Support for the show comes from Hostinger.
Ever had an idea for a business or side hustle but never actually launched it?
With Hostinger, you can turn that idea into something real in minutes instead of weeks.
Hostinger is an all-in-one platform that brings everything into one place.
Your domain, website, email marketing, AI tools, and AI agents.
You can create websites, online stores, and custom apps with simple prompts.
Then use AI agents to automate tedious tasks and grow your business.
Go to Hostinger.com slash Vox to bring your idea online for under $3 a month.
Plus get an extra 20% off with promo code Vox.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
José Andrés has got to have one of the most fascinating food careers I've ever come across.
He's not only one of the most famous chefs in the world, but probably the only chef to ever be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
He's the founder of World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit foraged ad hoc in the wake of the horrific earthquakes in Haiti in 2010, which harnessed the power network and the spirit of chefs and cooks to feed people.
And what was key was feeding people culturally relevant and comforting food in times of crisis.
They've served millions of people in natural disasters and in conflict zones and amazingly, they're often the literal first responders before any other relief agencies.
So people joke that Jose Andres can save the world.
But he deflects the credit to his team and all the cooks who have volunteered themselves to be organized by World Central Kitchen.
And at his heart, he's still a chef.
And before that, just a cook from Spain sailing the globe in the Spanish Navy, both falling in love with the world of food and hoping one day to help the world fall in love with Spanish food.
His new book is Spain My Way.
And while he's written many books about World Central Kitchen, about Mediterranean cuisine, about vegetables and tapas, this one kind of goes back to where it all started for him.
Jose Andres, thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you for having me, Francis.
Okay, I want to start with a couple of really quick questions for you.
Don't think too hard.
Okay.
Just say the first thing that comes to mind.
All right.
What is the best ham on earth?
Iberico ham.
In La Alberca, in a little town in the province of Salamanca.
That's unbelievable.
In Iberico Ham, even there, it's more places, but there it's La Alberca.
Amazing.
In Salamanca.
Okay, what is the best vinegar on earth?
That's a more complicated one.
Obviously, I always go to Spain.
It's where vinegar is around the world.
But when you are able to have a good vinegar in Cabif, in the land of Jerez, in the land of sherry.
Birthplace of sherry.
Obviously, sherry is one of the great, most universal, fascinating wines in the world.
But great wine makes great vinegar.
Sure.
And the sherry vinegar is amazing.
And right now it's different sherries using different grapes.
And the Pedro Jimenez in sherry cask age that has this beautiful acidity with a subtle sweetness.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And there's like a little bit of the funk, a little bit of the Yeah obviously, the characteristic that the barrels
Give to the... And sherry that you have cows there, they see history.
So those cows are old and just create vinegar.
That to me is very special for salads, for cooking, for a touch on top of a meat, on fish.
I mean, vinegar is one of the most special things out there and we don't realize it.
Lately, I'm becoming a very big fan of it.
But in America, a vinegar.
These young people in Virginia, the company is called Lindera Vinegars and they are making vinegars that are on the other edge of the tradition of sherry or balsamic in Italy, but they're making vinegar out of wild persimmons of Virginia, out of pow-pows, out of the most beautiful things that you will make vinegar with.
Yeah.
And so these Lindera Farms, it's to me vinegar of vinegars in America right now.
I love it.
Okay.
It's Lindera, right?
I think that's right.
I think that's right.
Lindera Farm.
I'm the worst.
I've had one of theirs that has a little bit of turmeric in it.
It's very cool.
What is the best rice dish on earth?
I have to go to Spain.
I'm very chauvinistic.
I had great rice dishes in China, great rice dishes in Japan, great rice dishes in Italy, great rice dishes in Latin America Caribbean, in America Jambalaya's.
But the culture of Spanish way of treating rice, which is more than paella valenciana, which is king of kings, but the diversity of paellas and way to treat rice we have in Spain.
I would say you have to go to Spain and you will know what's wrong.
Sure.
So I love your diplomatic nature.
You're trying to include the rest of the world in your answers.
But we know, the best ham is from Spain, the best vinegar is from Spain and the best rice is from Spain.
Before you were seen as a Actually literally as a chef superhero.
I got to get a little preview of the comic book, the Spider-Man comic book you are a guest star in, which is amazing.
Oh, my God.
This is already coming, yes.
Yeah.
Before you were feeding people in disaster zones, before you had 40 restaurants...
You were just a cook from Spain in America and you were trying to showcase the cuisine you grew up with.
And now, even though you're all those other things I can tell, you are still trying to showcase Spain to America.
So, for the uninitiated, for the people who don't know how great Spanish food is, What is the first thing you'd want people to taste or experience in Spanish cuisine?
Well, I think the argument we have to be making about Spanish cooking is an argument we can make for every other cooking.
Hmm. can the foods of a country trouble and do justice to the dishes and the country itself?
And obviously, I'm going to say the answer is yes.
Yeah, yeah.
But they have a feeling that you have to experience the place.
Were the ingredients that make that food?
Obviously, not everybody can travel to everywhere.
Oh, I love Chinese food, but I don't have the time or the money to go to China.
Oh, I love Peruvian food, but I don't have the money.
And obviously because great chefs travel and ingredients travel, We see in America that you can find amazing restaurants from far away, distant places that they do a very good homage to.
So me as a chef, part of what I've been doing is not only cooking, but very early on here in the streets of New York, I realized that I couldn't be the chef I wanted to be without certain ingredients that are almost unnegotiable.
Of course, we have great products in America, but a piquillo pepper is a piquillo pepper.
And I can bring the seeds and grow piquillo peppers here.
Yeah, I could.
But those piquillo peppers are not going to be like the piquillo peppers where they come from.
It's just the reality of the situation.
You find padron peppers here in farms in New Jersey, and actually they're very good.
But for some reason, because the dirt, the farm, the earth, the water, they're different than the ones from the real place.
So this for me has always been the conundrum.
So it's certain ingredients like Iberico ham.
I'm very proud that I was working alongside the farmers and the business people to bring the Iberico ham.
It was complicated to bring sardines in a can.
It was not so complicated, but it was complicated to convince anybody that a sardine in a can was actually a delicacy.
Sure, sure.
And so for me, part of my work has been really to I know where I come from.
I know where I belong.
I know the way we eat it.
But I know that in America, I don't want people to eat it any different.
Because if not, I'm not being fair to the traditions of Spain.
And I'm not being fair to the people here experiencing Spanish cooking for the first time.
I don't want to give them what they... what they think they will like.
I want to give them the real thing.
Sure.
As truthful as I can to the origin of the dish and the ingredient.
And so for me it's been.
I'm still, 33 years later, still trying to think What is the best way to present Spanish food.
The best way to present Spanish food is to be exactly as we do it in Spain.
With ingredients we've been able to bring from Spain over years, using ingredients locally, when it makes sense to be using ingredients locally.
The big thing for Spain though, is can I make a gazpacho if the tomatoes are not from Spain and the cucumbers are not from Spain and the green peppers are not from Spain?
Yeah, because the olive oil and the vinegar can be from Spain and very much that already makes it very close to the real.
So for me, I've been always on this conundrum of, Can we do a Spanish cooking without ingredients?
With some things you can, but certain things are negotiable.
Manchego cheese is Manchego cheese, sherry vinegar is sherry vinegar and Iberico ham is Iberico ham.
And there you cannot have substitutions.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let me do your publisher a favor right now and say you can still make these recipes and they're still delicious.
But I understand your point.
So much about the cuisine is about the ingredients, the product, either raw ingredients, like the vegetables, or the food products that are the product of a culture, a tradition, a craft that's been honed for, in some cases, hundreds and hundreds of years in Spain.
We'll be back in a minute with more from Jose Andres, author of Spain, My Way.
And by the way, we were in the studio together.
So if you want to see us doing this interview, head to our YouTube channel.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM, American Public Media.
Hey, I'm Matt Buchel comedian, writer and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYP, and I'm starting a brand new podcast.
Wait, don't swipe away.
It's called That Sounds Like a Lot.
I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world, and then I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or honestly, anyone who responds to my DMs.
This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it.
You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
That Sounds Like a Lot, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Why is this, it's still like burning inside of me that I feel like I am missing something.
I prayed so hard for my girl.
I prayed like every night, prayed, prayed, prayed.
And when I lost my babies, it was so hard.
So that when I... had them, I thought that was going to be the thing.
Like I am finally getting the thing that I prayed for and it's going to fulfill me.
And this is everything I want and more.
And it was, but it was also something missing.
I'm Raven Arzon, and this is Motherhood, the remix from Project Swagger.
This series is about defining our own versions of motherhood.
I am bringing in a mama I adore and admire, my friend, fellow Peloton instructor Kirsten Ferguson.
Listen now at Project Swagger.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table, the show for curious cooks and eaters.
We're spending the hour today with Jose Andres, founder of World Central Kitchen and chef and restaurateur extraordinaire.
You know for a chef, with restaurants all over the country with themes ranging from modernist magic to pan-Mediterranean cuisine to a Chinese-Mexican restaurant simple, rustic Spanish food is still at Jose's core.
We're talking about why.
Let's get back to it with him.
Let's get to the jamón, because this is, you know, certainly one of the key elements of Spanish cuisine.
Jamón serrano, which is the sort of more everyday typical ham, which is also...
Very delicious.
And iberico, which is made from a particular pig that's fed a particular diet and is truly one of the great things on earth to eat.
This is maybe a crazy question, but describe the experience of eating a slice of jamon iberico.
Well, you know, when you have a leg of ham and my family and friends laugh at me, because it seems every time I travel you know, for fun or even for an event, and I'm longer than two, three days at the place, seems that in my hotel room or in my house or Airbnb or apartment a leg of ham shows up.
Yeah.
So imagine how seriously I take this to heart.
Even so much that my daughters were very young and they had to be bringing was kind of bring your pet.
And we didn't have a pet and my daughter kind of was the professor, the teacher, kind of...
We don't have a pet, but we have the leg of ham in the kitchen.
That's count as a pet?
Imagine I would level that far of my family.
But imagine you have this ham at the right temperature.
You don't want it too hot, but you don't want it too cold.
You want the...
The nice, you know, the 70, 80 degrees is perfect all the way to 90 or 100 where the fat is shiny.
The fat almost becomes semi-translucent using the same leg.
The ham is heated there.
It's already clean in the outside.
As you get close to the ham, the smell is very present, without being obviously offensive, but it's something like brings you close to the ham.
It's something very attractive when your senses are activated, used by by the floating molecules of tastiness that are used, attracting you to it, and where you began salivating even before grabbing the knife.
And that's very rare with a lot of ingredients that you start salivating just by being in the presence of it.
In proximity.
And that moment is that Salivation happens, you know, something happens.
It's a total crash and a total attraction.
In the same way we get attracted to people, we think they are beautiful.
This is making me uncomfortable, but keep going.
And in that moment...
I think one of the beautiful things of this iberico ham, acorn fat that doubles the weight in the last three, four months of its life, that gets all these fatty acids all between the protein, the tissue and fat.
And when you have the ham and you start slicing it with a knife, your hands are going to be touching, in this moment, part of the ham or part of the fat, moment your fingertips are touching the, the fat of the ham.
Already there is a connection that is getting deeper and deeper.
Uh, it's almost like you.
You have your, your finger tip cells connecting with the tissue of the ham and start talking to each other.
And and then, as you began cutting, and The cutting is almost like if you're playing violin, right.
And you don't want the slice too thick because...
Thickness is okay.
I have a friend that said that if ham was not expensive, the Iberico ham was not expensive.
You will be eating it in cubes.
But I think this is too much.
I think the right slice that is thin enough that that is when it gets in touch with your fingers as you're bringing it to again to your nose and you're smelling it and then you put it on top of your lips and that first contact with the lips is just the beginning of something amazing.
And this is before it gets into your mouth, and the smells are there, and then obviously, what your tongue is going to be able to get.
I know it's only very few things of information and the saltiness and the acidity, but that is already what makes fireworks going right.
And it's so elegant, you know?
The texture of the slice of ham in your lips and in your tongue is so...
It's so whimsy.
It's so elegant.
Not all the ingredients in contact with your mouth are so pleasant as a slice of Iberico ham.
The drill is a very happy moment, a very comfortable moment that you are like...
Okay, and I promise I will not have more than one, but you know you're going to be having 30 and you're not going to be moving next from that ham.
So a very good ham is really one of those.
Obviously it's everything about the Spanish cooking, but obviously it's just one ingredient of thousands of ingredients that make a Spanish cooking.
Sure, sure.
But obviously it's one of those ingredients.
Superstars at the spine and the Spanish cooking can say this is a Spain in one ingredient.
It's nominee.
Not many cuisines in the world that represent a country so well as this one ingredient.
Yeah.
I mean hearing you talk about –.
I asked you this question of what's the experience of eating this ham, and I would have expected you to talk about.
Well, the fat is very buttery.
It's very nutty.
It's salty, but the salt is very – it was none of that.
You talked about a connection there.
It was really more this experience you have, again, like you said, to be in the presence of it.
And I love that, because that is the kind of passion that you have brought to teaching us about not just Spanish food, but how to really exist with food, how to be with food, not just the Spanish cuisine.
But that is a sort of passion, the love of life, and the love of life because we have the ability to eat food that you shared for your whole career.
I do want to get, I mean, it's funny.
Because you have this beautiful cookbook 400 pages of Spanish recipes.
You know your way, but many of them are very iconic.
Again, I'll do your publisher a favor.
You can make these recipes at home, even if you don't have the exact same ingredients.
You can, but some ingredients are a negotiation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure, for sure.
But I want to talk about some of the iconic dishes of Spain and maybe some that are maybe a little bit sort of deeper cuts.
But if you're in America and you only know one word about the cuisine of Spain, you probably know the word tapas, right?
And the most famous tapa is the tortilla española.
Why is that?
That's one.
Why is that the most iconic dish, or why is that?
Well, I think tortilla española is the... Well, actually, describe that one for us, too.
So tortilla española obviously it's a is, without a doubt, one of those dishes that comes out of total simplicity.
It's a dish that doesn't come from restaurant cooking, that comes from home cooking that, quite frankly, is chefs restaurants restaurateurs, writers.
Yeah, we all have our very big way to influence.
But many of the dishes that are important in cultures, we don't even know who invented them.
Sure.
And we don't know who invented them, because they came from the people and become part of the culture of entire nation.
Tortilla Española even has its origins in a particular moment.
It still is not 100% that everybody agreed that really was the moment.
But today the truth is that I grew up, my mom making Tortilla Española at home.
And my father making tortilla espanola at home.
And also every single other child in Spain grow up where tortilla was in the table.
And it's very simple, but also has its intensity.
You have to peel the potato.
You have to chop them.
You have to fry them.
Not complicated, but it's not something like I open the box.
Yeah, sure, sure.
And everybody is very particular about it because the potatoes can be cut in different ways.
They can be thin.
They can be in cubes.
They can be thicker.
Some people that fry them almost to they become slightly crunchy.
It's people that cooks them in a slow oil so they get kind of soft, more like poach.
It's different schools.
It's not one school.
It's different schools, the school of onion it's a lot of people with onion and a lot of people that they say onion never in the tortilla.
So basically eggs, the potatoes, the onion and the olive oil and salt.
So it's very rare that you make a dish that is so iconic with such a simple Yeah.
When you do an omelet that is in the right way, it can be thicker, it can be thinner.
The one I like is from the very thick tortillas that they get highly coagulated and they can be light but they are dense and chewy to the ones that are liquid, so liquid when you cut into it all the egg kind of goes out like a dam broke trying to hold a river.
Between those, it's a whole bunch of different textures that you can achieve in the tortilla.
It's one that the tortilla is more like.
It's warm, It never coagulates, but already the eggs and the potato have become like they have like a body.
This is the one I like, that is kind of creamy without being runny.
It's creamy without being hard.
That's probably the best one of all.
The eggs, when you cut into it, they're shiny.
When the shininess goes away means you overcook, it means it's too dry.
So why this is so iconic?
Because it's simplicity.
So this is the the amazingness about spanish cooking that something so humble of egg and potatoes and maybe onion and olive oil can achieve a dish that is really really very, very special and very unique.
Well, it's interesting too, because it's one of these things where, because of its simplicity, it's literally four ingredients.
Well, controversially four ingredients if you count the onion or not.
It's egg, onion, olive oil, potato, and salt, I guess.
And everyone knows what it's sort of supposed to look like.
But the beautiful thing about iconic dishes and the beautiful thing about individuality within this sort of structure is people look for ways to introduce their interpretation of it.
They look for ways to introduce their way of thinking about this thing.
And then you start thinking, well, like you said, like, well, how you cut the potato matters.
And then is the potato very soft or the potatoes cooked a little more really matters?
Are the eggs cooked more or less really matters?
You know, it's one of those things where it's like I don't want to say people like to argue, but it's like oh, it's like a fun way.
It's like a it's like sort of a communal bonding experience to say, well, I like it this way.
Oh, yes, me too.
Or, well, I don't know if that's really the right way.
And I think there's something about a national identity.
Spain is many hundreds of years old but it had periods of unification and then broke apart and conquest and reunification.
And I do think that when you have dishes that can become national.
It's a very regional country is kind of what I'm getting at.
It is, but tortilla obviously has already been part of, it's in every... Yeah.
Estapa has begun in the south of Spain and...
Tapas became a way of life because tapas is a way of life.
Tapas is a way of life.
What do you mean by that?
It means little bars.
You'll go for half a drink.
Don't even have tables and standing up.
You'll be having your sherry or your beer or your glass of wine.
Some places in some cities they give you a little tapa per drink you order, which is The heart of what it was.
Even in the old days, tapas meaning cover, that was the piece of bread or whatever they gave you used to cover the glass or the flies and other things will now go in as some of the theories of how the name came to be.
But that's something very Southern, very hot weather, culture of sherry and where, with the sherry, you will be having a little bite, but you will not just go one place.
Spain is a country that loves to socialize.
Spain is a country that loves to be in the streets and that loves to celebrate the life of the little towns or the big towns.
Part of what you do lunch or dinner is just going from place to place.
Yeah. as socializing through the different bars that you visit.
And in some streets and some cities that they celebrate this to the limit.
So the celebration of tapas as a way of life is not just the food.
Obviously, we serve in tapas, Spanish food.
But beyond that, tapas is a medium to showcase Spanish food.
Tapas is a way of life.
And you need to understand it under that context.
For me it was hard obviously, opening a Spanish restaurant 33 years ago in Washington DC and doing jaleo, that I was doing tapas.
But it's very hard just to try to change the way people live in another country, because even Washington DC will be a very different way of Seattle or downtown LA.
But what I did was okay, you can have the tapas in the bar and you're going to have the tapas sitting down.
But I'm going to go for the most important next thing in tapas, which is the small portions.
That I want you to do small and I want you to share.
Because then like in a tapas bar or in a pincho bar...
In Basque Country, the great thing about it is the diversity of your meal.
In a moment that tasting menus were happening and you could have menus of 6 7 8 10 20, 30 dishes, like the old days of El Bulli.
If you think about it, tapas was to democratize, to bring down to the street that you could go to a bar or, in a sequence of different bars, you could be having seven eight nine 10, 15 things in a fascinating way.
At the end of the day, when we talk about the tasting menu, I say well, tasting menus.
They've been happening in Spain, not only in the high-end fancy restaurants, but naturally they've been happening in the popular bars.
In every city, because you will have more than five six, seven dishes when you go into this kind of tapa to tapa place to tapa place.
And I think this is what is fascinating.
And that's why even in my own restaurants in the bank quarter in downtown DC for years everybody knows that I always told people Don't even come, only to my restaurant.
Come to this bar, then go to the other and check three places in one night.
Life is beautiful to celebrate, to be in the street, and do dine and dash kind of type of approach.
But this, in a way, for me, is where I've been putting the most emphasis.
What really is Spain?
And I'm discovering that, you know, Spain...
There's many ways to enjoy Spain and Spanish food, but what it is is a celebration of life itself.
At the heart of this book and at the heart of what the Spanish food is.
Tapas is a medium to to bring to people, not only in Spain, but to people around the world.
And for me it's been the way I've been able to tell the stories of what Spain is.
One tapa at the time.
Yeah.
There is, I mean, I love the food, but yeah, to your point, it's not just even how it's eaten.
It's just the role food has in, not a person's life, but in a community's life, in a social life.
You know in, in in the like, how you actually live among other people walking around.
Jose Andres' latest book is Spain, My Way, and we'll be back with more with him in just a minute.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM, American Public Media.
I'm Francis Lam, and you're listening to The Splendid Table.
We're spending the hour with Chef Jose Andres.
Let's get back to it with him.
You talk so much about, like the way food connects to life and the way food is really like a part of not just like a person's life but the social life.
And I actually want to get to a dish that recipe you have in the book.
That is from the part of Spain where you were born.
And you moved away when you were young, but you were born in Asturias, which is in the northwest corner of Spain.
And there's a very iconic dish there called Fabada Asturiana.
Do you remember eating that as a child?
Tell us about this dish.
Very much.
I don't remember eating it in Asturias because I left when I was...
I remember a couple of other things, but no Favada.
But I remember eating it as a young boy in Catalonia, in Barcelona.
Actually, in my first communion, The celebration.
I ate it.
So favada is this bean dish.
The bean is very common.
It's called the phacelus vulgaris.
That would be the Latin name.
You find phacelus vulgaris here in the States.
But these beans are very iconic because the weather in Asturias is very rainy.
Even in summer, you can have mornings that you will have a lot of fog that comes from the mountains.
The mountains, high mountains, snowy tops and the beach can be very close one from each other.
And it's fascinating.
You can be high up in the mountain with cows and you can be on the beach watching fishermen coming up from the water with the spotted crabs in less than an hour drive.
But these beans are hard to harvest there, but they became very important for a lot of reasons.
Difficult to harvest because the humidity makes very complicated the harvest process of certain vegetable species.
But nonetheless, over centuries, these These farmers, they came up with the ways to produce them.
And these beans in that fertile land they create, these Phacelus vulgaris, these beans that the good ones they can be, some of the biggest beans in size you can imagine, but with a very amazing characteristic that the way they're grown and the way they're picked and the way they are preserved, the skin of the bean is very, very thin.
It's so thin that when you cook them, almost is a skin you don't notice.
So the quality of the bean is very high.
The production is not very high, so very creamy when you eat it.
And then the inside, when you cook them well, the bean is almost like if you had melted butter.
Oh, God.
Untouched but looks like a bean, and you put it on the top of your tongue and only with a very gentle pressure against the top of your palate that bean separates.
This is the dry bean, when the beans will dry in the plant.
Past September.
Sometimes I'm almost going into October.
The beans are dry.
They pick them.
They're already dry.
The new ways.
Chefs, my Casa Gerardo, one of the best restaurants in Spain.
Many decades ago they came with a way of it's something I do here in America that they began picking the beans before the pot began getting dry and began opening, and the beans began getting dry on their own, just by leaving them on the plant.
They began picking the beans a little bit on the green side when they were still soft, so soft that you could put them in the mouth and eat them raw.
That changed everything because it was a way to make that bean even 10 times better.
Now they harvest them, you eat them in season, fresh, but now they freeze very well.
And the difference is that a bean that becomes much more grainy once it's dry, even very good Now it's just all pure butter and cooks much quicker.
But You have to treat it very delicate because it will fall apart if you put a fork or if you put a spoon to try to move them.
The beans are so delicate that they will fall apart.
It will make them into mash.
So it's a dish that very much with gentle moves is how you do it.
So the ingredients are water, beans.
Blood sausage chorizo, usually slightly smoked, a piece of lacon which is one of the parts of the belly of the salty.
And the bacon.
It's like two different parts of the belly of the pig.
Okay, sure.
And traditionally you would do a little bit of oil and a little bit of onion chopped, very little tiny, and then you put it on top.
And that's it, my friend.
Some people will add some saffron, will be allowed, tiny bit of saffron.
And you will boil them for an hour, two hours, gentle, never stopping the boiling.
Never stop in the boiling.
But sometimes every 20 minutes you'll put a touch of water used to scare them like don't boil more.
And in that perfect moment of boiling, slowly the beans feel comfortable.
They begin getting soft.
The beans don't get damaged in the outside because that skin is very thin.
They don't fall apart.
All the beans are whole.
And at the end, you let them rest one hour.
You take the meats.
You slice the meats.
You serve the beans, which is only water.
Beans, the saffron, and the oil and the fat that the meats have put into the broth.
And you will slice in a little bit of the blood sausage, a little bit of the bacon and a little bit of the chorizo.
And you will put it right there.
And this is eaten as a first course.
The simplicity of the dish is very difficult to explain because, without a doubt, it's one of the great dishes of beans of the world.
And it's a dish that cannot have less ingredients.
Compared to the cassoulet, which is a fascinating dish and highly complicated to make and highly difficult to find a good one.
The simplicity of the dish only tells you that.
Spain is different that way.
And I've been always trying to tell people that sometimes less is more.
It's part of what Spain is.
We're able to do great dishes with very little.
A lot to do with our history, a lot to do with harder times, a lot to do with with moments that Spain had to learn how to fit themselves with nothing.
But at the same time, it's a way to be honoring the dishes that come, the ingredients that come from the farm.
I think this is one of the most unique things of Spanish cooking, that less is more.
I'm totally transfixed hearing you talk about cooking, the act of cooking, your love of these ingredients and your love of this very traditional food, the simplicity of this food.
It's so interesting because one of the most probably influential moments in your career, right as a young cook, was when you were working with Farhan Ajia.
Who crazy to think this, but there may be people today who have not heard of him, which is wild to me.
But this is...
A chef in Spain who... did so many things.
But one of the things he did was he sort of ushered in this era of highly interpretive, highly creative food.
Some people called it molecular gastronomy.
You know, most people who practice it hate that term.
Other people call it modernist cooking.
But really I think what it was was.
It was an era of like almost unbridled creativity in the kitchen and where chefs were using technology that before that was never used in the kitchen to cook food.
And they were really manipulating the food in such a way where, like the food looks like it comes from outer space in some cases.
So that was the chef that you worked with, who was one of the most influential people in your life and one of the most influential people in culinary history.
And yet you come back to this love of purity and simplicity and tradition.
Talk about Like how your brain has worked that way.
Yeah.
Obviously, my time with Ferran Adria was like a big bang for me, but also was a big bang for food.
Yeah.
We can say that was a before and after Ferran Adria.
Mm-hmm.
And whatever criticism at times will happen about all this modern cooking, just give me good food.
This is not real food comes from sometimes, people that never experience it or ill-informed in more ways than one.
Because what Ferran, the best meals in my life has really happened in El Bulli.
His restaurant.
Obviously, not like I had other amazing meals.
But what Ferran did was just push the boundaries of anything we understood about food in the most simple but powerful way.
You know, technology we need to remember that has been used in cooking forever.
Meaning the day somebody came out with a knife to chop.
Yeah, that was a technology.
That was technology.
Somebody came with ways to preserve food using salt.
That was technology.
Sure, sure.
There are people that just find out how to make beer even they don't know why beer was happening.
Yeah. that's science and that's physics, but technology, technology has always been there.
Yeah, sure.
Always.
What Ferrandi did was, of course he embraced the technologies.
Any machine was out there.
My God, he gave a new purpose to the cotton candy machine, an American invention.
So many other machines that we are underusing even are there.
One of the very big things for RD was the very simple ISI bottle to make whipped cream with nitroxide.
The challenge was, oh, my God, we have this very simple technology and we can make whipped cream.
We create as fat.
And they began, okay, yeah, we can make mousses of anything.
Okay.
But they realized that they could take the fat out and put things that had the same function as the fat, which was to make these kind of networks that will keep air inside this kind of liquid.
Another sign, we could do this with gelatins and other things.
Another sign, you can make a mousse of strawberries using 100% strawberries.
And that mousse, if you do it well, is even better, because a strawberry mousse of 100 strawberry works will always be better than a strawberry mousse than a 60.
Why?
Because if you want to eat the strawberries, what better thing than a mousse that is 100 strawberry?
That's what Ferran did.
But what everybody misses, that is a book that is out of print and I forgot even the name, but was a little book that was about techniques of El Bulli.
And everybody will think I'm going to be finding the techniques that are strange.
What Ferran did to me and did to everybody is that I've never seen a chef that enjoys eating more than Ferran.
And Ferran enjoy going to the popular and traditional restaurants more than anybody I know.
And to see Ferran eating a shrimp, a gamba roja, a head on a shrimp, and the way he will direct sometimes the cook cook it less, because less is more.
But where all the sustenance and the best flavor in this rim is in that head.
That if you don't overcook it, it's still semi-liquid.
And you bring it to your mouth and you suck it.
And in the brain of Ferran, things are going on.
In your brain and mine, oh, this is a good head.
Ferran was deeper.
He always learned from traditional books until one day he put all the books away.
He will always tell me and tell all of us we need to learn tradition, honor tradition, so we know how we can move into the future.
So we will get the traditional American sauce, usually made at the same time you make with a lobster.
Yeah.
And it's one of the great dishes.
Some people say it used to be called Lobster Armory Cane and then became Lobster Alamary Cane.
But this is a sauce that has a very nice, beautiful flavor of the head.
Of the flavor of the lobster and one of the most iconic dishes.
Ferran began saying, how we can make the most pure American?
The traditional American has a lot of ingredients.
Some of them call for mirepoix.
You put carrots and you put... Yeah, yeah.
It's French.
And it's tomato.
But Ferran says, I want purity.
And the purity he realized was, If I get the heads of the shrimp and I squeeze it like it was an orange and I take all the juices and the brains right there I have the best sauce in the history of mankind, which is just simply the head of the shrimp.
Ferran began doing these kind of innovations that they were not about the technique or they were not about the physics, but was about the pure understanding of the product itself.
He began getting a clam and an oyster and barely putting it in hot water for two minutes.
And now for the clam to open, but still the clam was raw.
And he was taking it out and taking the juices.
It's like gelatin that barely you even know is a gelatin.
And covering the juices.
The clam with the juices is slightly gelatinized of its own clam, making sure that the clam will have all around itself all the water of the clam that will allow it.
Ferran did that.
Ferran began doing these things of coming up with new ingredients.
Like the tomato seeds.
The best part of the tomato, every single cookbook tells you discard the seeds.
Ferran made the seeds the best dish and a new ingredient in a way.
Those iconic dishes with the tomato seeds that you put them in the mouth and it's all the water of the tomato and all the flavor.
That's Ferran 101.
So for me, when I'm describing you about these traditional dishes and its simplicity, Ferran actually was the one that saw that the true value in Spanish cooking was that we were able to achieve simplicity.
Creating amazing dishes used basic ingredients. the cooking in its simplicity.
The high-end cooking that Ferran did was not so much based on the astonishing ways he came up with things, but because he was able to simplify what really was good about the ingredients.
Ferran was never about difficult techniques or science.
That was important to understand because with that understanding, you can do more.
But the true genius of Ferrand was to understand what is the true flavor in every one of the ingredients.
That's what separated Ferrand apart from anybody else.
He elevated the true flavor of every single ingredient.
Ferrand was always about flavor. and giving power to the ingredients.
He could make an amazing dish only using water.
I don't know a lot of people in the world that can do an amazing dish only with water on the plate.
Ferran was that type of chef.
I mean bringing this back to the beginning, when I asked you like, what is the key of Spanish food.
Like, what do you want people to experience when you talk about Spanish food?
It's, you know, you talked about the living of it, right?
The sort of being in the place of it.
But part of that.
When you're talking about the flavor, it's like oh, the being in the place of it is because that informs the flavor.
And at the end of the day, it's really about the ingredient.
That very primal moment of taking this thing that exists because hands have touched it and we're not naive.
Farmers grew it.
People tended to it.
In the case of ham, craftspeople cured it and all that stuff.
But it's still a singular item that you now have a connection with as a person who's about to eat it.
Think about gazpacho.
Gazpacho is not soup.
Gazpacho is a liquid salad.
It's just brilliant.
But this is something that didn't come from the high-end restaurants.
It came from the people.
It came from the people working long hours under the hot sun of the south of Spain and having to come up with something that was refreshing and will alleviate the heat they were going through, at the same time feeding their bodies.
It's just astonishing.
This is a dish that came from the people to the people.
Gazpacho is fascinating.
It's one of the most amazing beautiful, simple creations that you will say a high-end chef with a lot of creativity came up with.
No, the people came up with it.
This mix of what has happened in Spain in the last century, going from the Ferran Adriás to the cooking, coming from the most humble peoples and situations.
That's what makes Spanish cooking very, very special and very unique.
Because they don't fight each other.
They live with each other.
They connect.
It's not about traditional cooking and modern cooking.
It's about good cooking.
There's only two types of cooking in the world.
Juan Mari Orsac said, one of our most iconic chefs in the history of Spain.
He said, there's only two types of cooking, the good cooking and the bad cooking.
Me, I want to be on the good cooking.
Well, this was so much fun to talk with you.
Thank you so much for coming, Jose.
Thank you.
It's always amazing to be around you and learn from you and listening to your voice.
Let's keep moving this beautiful football of ours forward.
You do a heck of an amazing job on that front.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Jose Andres' latest book is Spain, My Way.
He left us with a recipe for a true classic of the tapas bar shrimp sizzled in garlic olive oil.
One of my absolute favorites gambas al ajillo.
Find it at splendidtable.org.
And hey, if you're interested, head over to our YouTube channel to see our extended conversation in video.
Well, that is our show for this week.
We hope you enjoyed this visit as much as we did and talk to you next week.
The Splendid Table is supported by The Slowdown, where they want you to begin each day with intention.
Listen to The Slowdown podcast from American Public Media as your new daily poetry ritual.
Subscribe to The Slowdown wherever you get podcasts.
We're also supported by listeners like you and we and all of public media need you more than ever.
Thank you for supporting your local public radio station.
Be sure to check out our free amazing newsletter called Weekend Kitchen.
We share a new recipe every week from the best and brightest food writers working today.
When you sign up, you'll automatically enter it for a chance at our monthly cookbook giveaway.
Go to splendidtable.org slash giveaway.
Subscribe to our podcast so you won't miss an episode.
The Splendid Table was created by Sally Swift and Lynn Rosado-Casper and was made this week by technical producer Jennifer Lubke, producers Erica Romero and Maria Wartell and managing producer Sally Swift.
Jordan Turgeon's our digital producer with help from Delonix Wind.
Our intern is Ruby Sigmund.
And Lauren Humpert is our senior podcast production manager.
Thank you for listening.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is APM, American Public Media.
