Dabiz Muñoz, the chef of the crest, of extreme fusion, the one with dishes with thousand ingredientsHe has traveled all over the world. And she has come home.
“This year everything we are doing at DiverXO has a lot to do with products that we find in the spanish pantry”, explained Dabiz Muñoz in a Madrid Fusión auditorium full to the brim. “We give it our own code, traveling flavors, but 95% of cooking today has to do with Spanish productsfrom producers in Spain”.
“From so much traveling and seeing the wonderful things there are”, Muñoz has discovered that one of the great assets of each gastronomy “is the beautiful apology that they make of their pantry”. And he didn’t want to be left behind. “This year we wanted to follow this path.”
Although Muñoz remains faithful to a style where the use of chili peppers and citrus fruits stands out – “about 14 or 16 citrus fruits and about 20 chili peppers” – which are incorporated into the dishes as seasonings, in his current proposal everything revolves around great products of our pantry. In today’s presentation, trout from the Pyrenees, spinach from Getaria, rooster from Mos or fabes from Colunga. Great products that do not fit into the so fashionable “product kitchen”. If anything, to paraphrase Wilson Picket, “the kitchen of a thousand products”.
The thousand ingredient dishes
As the president of Madrid Fusión, José Carlos Capel, recalled, it had been almost a decade since Muñoz had not gone on stage at the congress to cook. The last time he did it was in 2014. But this year he wanted to share with those present four of the dishes that are being served in the current DiverXO menuwhich he has assembled in a rigorous live performance.
It is impossible to tell without this article seeming like an essay the enormous amount of ingredients and preparations that each dish has. “For me DiverXO dishes are independent stories, self-conclusive, that could be by themselves, alone, or vary in their order”, says Muñoz, who applies this same creative exercise, ingredient by ingredient. Everything has to work separately.
“I imagine the dishes as a tower of babel in which a lot of things happen from top to bottom”, points out the chef. “We ask people not to mix it up.” The idea, insists the chef, is for everything to be harmonious, but there are many separate sensations: “I treat each element individually.”
Creativity to the bottom
Muñoz defines himself as a “flavour obsessive”who sets himself challenges such as recreating the intense flavor that accumulates at the bottom of a stew pot, the objective of one of the dishes he has presented today.
“What I wanted is to realistically represent the feeling beyond the aesthetic; What happens at the bottom of a pot?” she wonders.
Of course, not in all the pots what happens in the dish that Muñoz has presented, which starts from the bottom of a stew of the bones and less noble parts of the rooster, which is candied until a film of candied fat remains, on the one where the rest of the elements of the dish rest: ultra-creamy beans cooked for 12 hours, the crest of the rooster itself, a mole, Swiss chard, coriander sprouts… As if that were not enough, the pot is accompanied by a taco of squash flowers and a pork rind made from boneless rooster’s feet dusted with ghee. And I left something safe, because it is impossible take note of everything.
“Each dish is crazy like this one,” says Muñoz, who answers Capel’s question about how many ingredients can circulate in a DiverXO service: “I couldn’t tell you. I suppose that more than 300 there will be”.
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Photos | Madrid Fusion
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