The Hallucinatory Trompe-l'oeil Dishes of Andoni Luis Aduriz

In February, the candidates of season 12 of Top Chef France were set a major challenge: to impress Andoni Luis Aduriz. In his Mugaritz restaurant, located in Errenteria (not far from San Sebastián), the Spanish chef has made trompe-l'oeil one of his signatures. Frothy soap, mouldy white bread, rotten fruit... At first glance, most of Aduriz's dishes seem inedible. But they are delicious, and have won the two-Michelin-star chef the admiration of gourmands from all over the world. 

Indeed, his approach is not only provocative or artistic. For him, these trompe-l'oeil dishes create a contrast between what the brain thinks it is eating, and the real taste of the dishes, leading to a real surprise when tasting and intensifying the flavours. 

Check out some of the most mind-blowing trompe-l'oeil dishes served at Mugaritz. 

Squid silk 

Do you think the Mugaritz boss wants you to swallow a scarf? Not really. “Regarding the technical aspect of this dish, it is a crushed fresh squid, mixed with a bouquet of seasonal flowers, flattened into a transparent sheet, cooked at low temperature. It is drizzled with sake, using a smudger. With this creation, our vocation is to suspend a moment in our garden in a matrix, taking advantage of its flowers to make this squid-based scarf, which visually resembles a silk scarf." 

Pastilla Artesana - Handmade Soap 

This soap is the trompe-l'oeil which will be presented on an episode of Top Chef. Aduriz says: "The world of cosmetics increasingly enters that of gastronomy. In shampoos, there are more and more ingredients that are used in the kitchen, such as honey, oats, flowers, apple." The chef wanted to reverse these codes and bring gastronomy into the world of cosmetics by designing a dish made from oat milk and rice, moulded like soap. For the bubbles, it took "a year of work with an engineer" to develop a pump capable of producing stable bubbles with a honey flavour. 

Blue Bread - Pan Azul 

This is not a slice of mouldy sandwich bread. "This brioche bread inoculated with penicillium roqueforti, a fungus used in blue cheeses, is an example of how to break down prejudices in one bite." 

Edible stone - Edible Piedras 

During a trip to Peru, Aduriz discovered 'chuños' and 'tuntas', an Andean specialty produced by dehydrating potatoes through a cycle of sun and frost exposure - with each cycle, the tubers lose water. "We found them very attractive and we used them as inspiration to cover our plate with potatoes. We realised that if we dyed them they took on a pebble appearance and the kaolin technique sealed them keeping them wispy and creamy." 

Noble Rot - Noble Podredumbres 

In this photo, you probably think you see a bad apple. In reality, it is an apple fermented with penicillium candidum and penicillium roqueforti, topped with orange marmalade.

Watermelon Carpaccio - Sandia Carpaccio 

At first glance, this photo represents a plate of beef carpaccio. It is, however, a watermelon carpaccio, born with a slice of luck. "While we were wondering if it was possible to replace vegetables with fruit in our broths, stir-fries, or creams, we forgot one of these fruits in the oven: it burned. We had two options: the most logical one, that is to say, throw the product; and the craziest, to see it from another point of view," says the chef. "The fruit still tasted like watermelon but looked like meat. So we decided to play with it and that's how this dish was born."