Spanish Cuisine and Chef David Chang | Anthony Bourdain's The Mind of a Chef | Full Episode

Viewers like you make this program possible support your local PBS station Coming up chef David Chang visits Spain and it's heavy influence on his career San Sebastian is one of the eating capitals of the world. The cider house is sort of awesome It's pin shows with chef Juan Murray Arzak. They put it all is it the first pin show that was ever created? Visits chef and Adderley's Cooks a microwave sponge cake. The microwave is highly underrated as a cooking vessel. It's pretty rad fideos and a salt cod omelet Enter the mind of a chef a Glorious Spain It is too many a culinary paradise a delicious melting pot comprised of amazing ingredients and techniques San Sebastian is the hub for modern Spanish cooking this entire Wealth of culinary knowledge there So it's an important region to represent the culinary tradition here is a window into Spain's history The Moors introduced Spain to a slew of ingredients that have become staples of Spanish cuisine Including many spices rice citrus fruits like lemon and oranges and of course gazpacho the Greeks introduced olive oil and from the new world of the Americas tomatoes potatoes vanilla and chocolate So it's no surprise that with its rich culinary history Spain is where one finds many of the world's best chefs working in some of the best kitchens in the world and Where Dave Chang finds inspiration from some of his most revered idols? San Sebastian is an amazing place to visit to explore on its own But for me when I go to San Sebastian part of the gastronomic experience Is the Juan Maria experience? Arguably Juan R. Zack's one of the most important figures in the Western culinary world because he helped modernize Spanish cuisine from its sort of prehistoric days. He elevated Spanish cooking He was one of a handful of figures that made it happen. I Had the fortunate luck to go on a pincho store with Juan R His daughter Elena are Zack and our translator extraordinaire my tea last time we drank all day I'm the one that has to get ready Pinchos are the San Sebastian take on tapas, which just about everyone eats all the time all day long It's like purgatory sometimes The first pincho that was ever created His philosophy he's always looked at food with the child's eye That to me means always questioning always asking why always trying to improve It's just delicious Oh He's got Benjamin button of the mind it's like slowly getting younger Even though his body's getting older. His mind is getting younger and the dude is the most beloved person in San Sebastian I want to know why you don't run for mayor of San Sebastian The next egg dish that was very profound to me as a kid growing up And I think that was an iconic egg dish in Europe was created by Juan Maria R. Zack and his daughter Elena R Zack if I recall correctly I was a kid watching PBS and I would run home and watch the great PBS show great chefs of the West Great chefs of New England and the best ones are great chefs of Europe and I remember watching this and I was like Oh, man, that's so cool. Like this egg and I can't believe right now. I'm recreating this It was a different way of cooking an egg and how they presented it I don't remember but it was the technique that I thought was so cool And it was really simple is basically putting eggs in cling film And that's what we have here and we have it with string. The only reason we have string attached to it is this The water is about 185 degrees the idea again is you don't want these eggs to be touching the bottom Cook it at a gentle pace you could easily cook it in a water bath, but this is how I remember seeing it and chill it down and This is what we have In a way, it sort of looks like a ball of mozzarella So it's just an egg just repackaged. But as you can see, it's it looks like burrata cheese on the tag So what we're gonna do here is try to recreate one of my favorite things in the world I've ever eaten Juan Marie's friend the chef owner proprietor at Rodexio What she's known for and what one Marie goes there to eat is her ama when you see one read it It's like oh he's being transported to his child It's one of those magical moments magical dishes that just doesn't First thing is that salt cod? It's everywhere in Spain. This is fresh cod. You can actually make your own salt cod Take fresh cod and you pack it in salt. That's it. They're not joking when they say salt cod The salt it'll also extract all the moisture what you'll get is this Gnarly brick and what you do is when it gets to that point you reconstitute it either in water and you change that water out And then you put it in milk sort of makes it more edible because it's obviously incredibly salty So that's what we have here It's now edible So I'm gonna add about six eggs some of the salt cod Tear up some parsley a generous helping of onions cooked in olive oil and a little bit of butter What she definitely did not use was chopsticks to make this, but I'm sorry. It's a better way Olive oil Well the great thing I liked about this omelet was the build-up You know everyone's experienced this like oh this place is great You have to try it and it gets talked about and you're like, there's no way can live up to the expectations the weight of Everyone telling you it's the greatest omelet in the world. I mean you taste it and you're like it is that awesome. I Was on it and it was served like that, but as you can see underneath it's still pretty creamy I actually like my omelets that way that this is as simple as you can get and you know I think gonna be very tasty And now a word from chef Ferran Adria Full a gente que está viviendo de verdad la transformación de la cocina y lo que iba a ser un nuevo lenguaje Y además de la época que venía gente aquí y de verdad que no le gustaba no le gustaba nada que vea gente que se emocionaba que estaba viendo que estaba delante de algo Importante So San Sebastián is one of the eating capitals of the world Partly because of this guy named Lewis and on the other ease and he's the chef at Mugaritz Which has been around for over a decade under the arteries Protege of both chefs Adria and our Zack. He carries the torch of Spain's innovative chefs to new terrain Genesis of so many modern culinary techniques came out of this kitchen The meal here is a lot of fun. It's like pure joy One of the things with Anthony and what I love most about Anthony is his Creativity he has such a cerebral approach with food yet combines it with nature It's extraordinarily difficult and it's not what you seen. It's not what you think it is It just transforms into this insane experience He spent two years Researching the egg and everything about the egg and he was one of the first people to sort of break it down and out of his Research of the egg. He created the slow-poached egg in terms of cooking it in the shell in a constant temperature It's like more or less after 64 degrees it started to like coagulate cooks at two different times egg yolk and egg white I said he studied like the egg white Like what is the composition they knew it was a protein with a lot of water But he needed to know like what kind of protein so there's 13 different proteins After years of research Anthony discovered the egg white and the egg yolk cook at two different temperatures the egg yolk cooks at 62 Celsius the egg white cooks. I believe at 61 Celsius Their goal was to protect the egg yolk So after Anthony was just kind enough to explain to us how he came about slow-poaching the egg He really then just melted my mind when he showed me the faux egg after the idea of this low Egg, they said we want to make an egg that you would eat everything Is this edible? No way That's amazing My mind just melted Anthony is the first person that I know of to literally recreate The shape feel an exact weight of an eggshell He's able to cast an eggshell and fill it with an egg cream, which is insane Just drop it That's how they present it they take it to the table and they drop it I'm so mad at him He's a thank you for being so generous no way he's the man and doesn't even let me call him chef It's the only Anthony's that's the beautiful thing about Anthony is he's created this egg now You can create and cast anything you could literally put a chicken in there and cook it you could fill it with a baby bird It's a perfect marriage of science of innovation, but also how you execute it and making it taste delicious So we're gonna make a slow-poached egg Anthony made the egg as well. He created it in 1999 Anthony studied the egg and the idea really was how do you? Understand the egg that the egg yolk and the egg white cook at two different temperatures And then when you cook it within the shell that it cooks in itself so it poaches in the shell The best way to get this to work is in a water circulator The beauty of it is the simplicity of it. You don't have to do anything other than cook it at the temperature So what I like to do is cook it at 60 Celsius So the egg yolk and the egg white are sort of not the same consistency, but I like my egg yolk more runny, and it takes about 30 minutes depending on the water volume One way you can cook this at home if you don't have a water circulator is in a large water bath What we've done is took one bowl put another bowl in Place it in here The only reason we have this getup is so eggs aren't sitting on the bottom It's really important that if you cook it this manner The eggs are separated from the bottom of the heat source and what's also important is then you keep it in that 60 63 Celsius Range what we have here are eggs that have been cooked for an hour at 60 Celsius After the eggs are cooked if you chill them down They hold their shape a lot better. I Like putting in soup, and I like having it at This viscosity of the 60 Celsius because it gives it at inexpensive luxury And now another word from Farran They almost a lot of feelings That's what I didn't get a lot of No, no, I don't want to create elaborations. Yeah, but it is a lot of things. I don't know much about us Yes, it's a change of paradigm Innovation and tradition share the stage in the culinary world of Spain a Humble dish like paella can be found alongside a deconstruction of the potato dish in Spain Innovation respects tradition and tradition does not fear innovation now we're going to make the very famous Spanish dish fideos and offend them You know, I actually do love fideos because it's not made with rice It's made with noodles and it has this really cool texture But instead of using noodles, we're gonna use instant ramen and that sounds so ridiculous, but it actually does make something delicious So Start off with some olive oil in a ripping hot pan some chorizo Chorizo is delicious There's some clean little neck clams We're adding the clams first because they take the longest to cook Some Bouchot mussels from Maine This one, you know, you could probably find in Sandra Lee's cookbook. Excuse me, mrs. Cuomo She's gonna kill me and some crushed ramen noodles We're gonna pour in hot chicken stock for this dish So once the shellfish has opened up, you're pretty much ready to plate well, why don't we just serve it like this, huh? There's some pimentón We're gonna top it with garlic aioli, which is basically mayonnaise lemon olive oil and pulverized garlic So an homage to paella via fideos via instant ramen Very New York We're here with Dan Burns We're gonna make probably one of the best Dishes ideas techniques I've ever seen and it's directly from Alberta the landmark Foam and it's not even a foam. It's a microwavable sponge cake that's done wrong a lot Everything you're supposed to do wrong made, right? Albert Aja is one of the greatest chefs alive. It was also the creative director for for on And I believe he's like the CIA. You're never gonna know how much Albert has influenced food so Albert showed us this insanely delicious dish This is our interpretation of a strawberry shortcake Nobody was using whipped cream canisters to make food as a technique. It was a brilliant way to make a sponge cake It's a brilliant way to make a lot of foams creams everything. This is yolks whites Flour we put almond nuts and some of the fat we chose olive oil. So basically we're just trying to mimic strawberry shortcake So it was super simple cup this size quite important and then with the Dixie cup cut three small slits in each side Just so that when it goes in the microwave, it has some place for steam to escape all the way around So you fill it about one-third of the way up and then just simply put it in the microwave and might I add The microwave is highly underrated as a cooking vessel It's pretty rad. You can see the air bubbles have formed. It's fully set So 25 seconds, you just made a cake and all we do is take the palette knife To lightly loosen it from the sides the beautiful thing about this is you can break it apart and It looks so irregular So we're just gonna dust it with some freeze-dried strawberry powder to enhance the idea of the strawberry shortcake Some macerated strawberries as well Just house the raw strawberries with sugar and then let it hang out in the air we wanted to do as many things with strawberries possible and then we just have So this is an espuma. It's whipped cream, but we've added We had a mint water, so it's highly flavored blanched mint combined with cream So it's flavored with cream, but this is what this canister was essentially made for whipped cream. Although very good for whippets Just whipped cream. Usually it's strawberry shortcake is garnished with mint but never eaten And I think that's wrong because mint with strawberries is a very delicious thing and then we just made some strawberry gastrique Finished with wood sorrel also for acidity And that's our take on strawberry shortcake You got something on your face What is it? Something green, dude A final word from Chef Adria It's always been the same If you want to do something new, you have to have creative talent This creative talent is going to be transformed to the maximum level in new elaborations Concepts, philosophical lines, and this is a bit what we've tried to do with the bulli and the cuisine of the current vanguard I mean, not just the bulli. It's true that the bulli, I think that today it can be said that it has influenced and is influenced by many chefs in this spirit, not just in the dishes, in this spirit The influence of Spain on Chang's cooking may not be apparent on the surface But it's there Juan Marie Arzak for me is the epitome of how you age gracefully I wish I could be as patient as he is. You get to eat like this anywhere. His wants and desires are all located in San Sebastian. Sometimes like when he finishes work at the restaurant, he comes by himself Just give me an omelette and he has an omelette. He is so loving. He's so gracious and he just loves life He's just happy Happy all the time and even when he's unhappy, it's usually unhappy because there's not enough food or not enough drink He's got it all So good I'm never going to be Hugh Hefner. I'm never going to be as rich as Bill Gates I can only be like Juan Marie