For many generations of ambitious European cooks, the techniques of the kitchen were ironclad. There was a way to roast, to sauté, to poach. There was an accepted method for making stocks and sauces. You mastered this playbook early and then, if you chose to be unconventional, you did so conventionally. Maybe you embraced Japanese ingredients like soy sauce and shiso, or you began to put your sauces underneath the fish rather than on top of it.

But what’s going on in Catalan kitchens today is much closer to a revolution. Chefs aren’t just pairing foods that have never been paired before (although there’s plenty of that). They are devising entirely new techniques and using new technologies to manipulate food almost beyond recognition. Who said olive oil had to be liquid? Who said ice cream had to be sweet? Who said noodles had to made from starch?

Led by the genius/madman of elBulli, the provocative Ferran Adrià, Catalan chefs have set the pace in Spain for rethinking the rules of the kitchen. Whether you refer to what they are doing as nueva cocina, molecular gastronomy or simply avant-garde cooking (most of these chefs resist labels), the hallmarks are an experimental frame of mind and a willingness to incorporate ingredients and techniques from other fields, such as food processing.

Adrià himself describes his work as a series of technical breakthroughs, like the use of the siphon to make foams or the use of alginates to make liquids solid. But one of the earliest and most critical breakthroughs came in 1990, when the young chef spent time in the avant-garde French kitchen of Pierre Gagnaire. There, writes Adrià on his restaurant’s web site, he learned something that might be summed up thusly: “Everything is possible.”

These renegade Catalan chefs produce food that requires a lot of quotation marks to describe. By playing with temperatures, they convert olive oil into “butter.” Using methylcellulose, they turn fruits and vegetables into “noodles.” With alginates and calcium salts, melon puree becomes “caviar.”

Let’s take a closeup look at the technique known as spherification. At a conference at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, California, Adrià described the process while an assistant demonstrated it (view the videos of this on the Spain and the World Table Conference page of this website). By mixing melon coulis with alginate (a thickener derived from seaweed), then injecting the coulis into water mixed with calcium chloride, you can produce solid melon “pearls.” Conversely, if you put the calcium chloride in the main ingredient and the alginate in the water, you can produce a sphere resembling an egg yolk—liquid inside, but with a “skin” that contains the liquid until pierced. Watch how well the technique works with yogurt, which naturally contains calcium.

Initially, the novel process did not work with ingredients that were sour or salty. But Adrià and his team revised the mix of calcium salts until they could spherify virtually anything. Imagine a mussel encased in a liquid aspic made from its own liquor. Other techniques have led to other inspirations, like powdered jamón produced through freeze drying. Or a “caviar” made by encapsulating olive oil and water mechanically.

Today, thanks to Catalan chefs like Adrià, the Roca brothers at Celler de Can Roca, Carme Ruscalleda at Sant Pol de Mar and Jordi Vilá at Alkimia, everything is indeed possible. To their credit, these chefs maintain a spirit of collaboration that allows ideas to spread quickly. Adrià publishes his research and considers nothing proprietary.

“Don’t feel like you are copying,” says Adrià to other chefs. “The techniques and concepts belong to all.”

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