“Order, order, order, that’s how you create.”–Ferran Adria
If you have an interest in creativity, there are a number of reasons to recommend watching the film Cooking In Progress. The film tracks Ferran Adria and his crew from the famous El Bulli restaurant in a coastal town in north-east Spain. El Bulli is now closed–Adria has since turned his energy to opening a culinary and creativity center, as well as Bullipedia, a website database for mapping all the world’s culinary knowledge. When the restaurant was open, it operated for only six months of each year. For the other six months, Adria concentrated on culinary research at a kitchen lab in Barcelona. The key, as he puts it, is to “separate creativity from production.”
Much of the film takes place at the lab. We see Adria’s head chefs running experiment after experiment on different ingredients and different cooking techniques. Every once in a while Adria pops in and has a taste, frowns, makes suggestions for variations or alternate combinations, and his team’s R&D continues. As the El Bulli chefs experiment, they also meticulously document their findings by noting measured amounts, taking pictures, and rating the taste of their dishes. They’re like scientists running tests, then pouring over their results on giant note boards and laptop computers.
A few comments by Adria stood out for me. The first is his conviction that one needs to create time for oneself in order to have time to create. Sounds simple, but it’s really the most crucial first step of any endeavor. The whole point of closing El Bulli for six months of the year, after all, was to literally produce time. Another Adria comment is his notion of the importance of doing “creative audits” of one’s work to identify trends, habits, ruts, and evidence of what work has worked and what hasn’t. Creative auditing is necessary as a way to keep track of one’s progress and keep at bay–as much as possible–the overwhelming sense of all the possibilities not yet explored. As Adria puts it, “our problem is that there are a thousand combinations.” Finally, I was also struck by Adria’s constant awareness of the bottom line of all the culinary research in his lab: taste. In one scene, Adria describes the sensation in more poetic and adventurous terms. “At the moment” he says, “what matters is whether something is magical, and whether it opens a new path.” The chef/scientist/artist seeks through taste a sense of “surprise, emotion, and a new texture.”
There is something very musical about all this. Beyond the techniques, the equipment, beyond the ideas and flavor (or sound) combinations that may seem good in theory, there is the question of how the food (or the music) actually makes us feel in practice. Inevitably, the science always encounters the subjective I–me the taster (or me the listener). Near the end of the film, we see Adria tasting an oil, ice, and tangerine concoction. He looks up from his plate, glancing wide-eyed around the room. “This is it” he says simply.
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