I believe the use of soil in some of our dishes has created quite a stir, as expected. And it is because it is amusing, shocking, and even, why not say it, rather daring. But ultimately, it is essentially talking about and dealing with the odours and aromas of the forest, especially in autumn . . . for some time now we have been working with soil, with compost. We came up with a very interesting recipe a few summers ago, and presented a dish called ‘composted squid’. Our research began when we opened up a laboratory. We started working with ‘earth’ and thinking about tastes and aromas.
For example: Mushrooms? What do they taste of? What do they smell of? Truffles? What is their essential taste? And what is the olfactory memory of their wonderful and intoxicating aroma? Abstracting ourselves from the products, closing our eyes, the effluvia in all that we tested brought forth a similar response: the smell, above all, of earth, compost, and, of course, something inherent in forests, especially in autumn: leaf litter (we use the word orbela, which means litter in Basque).
The answers to these elementary questions were interesting to study. But we all also wondered: What can we do with this?
We decided to make a very unique fumé – then use it to soak a bed of vegetables, which we used almost like a broth.
In the first place, a good selection of raw material was needed (of course, soil of the forest, without pollution or waste). It was infused in boiling water and treated as if it were any other aromatic herb. Then it was strained (passed through a fine sieve) to obtain a brownish broth, brimming with the deep aroma of the forest.
We first used it in the above-mentioned ‘composted squid’, and the truth is that, after initial misgivings, a lot of people liked it. The name surprised them but the flavours were familiar. It is highly reminiscent of earthy fungi, mushrooms, truffles etc. It is as if we have taken a piece of nature and served it up on a plate. In this case, rather than being in ‘sea and mountain’, or ‘surf and turf’, the squid in the abstract is in sea and forest.