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Javier Varela
Madrid
Lunes, 27 de enero 2025, 19:16
Jorge Vallejo's cuisine tastes of Mexico, but "Mexico is not one, it is many," he clarifies. Those who enjoy his cookbook at Quintonil** restaurant (Mexico City, Mexico) know well the regionality of his country's gastronomic culture and its life in communities. "Community is an essential element in our cuisine, and we have an enormous variety because each region has its own recipe, as we have almost all ecosystems, seas, gulfs, and a very diverse gastronomic heritage," confessed the Mexican chef at Madrid Fusion Alimentos de España.
To discover all those Mexicos, Vallejo presented three dishes that showcased different ideas and a map of all the ideas in his kitchen. "We all think about death, but we all know the role it plays in the lives of Mexicans," began the chef to introduce a tamale, a dish enjoyed throughout the year, "a common dish across the country that has become an essential element in altars and offerings for the Day of the Dead," he explained. Presented in different forms and with a huge variety of flavours, it generally consists of a filling wrapped with dough inside a corn husk and steamed. "Our proposal is with duck, which we bathe with a sauce and on top, we add a Creole sauce through peppers, tomatoes, cilantro, and a bit of chili, completed with a sweet corn cream and ash powder."
If tamales are typical in Mexico, what about tacos? "A dish that must be prepared at the table because from the kitchen to the table, it loses its charm and changes flavour," explained Jorge Vallejo, recounting how a customer complained about having to prepare the taco at the table. "The customer is not always right," he stated. With the tamale, he wanted to talk about the importance of death in Mexico and its cuisine, and with the taco, called the Festival of Entomophagy, "we want to transition from death to the grotesque and prejudices." "It's a gentle way to eat all the insects, exploring their possibilities and flavours through tacos," he explained. It is a set of insects and ant eggs and larvae in the centre of the table waiting to be prepared in one or several tacos, because "eating tacos is a memorable experience." The insects are not raw, but they retain their flavour and essence, and for this, he prepared escamoles (larvae of the güijera ant), with a sauce made of jumiles, another type of insect, nopal sauce, cucumber, chilies, chives, and tiger's milk. "To all this, we add mushrooms with fermented broth with macha sauce of dried chilies and a guajaqueña sauce made with grasshoppers. Finger-licking good," confessed the chef.
And Mexican cuisine cannot be understood without mole. "In Mexico, there are more than 50 types of moles, although the truth is that there are as many moles as there are families and cooks," he clarified. At Quintonil, they enjoy a sea mole, "the result of an evolution in me and my restaurant that excites me greatly." It consists of a pumpkin seed pipian, with mussels and a sauce with scallop reduced with butter until almost a compote. It is accompanied by artichoke to give it a different texture and a chili liqueur. Everything is placed on a corn starch toast. Pure flavour, pure Mexico.
"The most expensive food is the one that is wasted." Diego Guerrero is clear about this, having spent time studying and using different techniques to understand products in their entirety and comprehend their composition and functionality. The chef of DSTAgE** (Madrid, Spain) is capable of giving first, second, and third life to foods, developing his own flavour enhancers that he applies implicitly to dishes or even turning them into protagonists of the same.
All this product knowledge work is done at the Dspot Workshop, where a biologist, a chemist, and a cook "cook, talk about science, and study food to create 50 new elaborations," reveals Guerrero. On the walls of Dspot, "we explore, seek, and learn, pursuing sustainability by relying on techniques, technology, and tools, with creativity as an association of ideas from different sources of inspiration," he adds.
"I understood that the only thing that wouldn't fail me is the product, but not understood as a luxury, but as something that allows us to enjoy it completely," noted the chef of DSTAgE. "For this, knowledge is needed, and having science experts at home is complex. If you want to play this game, you have to take risks, not care about losing. We don't look at what we want to gain but what we have to do," and in Diego Guerrero's kitchen, they never stop. With this use of food waste, "we have created a bank of flavours and a pantry that we want to last over time. They are bases in our way of cooking." With this, they make the most of a scallop, a shrimp, the previous day's bread, or beef brisket, with which they not only make dishes but also generate flavour enhancers that have their own personality and presence in the dishes. "We have so much waste that we can stop to round off a recipe with any of them," he concludes.
The project of Iago Pazos, Chef at Abastos 2.0 (Santiago de Compostela), is essentially a neighbourhood project, where the key is to supply and where it is discovered that "market cuisine is made in the market." Abastos is a structure woven from multiple mini-businesses that come together to form a whole, a network that links the primary sector with the table, where the essential link and bond is the term K1L0M3TR4XE. A concept they use to express, directly and conceptually, the traceability of their dishes. Their menus always show the kilometres of distance between the origin of the food and the point of sale as a way to highlight and value the origin, the product, and the people behind everything they serve.
"We were born 15 years ago doing a clear type of cuisine where every day, depending on what was in the market, we made a menu," he noted. "We thought it was normal." Over the years, our way of looking has changed, and now we do it more consciously, responsibly, and critically because we continue doing the same but from a different perspective," he added. It features a table with 12 seats where almost 60 people pass through each day, offering "a simple cuisine with 2 or 3 ingredients per dish. A naked cuisine because that's how we understand our cooking," claimed the soul of Abastos 2.0. "Ferran Adrià said that you can't talk about product cuisine, but we want to explain to the customer where our products come from that are eaten on the plates," explained Pazos.
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