Essay III / Cooking Questions

On provocation as method in the Centauro kitchen

What if we made a trout ice cream?

The question is a sincere provocation. An invitation for contradiction to find itself in an unlikely synthesis. Yet behind every provocation lies a boundary being pushed, a beyond that begins to become familiar territory.

That is what Felipe proposed in course 6 of the Centauro tasting menu: using trout offcuts to bring salinity to a lemon ice cream. A long process of extracting diverse properties that eventually become a kind of trout milk. At first, when it was only a question, we all thought the result improbable — or simply a joke. Then the tests began to find the texture and flavours being sought. And finally: an extraordinary ice cream where the unexpected actually happens.

Will it become a classic? That would be the natural outcome of a path laid down that resembles all the questions that were once a provocation.

Is surrealism perhaps a current that spread through collective unconsciouses? Is joining two ideas at opposite ends an operation freed by that flow which concatenates without apparent connection? The human being remains that joyful expression of questions that seem absurd until they begin to settle into the fertile ground of the logical.

Perhaps there are cooks designed to cook questions, and others to cook answers.

Felipe and Aris seem to be a team designed for the former: recipes that bring gastronomic questions. In this case, the answer is found in course 6 of the Centauro tasting menu.

We'll be waiting for you there.