Ferran Adri And The Devil

• Michael Gebert
• Ferran Adrià with “the devil”

The room was a classroom at Eataly. The attendees were journalists from the blogosphere to the Tribune. But the atmosphere was more like that of a crowd listening to a preacher—and at one point the preacher even pulled out what he said was nothing less than the devil itself: an iSi canister, for making whipped cream.

• Michael Gebert
• Coffee caviar

Weird science? Not to Adrià: “You understand what a poached egg is?” he asked. “This is more or less the same reaction. In all of cooking, there is chemistry and physics.”

• “Hands are not tools. Just hands.”

“I don’t use it in my home,” he explained frankly. “When I buy architecture books, I’m not going to build a house.” In fact, chefs don’t cook at all in any conventional sense: “There’s a great deal of populism [about chefs cooking at home]. Chefs don’t cook at home. It’s a lie. When you have to cook every day for your family as an obligation—that’s cooking.”