Guess Who Is Coming to Make Dinner, Joan Roca

Introduction to the Roca family (translated from Spanish by Harvard University, listed below in post)

As I try to master (or at least minor) the art of cooking (in small places), noted chefs, Joan Roca, and his brothers, Jordi (pastry chef) and Josep (wine expert, sommelier), from the restaurant, El Celler de Can Roca in Taialà, Spain (near Girona) are coming to Houston August 4-6, 2014 at the Rienzi (MFAH house museum for European decorative arts and paintings in River Oaks) to show 300 select individuals what magical foods that they can create (including new version of chili con carne or make ice cream with breathe with yeast).

Pictures from August 4 meal at the Rienzi from Houston Chronicle (14 courses) from Alison Cook

Second set of Pictures from Culture Map Houston, Eric Sandler
Opening dish of tapas is presented as a tree with a black lantern canopy that opens to reveal the gifts of a tiny taco, and more delicious bites.

Featuring Spanish wines: Vega Sicilia, Gramona, Grans Muralles and Mas La Plana from Bodegas Torres

They are also bringing their restaurant and 20 workers to Dallas for 2 days as well.  Then continue to Central and South America. 

Two students from Art Institute of Houston, International Cooking program, and two students from Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Art in Dallas will be selected to go to Spain and apprentice under the Roca brothers in their restaurant.

Thanks to the BBVA Compass Bank.

Roca & Roll World Tour

Houston restaurants and chefs have already opened their doors wide open to the Roca brothers.  Recently Hugo Ortega hosted a party for Joan (phoenetically 'Jzoh an') Roca at his newest restaurant, Caracol, and many of the best chefs in town showed.

Click his name to read more about Chef Joan Roca in this biography or read the translated text from the video below.  To watch his cooking styles, I have linked all of the cooking videos from the course that I took by Harvard University in 2013-2014 through edx.org, and all of the lectures that the Roca brothers had given to the Science and Cooking lecture series at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences since 2010.

Hello, I'm Joan Roca from El Celler de Can Roca.

It's a family restaurant. It has its origins in my parents' restaurant. All of this started when we were very young. My brother, Josep, and I were the ones that began this whole story in the year 1986 with more guts and heart than brains. We opened a gastronomic restaurant. We were 20 and 22 years old. We opened it right next to our parents's restaurant, under their wing. And though we had that uncertainty of not knowing what would happen we still had a vision and a will to work. And that non-conformist spirit, that in some way led us to make this decision, is still with us today.

Twenty-seven years have gone by and the road has been very, very interesting. We have learned. We have grown. And we've had fun down that road. It may seem unrelated but it's true and it becomes ever more evident every day that for a restaurant like this, our goal is to make people happy, o make sure that they have a pleasant time, that they dine well, and that they live a gastronomic experience. Because of the people that have come to the Celler de Can Roca came with a will to undergo that gastronomic experience, we have increasingly had more freedom.

Creative liberty. The freedom to do what we loved to do. It's not easy to talk about creativity. It's not easy in terms of cookery or even in other disciplines. I believe that creativity is a way of living life. It's a way of being curious, of being non-conformist. Maybe the luck we've had in the Celler de Can Roca was that as three brothers we understand each other well while working together. More importantly, the three of us are dedicated to creativity. Maybe that's the most interesting of all. Forming that creative triangle gives us a polyhedric way of viewing creativity. If Jordi represents the more nonchalant aspect, even shameless in his ways to propose ideas and to think about creativity then Josep, from the world of wine, supports us with his knowledge of aromatic aspects as well as bringing a certain poetic sensibility to understand and view creativity.

I intend to contribute the possibility of making reality those aspirations all three of us share and at the same time bring my culinary knowledge and technique and the resources that somehow we have accumulated to know the academic world and the culinary world. Together we try to overcome our obstacles. Often there isn't any or we don't have any specific time or even designated location to talk about creativity. We live at the restaurant. We spend a lot of time together. We travel together. And from each of our points of view, every once in a while we run into each other. We talk about new dishes or new ideas and those ideas end up on a chalk board in the kitchen. We have a creative team with two chefs who have been relieved of service to the restaurant that the work on developing these ideas that between the three of us we launch in the form of dishes, in the form of utensils, and in the form of service methods or cooking techniques. These are ideas that are either concepts or take the shape of a technique or the shape of a physical plate. The most important thing isn't to reach a specific objective or to accumulate Michelin stars, or even to be listed as a top gastronomic restaurant. It's to be happy doing what we do. That's why we're lucky. If you have the kind of luck that allows you to do what you enjoy then that's when you really have that freedom that reaches the point where people come to your home to enjoy the experience with their hearts open and their minds open.

That's when you have the freedom granted by security and the possibility to employ all your creativity to do whatever occurs to you. It's a marvelous moment for a restaurant or for a chef or for a pastry chef, like Jordi, or a sommelier when between the three of us we can create this fantastic world that we have been slowly building up. Probably the most important has been to remain in contact with the world of science and to find the answers to the questions we encountered as we went down this road. We were in search of explanations for the phenomena that we experienced in the kitchen and the answers and solutions we found gave us more clues on how to expand or to find new ways of doing something and to amplify the degree of complexity in that the same elaboration. But we haven't just stayed here. We've maintained this dialog not only with science but with other disciplines.

In any case, it is very important for us to be able to participate in this course. To participate in this course taught by Harvard University is an honor. It's exciting and for us it represents the merit of our work and what it means to be connected with the wonderful world of science that every day expands the knowledge behind our work.

In 2010, Joan Roca showed me (and Harvard University students) the science behind sous-vide cooking which is cooking food in water for an extended period at the same temperature in a vacuum sealed bag.

 

In 2011, Joan Roca, redefined the lecture at Harvard as Precision cooking: enabling new textures and flavors.

 

In 2012, Joan and Jodi Roca do another Sous-Vide cooking lecture for Harvard

In 2013-2014, I took and successfully completed the EdX course SPU27x taught by Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Lemon Dessert with a Rotovap (Spoken in spanish, translated by Harvard U in SPU27x).

The rotovap allows us to distill at low temperatures. The low temperature is produced because we modify the atmospheric pressure. We remove air and create a vacuum. And in this way we can promote evaporation at a very low temperature.  Evaporation occurs at 50 degrees. Then we pull the volatile aromas. We produce a condensation and then the precipitation of the liquid that lets us have this result and distilled water with all the aromas.

Let's use a new dimension of this product. In this case, the lemon peel. We can't get that aroma in any other way. That subtle flavor we can't get from infusions or reductions. These are different from what we get with the distillation. We get what we call the soul of the product. It's the part that is evaporated in a reduction.  So we capture it and we use it. Now we're going to look at a dessert that -- usually Jordi tells the story but he's not here today so that's why I'm telling you the story -- It's a dessert we call "nube de limon" (lemon cloud). We try to play with flavors and aromas from childhood. We reproduce citric flavors as well as cakes wetted with milk. Toasted cakes and citric aromas. From the citric aromas we'll show you how we use different textures of the lemon.

We have a compote, a limon escarchado (glazed lemon), a cold bergamot cream. We use different tones, degrees of citrusy flavors. We have a lemon cream. But the most interesting part of this dessert is that we use the distillate of the lemon peel. This way we can have a volatile aroma. When we distill it we call it the "alma" (soul). In this case of the lemon or whatever we submit to the distillation. What we do is capture the aromas of the lemon peel. It's very delicate and we need to give it a texture very quickly so that it doesn't lose its volatile aromas.

The fastest way to convert the distillate into a "granizado" or granita to incorporate it into a dessert is using liquid nitrogen. We use the nitrogen in this case to give texture quickly to a very delicate liquid that would otherwise lose its volatiles if we tried another method of adding texture.  This is the distillate and we will convert it into a sorbet so that we can incorporate it to the other citrusy aspects of the dessert. Once we have finished the dessert and we present it to our guests we place a perfume in front of them, made by a perfume maker, based on this dessert. We've called it nubo de limona, or lemon cloud, which is the name of the dessert. Then we serve it so the client can perceive that idea of toying with the flavor and aroma together.

The idea for this dessert comes from the interdisciplinary dialogue that we maintain during the creative process. This idea came to us when we were talking with a perfume maker. We had previously used the distillation technique for other objectives-to capture the aromas of the earth, truffles, mushrooms, and other products but in this case it's nice to have this "granizado" of the lemon peel distillate. It's a nonalcoholic distillate that drags the volatiles that gives us many different textures. We have the essence and thick consistency of a lemon cream to a very soft bergamot ice cream to this very subtle aroma that is brought to us by the lemon peel distillate. This is how we top off the dessert and how we present the dessert intending for the client to establish the relationship between the flavor and the aroma of a perfume that a perfume maker has designed explicitly for us.

Jordi Roca showed me how to infuse water with the smell and taste of eucalyptus and lemon using a rotovap. Watch below.

Supercooling using a rotovap (rotary evaporatory, small distiller) (in spanish, translation below by Harvard U from online course SPU27x)

 

Hello, I'm Jordi Roca from the Celler de Can Roca and I'm going to tell you about our dessert "Cromatismo Verde" (Green Chromatism).

It's a dessert we make based on eucalyptus leaves that we gather from a nearby forest and what we do is that we place them in this flask in order to distill them.  We pluck them from the branches and fill the flask with water such that the proportions are 20% of leaves with respect to the water. We attach the flask to the rotovap and we begin to distill under vacuum -- one millibar of pressure -- and at low temperature.

In the meantime we crush these candies, as you can see, to make a semi-powder with those candies. And we'll use them as part of our dessert. Using a kind of frosting, made from egg whites and sugar, we make a snowflake and we add some of the balsamic candy powder on top. We want a snowflake, icy, very fresh, that will add a fun twist to our dessert. We let these dry and set them aside for a few hours until they become crunchy.

While we have these leaves here being distilled, what will happen is the water will evaporate and then condense when it comes into contact with the cold coils allowing it to drip into a flask to get our eucalyptus water. We pour the water into these small plastic bottles and we store them in a freezer that has a stable temperature of -5 C.

We cut a melon into small slices as a dressing for this dessert that will also have many different green elements: Leaves, stems, fruits. Then we begin to plate the dessert with a cream made of Chartreuse, which is a liqueur made of green herbs.  It's a very balsamic scene. We add little pickles sliced in half with some dill leaves, some fennel leaves, some glasswort stems, it's a marine herb that brings a very interesting taste, some arugula leaves, all sorts of green elements. We also add an acidic lime confiture, lemon peel shavings, which are very aromatic, a few leaves of a special green -- a type of local herb.

We take this snowflake that is already dry and we place it on this side of the plate.  And just when we're about to serve it we add some leaves that have been crystallized with sugar. Right before it leaves the kitchen we plate the frozen melon and when it is brought to the table the waiter serves this little bottle at the table before the client and then this happens ... When this water that has been stable at -5C touches a frozen surface we observe this phenomenon.

Making Sous Vide Eggs
(in spanish, translated by Harvard U in SPU27x)

We're going to see an asparagus and egg dish. And we'll see through this plate two different techniques of cooking. We cook the asparagus under a vacuum looking to protect the product from the water in which we cook it in and to preserve the flavor. In this case, we cooked the ends of the asparagus at 85 degrees C for 35 minutes. We have interesting texture and interesting flavor since we have not lost its flavor or its juice. It has not been dissolved in the cooking water. This is on one side. With the other end of the asparagus, we blended it, we triturated it, and we made an ice cream. An asparagus ice cream. Ok, asparagus on one side, the ends with the stalk, and the asparagus.

And now we're going to see another part of the dish. That is the egg. What interests us is to see at which temperature we have stopped cooking the egg, and especially at what time to apply the concoction, especially since we are only using the yolk in this case. We've cooked the three eggs at 63 degrees. What we are going to see is how time influences the degree of cooking. This one has only been cooked for 15 minutes. We have a fluid texture of the yolk. This is the one we're going to use. I am not going to cut it yet because I need the yolk. But this one has been cooking for 45 minutes. Notice that it is much more dense. This intermediate one is the one we're going to use now. We're going to separate the whites since we don't need it. Only the yolk. Notice the sauce-like texture. It's like the sauce of egg yolk. It's what we want to use now, eh? We wanted an egg yolk sauce. We're going to add some olive oil-only a little bit, a little bit of salt. And now we're going to put together the dish. We have the texture of the egg yolk. It's like truffle juice that we have texturized with champagne.

First, we'll pour a little of this juice over the base of the plate. Then we'll dribble some of the egg yolk. Then we're going to construct the plate. We're going to sprinkle some summer truffle, Tuber aestivum. We are at the gates of summer.  These are summer truffles that have come early in our spring but are very, very tasty.

This asparagus ice cream is really important in that the formula is well stabilized so that it has a very good texture. And we like to place the asparagus hot, straight out of the water bath, to create a contrast between hot and cold, egg yolk, and truffle flavor. We'll give it a bit of acidity with a few leaves of oxalis. And then a bit of strength with a little bit of freshly ground white pepper.

Making Sous Vide Anemone (in spanish, translated by Harvard U in SPU27x)

We are going to explain how to prepare a dish, called anemone - sea anemone.  We are trying to reproduce an idea with a strong taste of the sea.  The anemone is a product that we love, that is highly used in our kitchen but it is usually fried, so we are going to give it a twist.

We are going to convert it into a juice, a sauce, and then later we are going to reproduce the shape of an anemone with razor-shells. Razor-shells must be cooked sous-vide at low temperature to achieve texture, and above else, flavor. And at the same time, to avoid lost of weight in the cooking process of the product.

We have cooked it sous-vide at 65 degrees for 5 minutes and during this time, we achieved to cook it and to have it very wholesome, as I mentioned, to have it in its own juices, its own shell will protect it and the plastic bag will contain the juices.  Everything gets retained and stays inside.

Now we open the razor-shells.  We open the razor-shells.  They remain much more wholesome than if we cooked them on a sauce-pan or if we cooked them in a boiling pan, as they are usually cooked.  They are more tender and soft, and so their texture is much more interesting now.

Now, what we are going to do is cut them in long strips that will give them the shape of an anemone. Just a reminder that we are trying to reproduce the idea of an anemone, not only the flavor, but also the aesthetics of an anemone. That's why we have to revert to the design to build a dish with the shape of an anemone.  We are going to warm it up, because we want to serve it warm, right away.  And we will build the interior of the dish with a juice made with anemones which we have fried in a pan and then crushed them with extra virgin olive oil to create a sauce. It's a very simple process. They integrate well in the oil. It becomes a stable emulsion very easily.  More importantly, the anemone gives us a a strong sea flavor.

We are going to build the dish with the sauce from the anemone in the center of the dish. This is the anemone sauce.  We already have the razor-shell.  These stripes from the razor-shell are going to be placed on top of this metallic structure to reproduce a living anemone.  When an anemone comes to our kitchen, it's all bulky, it doesn't look very nice.  However, when it's in the sea, it is spectacular, how it opens, even how it plays with the waves.  This container reproduces the movement of the anemone in the sea, so that's why we are placing the razorshells on top of the structure to achieve this look.

We are going to play with the sea landscape, that's why we are going to put different types of seaweed into the dish, even glasswort, to give it textures and to give it nuances of salt flavors, flavors related to the sea, and with different intensities of salt.  Raw glasswort will give us a crunchy vegetable texture, and with different types of seaweed, we are even going to include plankton, to reinforce the flavor.  And it will give it a playful green color.

We have added a little bit of spicy oil, made with cayenne, to give a kick of strength, and a little bit of shredded lime.  A lime.  A lime in the dressing. 

Well, this is an idea of a dish with seafood, razor-shells that try to imitate an anemone, a product used very much in Spanish cuisine, especially in the South, in Andalusia, where they commonly eat them as "ortiguillas" fried in the form of fishballs with a heavy taste of the sea in the mouth. We have produced this idea and we have brought it to the Mediterranean, to our Catalan Mediterranean.  We have prepared a new dish, with the sous-vide technique to prepare razor-shells with a very interesting texture, and the shape of filaments, with the taste of the anemone, and in this case, with the multidisciplinary expertise, with an industrial designer,and with the artistic touch to reproduce a razor-shell to give to this idea more strength, more content, and more visibility.

Making Sous Vide Fish (in spanish)

Today we are going show you how to cook a sole. We use the direct sous-vide technique a lot, which means that during the service, and with short cooking times, 4 to 5 minutes, we cook the fish at 55 degrees.  This is the "mise en place." When someone asks us, or when we know that somebody has ordered sole, we put it in the sous-vide vacuum practically the moment before cooking it, after having soaked it in brine or water with salt. We use a solution of 10% salt for 4 minutes. Then we put it sous-vide and we cook it. Let's see the result.

This sole has been cooking for 5 minutes at 55 degrees. We have put together the two fillets of sole, so that it will be thicker. The thickness is going to make the interior much more juicy. In fact, both fillets will remain glued because of the proteins that form while cooking, and it will result in a single piece, which is much thicker. However, the appearance of this sole when cooked with sous-vide is not very appealing to us, especially because here are are used to always eating the sole fried in the pan or cooked in the oven. What we are going to do is use the sole fried in the pan or cooked in the oven. What we are going to do is use the sole which has already been cooked in a sealed environment. So we are going to lightly braise the exterior of this sole, to give it a much more appealing look with the marked burns, and an oak scent. But also it will provide us a very interesting smell and taste-an interesting, grilled aroma. If we would have braised it directly from the beginning, which is obviously a possibility and it's often done, the result would have been much drier, because the temperature it much higher, and it would dehydrate it, especially the exterior part. This way it will give us many opportunities to make it much juicier. It will be braised just the necessary time to give us color and aroma, and this cooking time is very short, which will help us preserve the internal juice of the product. The appearance has changed, but the cooking point is the one that we wanted, very delicious and juicy.

We are going to embellish the dish now. Another thing that we have done is to not get rid of the skin. We have kept it and we have dried it. This is a technique of "mise en place"-a way to rapidly and efficiently present the sauces in a manner that we like. We are going to put stripes of parsley juice, a puree of smashed fermented garlic and shredded lemon. Lemon, garlic, and parsley are three elements used widely in a traditional fish dressing in Catalonia. We have taken this idea and we have added a twist, by using a black fermented garlic, made with a technique from Japan, that allows us to have black garlic. A puree of black garlic, a puree of parsley water, and a puree of lemon. These are the basics for this sauce. To make it more manageable, we have frozen it, and we are going to heat it up so that it is going to be ready to use.

We already have this on a dish and we add a juice that we have made with sole bones. We have made a "fumet" at low temperature, 60 degrees, with a very neat sole flavor. And then we have added to it an emulsion made with a little bit of white garlic. We wanted the white garlic to be present. The black garlic is present in the form of stripes, but this is the classic garlic that we use in our traditional cuisine, and it is present in a very subtle way.

As we said, we are going to put the sole's skin on top. We have dried it and given it the shape of a crunchy biscuit. We are going to add lemon skin. We are going to decorate with flowers - garlic flowers, that will provide sharp nuances, flavors that are related in this line of sauces that we have used to construct the dish.

Making Sous Vide Lamb (in spanish)

Well, now we're going to see how we prepare a plate of lamb with artichokes but with a "juego de matices" inspired by a trip to India.

We cook the lamb under vacuum at 63 degrees. In this case for 24 hours. After this cooking process, we can cool it to have a pasteurization and that way we can bring it out whenever we need it. It's an advantage of the sous vide technique. When we need the lamb cooked, we return it to the same temperature as that in which it was cooked. Which is 63 degrees. In approximately 30 minutes, we recover the temperature. Then we remove the bones and sear it on a chromium pan. The skin is now crunchy, as you can see, and most interesting is that the flesh is very juicy and contrasts with the crisp exterior we get from searing it at 170 degrees on a chromium pan. It gives us the good "crunchy cookie."

As I was telling you, this dish is composed of a set of juices and sauces of cardamom, curry, and green peppers. It's constructed as if it were a mandala on top of a rock. And the artichoke, we have cooked the artichoke in a vacuum to avoid oxidation. And we made this puree.

This is the base of this flower that Joey is making from the interior of the artichoke, these that we are using here, that have an interesting texture and agreeable taste. We uses them raw, constructing the flower on top of the artichoke puree. We cook them under vacuum at 85 degrees for 45 minutes. It depends on the type of artichoke. It could be even less for a different type of artichoke. But the temperature is always 85.

As I was telling you, we are constructing this dish from lamb, yogurt and juices, sauces, and emulsions using flavors associated with Indian spices. Also with greens and flowers that we have here in the spring in Girona. We are dicing the lamb to integrate into our dish. It is most important to have a crispy texture and a lot of tenderness in the meat. This is another use of sous vide for the cooking of artichoke and lamb.