souslaterre

“If you need anything, please tell me.” So said the email from Ferran Adria to Grant Achatz. What the kitchen staff of Next needed a week ago was the recipe for elBulli’s famed gorgonzola sphere. They didn’t get it.

“They were setting up the exhibit in Barcelona and they were, I’m sure, incredibly busy so they kind of went off the grid,” chef Achatz says. “We had four recipes that we needed from them because they weren’t in any of the books. But [the elBulli guys] kind of disappeared. So Dave was like ‘I need these recipes, I really need these recipes’ and I’m like ‘I emailed them twice, I don’t know what to tell ya’ and his response was like ‘fuck it, I’ll just figure it out.’ Literally he goes ‘how hard can it be?’”

And did it work?

“Well,” Achatz replies. “It was good. It was pretty much the same thing.”

“I mean, it was 50 grams off,” Dave Beran says. “I used ice cream stabilizer instead of xantham gum, but otherwise…”

“Otherwise it was pretty much the same thing,” Achatz says.

“But then they came through with the recipe and now we’re going with theirs. But you gotta learn how to do it or else how do you know?”