Vegetable Haute Cuisine With A Michelin Star

Rodrigo de la Calle is celebrating his anniversary. Since in 2009 he began to cultivate his own garden and to bet on “gastrobotany” as a personal project, during the boom of Ferran Adrià’s “molecular cuisine”, ten years have passed in which he has consolidated his leadership in “cuisine highly vegetal “. 2019 is the finishing touch for a sum and it goes on, since, as he said in his presentation “Vegan Haute Cuisine” at Madrid Fusión 2019, he continues to develop new products at his restaurant El Invernadero (Madrid).

Algarium: fermented seaweed sauce

Among his most recent finds are the dried dressings and the algarium, which originates from the garum . This was “the first umami in history,” explained the cook. Used in Ancient Rome, it was used with the same assiduity as soy sauce, but it was prepared from fermented fish viscera that Rodrigo has replaced with seaweed. With two different ferments, “it is our personal flavoring to give identity to our vegetable world”.

“We have always cooked vegetables badly and for this reason they generate a certain rejection for some. We are getting new flavors through certain techniques ”, explained Rodrigo, the first Spanish chef to get a Michelin star in 2011 by cooking essentially vegetables.

In 2012 it moves away from animal protein

An icon of Rodrigo de la Calle’s kitchen is his beet tartare, the first vegan dish (without animal protein) that continues to be on his menu with the specific interpretations that he adds. Using algae as flavorings, lichens, and citrus fruits less known then as the “Buddha’s hand lemon”, whose aromatic and thick skin is ideal for salads and jams, were steps that in 2012 led him to consolidate his decision to “never go back to make any tasting menu with animal protein ”, explained the cook.

However, the cook clarifies that they are not yet fully veganized. At the time they opted for the “green kitchen” label because they were neither vegan, vegetarian nor macrobiotic, but it was the option that made them happy when cooking. And they maintain the possibility that diners finish their dishes with meat or fish in the menus called “#red” and “#blue”.

Cooking preserving nutrients

They recognize that he is still “hooked” on butter and milk, but he has managed to make all his demi-glace sauces, reduced between 24 and 30 hours, to be exquisite while preserving all the nutrients of the vegetables, which he adds without toasting or burning them so as not to deplete its nutrients.

An example is the demi-glace of carrots, onions and chickpeas, which can later be enriched with leeks boiled in water and with seaweed to make a cream.

In 2013 he began to work with hot fermentations, such as black garlic, which became the common thread of his dishes. But he continued to expand techniques when a year later he traveled to China and the traditionally known fermentations began to incorporate vinegar, other textures, more spices and more depth of flavor.

Healthy fermented drinks instead of wine

With all this, and the knowledge after the experience of having been a gastronomic advisor to the more than 20 establishments of the prestigious French chef Joël Robuchon (the chef with the most Michelin stars in the world), 2015 arrived and opened El Invernadero on Ponzano street in Madrid. A year later it got a Michelin star.

Among other things, El Invernadero was born to “make healthy haute cuisine, where the world of wine does not fit. That is why we make our own line of water kefir, tepache, mead or kombucha. And with fermentation mushrooms we make our own vegetable drinks and of fruits like the first vegetable sake of beet with waste leaves “, Rodrigo specified in code” waste 0 “, a thesis that many cooks now pursue.