CityFood Magazine - THE READ - Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli

What we learned from reading:

Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented Food.
by Colman Andrews
Gotham Books, 2010.

World famous Catalan Chef Ferran Adrià can't stand bell peppers.

His favourite "guilty pleasure" is the Bollycao, a chocolate-filled Spanish relative of the Hostess Twinkie.

He was making bacon ice cream back in the early '90s. (Although Chef Heston Blumenthal is probably better known for his nitro-scrambled bacon and egg ice cream.)

His El Bulli team once catered a wedding banquet at which all the food was suspended from trees.

He hates the term "Molecular Gastronomy" and doesn't think it has anything to do with his style of cooking.

Raw wild rice deep-fried in olive oil makes a good snack.

The most acute appreciation of what Ferran is all about appears in Up Till Now, the autobiography of William "Captain Kirk" Shatner.

You should serve fresh orange juice foamed up through a soda siphon.

He believes the actual "Best Restaurant in the World" to be Mibu, an ichigensan okotowari (invitation only) restaurant in Tokyo owned by chef and Buddhist monk Hiroyoshi Ishida.

Ishida's dinner, as a guest chef at El Bulli, has been immortalized in a Japanese manga comic book.

You can make a potato omelette in 7 minutes with crushed potato chips.

His food inspired a young French composer to write a 29-minute orchestral symphony based on each dish in one of El Bulli's 35-course meals. On one occasion, the El Bulli menu also inspired one food-loving, self-employed courier from Geneva into a nervous breakdown.

At home, he likes to eat his own meals scalding hot.

In partnership with Caprabo, a Spanish supermarket chain, he once published a book giving home cooking advise to housewives. One of the tips: "Avoid things that take too long to cook."

When he was a boy he wanted to be a professional soccer player or a mathematician, never a cook. His path towards becoming a chef only began after he was assigned kitchen duties in the army.

In 1980s, nearly a week would pass without a single diner walking into El Bulli. A friend asked Adrià why he continued on in such a remote location and he replied: "Because I have an idea, and it's a good idea."

Jörg Zipprick, author of the book "How Molecular Cuisine Serves us Wallpaper Paste and Fire-Extinguisher Powder", soundly criticized Adrià for "poisoning his guests" by using Dihydrogen Monoxide, a colorless, odorless, tasteless chemical, in order to achieve certain effects in his cooking. Dihydrogen Monoxide is, of course, H2O - water.

In an argument with rival Spanish chef, Santi Santamaria, he allegedly shouted "Shut up! I'm a genius and you're a cook!!"

Of the dozens of young stagiares who went through his El Bulli kitchen each year, he says it was the women who were best able to handle the pressure - better than most of the men.

His legal name is Fernando Adrià Acosta.

Whatever else he may do in life, Chef Ferran is always going to be known as "that guy with the foams".