A Song of Fire
Exploring fire-powered gastronomy
This is a very long article. But mainly because it contains pictures.
A lot of them.
Best consumed near a fireplace, for an immersive experience.
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Cooking with fire, charcoal, coal, and ashes has been the leitmotiv of fashionable and allegedly innovative cuisine—at least for gastro-journalists and food enthusiasts who discovered this prehistoric technique in the refinement of Michelin and Repsol environments.
On the other hand, I am bored out of my mind by these events and restaurants where the only thing you bring home is the need to shower and yeet any piece of clothing into the washing. All Iberia is ablaze for some firewood festival (Chefs on Fire or something like this), which looks just the sufficient amount of thrill for pale, office-dwelling “foodies” in search of “raw emotions” and “meaningful connections”.
It will never cease to amuse me that a wheels company and a petrol one are leading gastronomic importance in the Iberian peninsula, where these firewood cooking techniques are sublimated into haute cuisine with the ascension to stardom of the Josper grill producers.
If you do not own a wood oven, fire stove, or a Josper, you are nobody in gastronomy. And more: if you do not have a worship route through these places, oscillating between being “templos del producto” and “fire temples” according to the occasion, you are also nobody.
Transforming food through cooking, and hence fire, was the highlight of the first culinary revolution that making experienced. In a way, through cooking and preparing food, humans became humans.
Collectively, we transformed possibly edible elements into nutritious compositions, and by applying various degrees of warmth (through physics, like with fire, or chemistry, like with acids), we created gastronomies.
Without fire, we can assume we would still be munching seeds and eating crickets.
But with fire, our possibilities expanded greatly.
Despite the raw food apologists, the warmth adds complexity to food. Even just the warmth of lukewarm rice, at body temperature, heats raw fish to exalt its complexities.
Even when it is just some lemon juice or leche de tigre that “heats” a chevice, transforming what is raw into something delicious.
There would not be any paella without fire, and rice, one of the most essential foods consumed worldwide, would not be consumed at all.
I cannot imagine a world without paella, and I realized how much I love the crispy crust that we have to scrape from the bottom of the pan while I secretly took this forbidden picture above, one sunny cold lunch at Casa Carmela in Valencia.
Applying fire to food is a culinary experiment of transformation, a mixture of chemistry, physics and wonder.
At Estimar in Madrid, I tried once the same seafood prepared in three versions: raw and lightly marinated, steamed, and Josper-grilled. The meal's highlight was exploring the same but different ways of applying verticality horizontally. Not every dinner is such a privileged occasion to expand the understanding of one single (and premium, in this case) ingredient.
We are much more used to doing so in wine. In food, we are not offered the same possibilities of comparing, studying, and analysing the expressions of a single ingredient.
This is why I still believe that the epitome of hedonism is still food, not wine.
When we cook with fire, we recall an ancestral, purer, more straightforward way of life—and it does not matter if these memories are fabricated ad hoc: the storytelling of every fire-powered restaurant is always the same.
Cleverly, at Kaleja in Málaga, Spain, they can leverage these fabricated memories. I wrote about this restaurant earlier this summer.
Transforming food has been culturally done forever, not because it was fashionable, as NOMA-goers insist (NOMA-cooks are wiser than this, but they peddle the narrative to get a cash flow). Transforming was the only possibility of rescuing food from its perishable state of constant and progressive decay.
It was a manner of survival.
Similarly, at Trattoria La Madia in Brione, they are transforming food (not only through fire), in a strenuous attempt to save and rescue the concept of Trattoria, of which I wrote about earlier.
The Basque are known for their unintelligible language and their mastering of fire arts. At Arrea!, a restaurant in Kanpezu, fire is the leitmotif of a menu that the guests are asked to put together following a hunting trail of beasts and vegetables.
Hearts, intestines and entrails combine into a cohesive unit of gluttonous pleasure with a pinch of wilderness and “adventure”.
In a mirror, on the opposite side of the Iberian Peninsula, another Ephesus, another fire god, works with flames and product, bending the latter through fire.
Unusual ingredients, locally sourced and personally foraged, combine in a menu to be tasted al fresco under the most photogenic bougainvillaea in Europe at Tohqa in El Puerto de Santa María.
Some kilometres away, in the ugliest clusterfuck of overtourism, concrete and all-inclusive vacays for drinking Brits (hi, Fuengirola), there’s one of the so-called Spanish temples of product, Los Marinos José.
Here, a subtle touch of fire caresses the freshest seafood in a dance, even if the best one I’ve ever had was raw and sprinkled with lemon zest and extra virgin olive oil.
In Portugal, there are a plethora of chefs trying hard to fire up—literally—their fire literacy. There’s even a namesake festival, a favourite of the foodie crowd (you are allowed to cringe).
Cleverly, Chef João Rodrigues picked up the Portuguese lust for everything Spanish, especially grilled, and created a restaurant that is a copy of whatever is fashionable and cool in Madrid, placing it in Lisbon.
Locals and tourists flock to it, redesigning their understanding of “typical Portuguese food” in a restaurant, Canalha, that provided a very “Iberian” experience skewed towards Spain and affluent customers (they just opened another outlet in Comporta, the poshest Portuguese beach zone, within a luxury compound).
It is not affordable or desirable for the everyday Portuguese but aspirational and elusive for the affluent gastronomic crowds.
Instead, at Nublo in Haro, La Rioja, you can peek into a kitchen entirely powered by wood. Still, the fuel is burned in different manners through different cooking appliances for different results: there is the wood stove, of course, a Josper, but also a closed pizza oven, and the Chef and his staff blend different techniques for different ingredients.
The result is quite interesting, and although we, as customers, can only have an idea of the process through our tastebuds, I believe that in the kitchen, they are having way more fun than those gas—or induction-powered colleagues who have to work in more “sterile” environments.
The slow cooking movement is often complemented by a more general slow concept.
Slow living (reduced working hours and short weeks) and slow food. Not necessarily trademarked as such, the incessant research for better products (in terms of sustainability and flavour) some cuisines bring to the table food that is also produced in a slow manner, such as at Euskalduna Studio in Oporto, Portugal. This basque name hides a Japanese bar and Portuguese cuisine, mainly focused on proteins but with a strong hand in vegetables and sides.
I only visited Euskalduna once, on a festive occasion, their anniversary. Still, it was sufficient to understand the kitchen brigade's close-knit sense of community, striving for improvement, and work ethic.
All of it being excellent seasonings for my meal.
You can find solace and fire even in the poster child for overtourism (Barcelona).
The imposing kitchens of Gresca care for selected products and seasonal delicacies in a very Iberian way paired with excellent wines and a beautiful, forgiving setting.
At Casa Leali, a small family fine dining restaurant on the shores of the Garda Lake in Italy, Chef Andrea Leali opens his every menu with his signature “just grilled” oyster, presenting the oyster in a series of infusions and preparations that highlight olive oils and lemons, the most famous postcards for this beautiful alpine lake that dreams of the Mediterranean.
And, of course, we cannot glaze over the Smoked Room Project.
I won’t call it a restaurant; it’s a perfectly executed business project that manages to illude customers of wholesomeness through the use of a perfectly theatrical setting and the imbibing of customers with expensive wines and a lot of fats and smoke—typical Spanish.
And perhaps, now, a bit…trite?
But you can’t see anything beyond a perfect money and stars machine when Maya's veil is lifted.
Restaurants featured in this article through words and pictures (in order of visual appearance):
How interesting!! I never thought of cooking with fire as the thing that made us human, cool thought
I've had ordógs, that is, crab legs, literally thrown on a peat fire to cook, served up with brown soda bread and lashings of butter. And tea. For a magnificent, very unexpected breakfast in the west of Ireland.
The crab had just been brought in from the boats we could see from the window by the man of the house. It literally went directly on the fire as we watched, in the regular fireplace of the house.
This was in a half café half shop with no pretensions to anything special. They were simply using what was available on the doorstep. It was a few miles from where I first saw a bastable three legged iron pot many years before.
It's a feast I think you would have really enjoyed 😊