Cultural Consciousness | Massimo Bottura, Osteria Francescana

thank you thanks so much i have butterflies in my in my stomach if yoji wants to do what he has to do we can go on okay serve whatever he wants so hi i'm massimo butura i'm an italian chef i grew up under the kitchen table escaping my older brothers at my grandmothers and jalanis with where flower fell on my feet this is where appetite begin for me appetite is like anger but comes from a different place anger is physical appetite is emotional appetite is the personal association we make with food in italy centuries of culinary tradition tells us who we are and what we should eat at francescana we look at the word from under the table from a critical point of view not a nostalgic one if we take our memories out of the past and bring them into the future our tradition can be improved maybe even taste better culture has become the genuine motivational force behind the evolution in our kitchen culture breathe our awareness awareness leads consciousness with consciousness comes responsibility everything we think see and learn gets squeezed into our cuisine food is not only is not only the quality of the ingredients but the quality of the ideas an amelian appetite is round like a tortellino so what goes around comes around this is gino dominicis is a very important italian artist and you're going to understand what he's doing now at the end of the speech let's move to i don't know i'm sorry cornetto cappuccino in the beginning cappuccino is being invented in italy not in the united states by starbucks you know that okay okay now just to know just to know so in the beginning there was cappuccino and cornetto the image is classic italian breakfast cappuccino and here you have jurasso del carlino but in these days ferran sorry ferran in these days they're gazeta de los port so you know what we are talking about tonight uh tonight no tonight so the year of this dish was 1993 a trattoria we were serving cappuccino emiliano so it's like onion and potato with an extra old balsamic vinegar and savory cornetto filled with mortadella so the transformation is a classic italian breakfast to the essence of emilia you see sweet but you taste savory you see italian but you taste emilia this is where the seeds of our knowledge were planted the irony the need to express territory the pride in our traditions and the respect for our local ingredients this was the beginning of all a very good collector of gino de dominicis the artist you saw in the beginning throwing stones into the water wanted wanted the artist to make a portrait gino didn't want to make this portrait as the collector continued to insist this of gino finally agreed to do it invited the collector in his apartment in rome and the collector sat for hours this is a real story for hours waiting for the for his portraits in the meantime gino was eating breakfast in bed read the newspaper get dressed make phone calls finally the collector asked him is my portrait finished so gino then he's drew a small mark in the middle of the canvas and said yes your portrait is finished when the collector look at the at the other canvas he was very upset he gets angry and you know gino said but this is a portrait scene from 10 kilometer of distance that was the portrait it's very important painting culture breeds awareness and being around artists taught me to see things in a different way from this reflection an idea was born in 1994 a monochrome dedicated to one ingredient in in the plate parmigiano-reggiano and to time slow the time of reflection through research about the slow aging process of parmigiano-reggiano i discovered the evolution of of these incredible ingredients and i was able to give these these ingredients an abstract form some of you remember sri sano that was is this parmigiano-reggiano do you believe this is parmigiano-reggiano 20 years later so i discovered this is evolution and i was able to give this ingredient this abstract form and recognize it so what i thought i was thinking i was thinking as gino the dominicis was doing territorial scene from 10 kilometers of distance you eat emilia faith and reason tradition and technique what do you believe was the most revolutionary man of all the time jesus who said that all men are equal or tommaso the queen who said that faith was okay but every man should also use reason we should also use his mind at the time tommaso da quino this is professor montano was introducing me to this argument in the 13th century it was like 1270 boiling meat in water became the alternative to the grilling meat over the flame it was a revolutionary idea you could get two in one broth and meat and for many centuries northern of italy various cut of meat plus vegetable and spicy are still boiling every million eats this at christmas the first time my american wife was came to italy she was kind of vegetarian she was introducing at the christmas classic dinner lunch and she was asking me i would really eating boiling meat are we living in the middle ages so for that reason i gave bolito misto this shape skyscraper of new york so it's like it's dedicated to that moment one day when we were thinking about that at austria franciscana we were asking ourselves with this beautiful piece of meat on the table in in and all the the guys that were we were there thinking about that do i boil meat because centuries of tradition are telling me that are we so sure that tradition respect these ingredients and that morning everything changed so we have stopped boiling the meat we cooked then under sous-vide the low temperature we preserve the vitamin protein and organolactic bars the meat is alive and so the meat is tender full of flavor and the most important is that each cut of the meat has his own identity what is important is safeguarding tradition by bringing them into the future this is what i call tradition in evolution we have a beautiful bird in emilia romagna called faraona it's so perfect small tender almost almost almost in each house roasted to death so roasting roasting a bird like that gives you two choices or a perfectly cooked breast or a perfect fruit leg like the boiled meat this traditional dish must be cooked subversively to give the priority to the ingredients so the birth is deboned the breast is cooked low temperature the drumstick is lacked the lag saute in a pan fill with all the interiors it's delicious technically correct but where is the emotional part of this dish so it's where you least expect it in a scrape box the skin interiors the bones the skin is caramelized and became a crostino we make a white chocolate garlic and rosemary spread dark chocolate liver and white and black raise the boundary between savory and sweet and on the top a gelato of toasted bread this is one bite roasted ham sandwich then we spray this intense perfume of roasted faraona on the top so we are roasting the bones we chop them crush them distill them in a lot of upper and so you have made this savory and sweet crostino that smell like roast made with the leftover the roast when your grandmother is opening the oven serving the bolito after serving after the bolito the roasted parts that's the perfect way to get emotion in your your art because you are with your family you are with your people you share emotion you fight but also after that you get in the family so this is the emotional part connection to art is very important on australia francescana the art is on the wall is not there to decorate austria francescana there is no view of the sea there is no beautiful landscape of mountain this beautiful landscape of the city of copenhagen or the canals and everything so what we have to do art is is our landscape of ideas it widen the horizon and open up possibilities one of my chef asked me about a new painting on the left that i was hanging in in the restaurant it's a landscape called train departs at dawn there are two trains going in different direction like the way your mind works at 5am the chef travel back from milan modena to see the family the image of the train connect them to the past and is present with a handful full of ingredients we begin to create the plate train the parts of dawn this refers the recipes is uh as an abstract landscape of cappuccino cornetto coffee meringue chocolate crunchy biscuit it reconciles the art reality of taking a train at 5 00 am leaving your family coming to modena working in our kitchen with the tender flavor of a cappuccino and brioche that evoke warmness i always say in my future there's more future because i can stop i cannot stop thinking maybe that is why i love the metaphor of the train of departing like my chef departing one after the other coming into their own day after day making future out of everything and squeeze so much life into one bite again the art on the wall is not a decoration but a way to read our kitchen our method and our madness so in eliza sigicelli video the part is over the fin runs backward so the firework they don't explode they implode the title is a reference to financial crisis for in the world so i see the work of art as a metaphor of contemporary cuisine as well we are living in a historic moment in gastronomy these are not time for fireworks but colorful tech not not only uh not again colorful technique or i think they are not necessary right now we are searching for truth so reality in the world right now is very strange not right now it's always been like that so it's a stranger than a fiction than you imagine think about 21 days of heavy snow in modena last year not one day or 25 days of earthquake something that no one ever considered could be possible a contemporary chef tried to supplement the product and put the quality of the produce first interpreting what can be expressed through the ingredients this is an ethical process very important and which shift light camera action from chef farmers fishermen cheese makers all the people are close to us the time has come to put on aside the our ego and who are the real heroes the guys from the sea urchin or the guys that are creating this putting us in a position to create this kind of emotionally dish with their products or like the fireworks are over everything has changed for the better culture this is for all the young you know her ear culture this is a highway installation 100 million sunflower seeds each one made by hand culture is a motivational force behind change awareness consciousness responsibility to quote the chinese artist art is a tool to set up questions to create a basic structure that can be opened to possibilities highway sunflower is a landscape of 100 million porcelain sunflower and seeds each seed is unique each seed is made by hand the sunflower seeds are made in a town of 1 000 kilometers from beijing which has been making porcelain for the emperor for centuries this project saved a generation of artisans and thousands of years of culture the purpose of art is to make visible day invisible consciousness leads responsibility as the artist as well said i want the people who don't understand about art to understand what i'm doing i think this message gets to the art of why we are here today speaking about our passion our diverse appetites for food and for life it all comes down to the need to share to educate and be generous with our ideas and our words i want people who don't understand about what i'm doing to understand what what what is the feeling behind my plates impossible is nothing here you know the diminishes can we turn silicon into squares in 69 gino made a film kern turning silkers into squares in the film he stands by the side of a calm lake and thrown stones into the water stone after stone he watches and wait for the round ripples to turn into squares this is what we do in australia francescan in modena in italy we thought we throw stones every day into the water and wait for them to turn into squares this is what makes our work magical do you believe that northern cuisine could be the most influential cuisine in the world this is the the circles they became squares and what it did renee this is reality impossible is nothing i believe that one stone one sunflower one train at a time we will make ripple that we became waves all together here a train that departs at dawn is always on time don't miss it thank you beautiful okay there's a i prepare a little surprise for as a video no that we thought a few months ago and i i wasn't really really thinking to show but at the end you know it's madness no mad food camp is like we have to do it prepare prepare so so okay so this video is dedicated oh my god all the italian goes out please please all the italian please out because i'm gonna go back they're gonna say i'm crazy goat who does that would kill everything you know it's you know what the matthias so i'm dedicating this video as a short film it's something that has won the prize critic prize at non antelope film festival to every grandmother mother housewife who is trying to still making tortellini daily for the family and so every family as rene was talking before no when i was throwing the pasta you know i saw the vid the faranbok the beautiful staff meal to me was the worst meal ever for you yeah and and the pig and and the pig lag 15 of august 45 degrees how was that delicious perfect so it's like every family has his own recipe for tortellini so more parmigiano less parmigiano i don't put prosciutto i want more tadella the parmesan is too hot too old it's like crazy things you know we fight every day about this so there are more discussion about tortellini in um in our family in every million family than about politica not not more than uh soccer but but you know that italians are like 60 million people are gastronomic critic not chef are gastronomic critics so they come in your restaurant they say yes this tortellini are good but mine are much better or they're gonna say like oh this is a this is this is great this is great but i would put some more come on come on so and and soccer team so they know exactly how to win the final of the european championship