Ritz-Carlton Magazine - Summer 2013 - (Page 106)

It’s no small thIng to show up on someone else’s Island and cook theIr grandmother’s specIalty. HOMARD HOMAGE Clockwise from left: Spiny lobsters ready for the pot; Chef Andrés; leaves of culantro, a local herb, essential to asopao. 106 w w w. r i t z c a r lt o n . c o m Andrés, who is as affable outside the kitchen as he is strenuously exacting inside, dropped out of high school in Spain to enroll in cooking school, which led to a place in Adrià’s hotbed of avantgarde cuisine. But America beckoned, specifically its capital, where Andrés opened a tapas restaurant in the ’90s that was to be a mere foundation for the small plates empire he was to build. His latest venture takes him in the most literal sense into Latin American territory. It’s perhaps the perfect melding of his Spanish roots and his adopted hemisphere. Not only the overall menu, but each dish at Mi Casa reflects this layer of traditions and interpretations: European twists on the islands’ own folk dishes and decadent products from abroad used to draw out the best of ingredients from local farms and waters. Consider the lobster: I find myself in this hectic kitchen, watching the chef goad a twitching spiny lobster awaiting its end in a heavy black pot. “Let’s go!” he yelps at the crustacean. “Vámonos!” The fate of this particular lobster, and his friends — pulled out of the sea just a few days ago by the hands of a local fisherman and now housed in a free-standing tank in the Mi Casa dining room — is to star in a bowl of asopao, the national dish of Puerto Rico. It’s no small thing to show up on someone else’s island and cook their grandmother’s specialty. I ask a Puerto Rican sous-chef, “Is it by the book? The one you ate as a boy?” I get a smile and a thumbs-up. “What else is he going to tell you?” says Andrés with a big belly laugh. To create this rich, briny “mother of all asopao,” Andrés ate the dish all over the island, gathered as many recipes as he could, and then added his own Spanish twist: a short-grain Valencia rice instead of the long-grain local variety. “Rice is a sponge for flavor,” Andrés says, “so we used a better sponge.” Here’s what it’s sponging up: a sofrito of olives, red peppers and caramelized onions, and a broth of wine, tomato and smashed lobster heads (“that’s where all the flavor is!” he exclaims, flipping a massive steaming iron skillet), scented with culantro, a local aromatic leafy herb, and annatto seeds, which give the dish its blood-orange color and a slightly smoky flavor, enhanced by dense chunks of pork. Then the rice is laden with exquisite lobster tails, and finished with what Andrés calls “the truffle of the Caribbean” — shaved hearts of palm. This is as close as the chef gets to a traditional interpretation. After all, not only did Andrés come of age in the kitchen-lab of elBulli, he now teaches culinary physics at Harvard, and spends his spare time in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences there, working to understand, for example, the chemistry of mayonnaise. His avantgarde cuisine has made him famous, but the tasting menu at Mi Casa is warmer, more satisfying, more accessible than what you might expect to find coming out of one of his famous kitchens — these dishes are prepared in chef’s whites rather than lab coats. Still, there’s always a clever reinterpretation, an adventure to be found on a plate. Or in the case http://WWW.RITZCARLTON.COM

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Ritz-Carlton Magazine - Summer 2013

Ritz-Carlton Magazine - Summer 2013
Contents
Contributors
Editor’s Letter
President’s Letter
Falling in Love With … New Orleans
Design
Technology
On the Boulevards
Shopping
Jewelry
Watches
Family
Local Knowledge
Sports
Cancun
Doha
Fashion
Culinary
Let Us Stay with You
Heritage

Ritz-Carlton Magazine - Summer 2013