which they get much of their food, will talk about Essential Cooking, which dispenses with the superfluous. It will be a talk reflecting on raw materials, making them the focal point in the hall. Their cuisine focuses on the vegetable pantry and incessant work on distilled and fermented vegetables, discovered by Ivan when he worked at El Celler de Can Roca. It is a continuous search for the tradition of Russian cuisine based on the delicacy of the product as the star of the table.