On the eleventh anniversary of her restaurant A Tafona, the Galician Lucía Freitas continues to cook products from Galicia and the sea. With seemingly simple cuisine that embraces great creativity, Freitas is now focusing on gastronomic colour schemes.
Lucía Freitas (A Tafona*, Santiago de Compostela) closed the second day of Reale Seguros Madrid Fusión 2020 with a colourful, assertive presentation. The Galician chef, who also runs Lume, a gastro-bar near the main restaurant, presented and cooked some of her most iconic dishes, which are part of a colourful range of simple cuisine and products where everything is home-made Freitas ended her talk with a feminist plea: “We need more women in the kitchen everywhere”.
The chef recalled the Japanese influence in her cooking, “above all due to the use of seaweed, which I have incorporated with a Galician stamp”. She used them, for example, to prepare the first dish on her colourful menu, White Chromaticism. This is a dish based on semi-raw mushrooms, after 15 seconds in the microwave with a garlic bulb. After this step, “the mushroom is still crunchy, and I add an alga called laurencia, a sea truffle and white garlic, a trace of oil”. The dish, which is “almost uncooked, just the essence of flavours”, is finished off with raw cauliflower.
From white to black. Black Chromaticism is based on a grill-charred onion that is flambéed with oloroso sherry and rounded off with a burnt lemon emulsion. Leek ashes and burnt corn and a black bean broth with smoked kombu root complete “a simple but tasty dish”. Now on to Orange Chromaticism; a “freeze-dried dish made of all the surplus from the garden and dead man’s fingers, which contains chlorophyll”, and orange, “which I call Journey to India”. This has spices and a curried lentil soup, the latter made from persimmons and pumpkin, “products from here”.
Freitas finished with Pink Chromaticism, “the first chromaticism I did. This dish came out of the happiness of the anniversary of my son’s first day”, and is made up of red fruits; jelly and raspberry sorbet; ice cream made of macerated strawberries, lychees and roses, and a rose-tinted glass, “which shows how I see life since my son was born”, smiled Freitas.
Emotions continued to run high on the stage. Before leaving, the Galician chef called her entire team, consisting mostly of women, to join her. “We need to normalise the presence of women in gastronomy, we need them, in the kitchens and in all facets of life. We need to become leaders”. There was a final ovation for the chef, who is also president of WIG (Women in Gastronomy), a women’s organisation “which has taken this dish – Pink Chromaticism – as a symbol of the organisation. A source of pride”, she concluded.