Quique Dacosta is coming to San Sebastian Gastronomika this year to show how his work with salt and salting has developed. He has been using salt for three years not to preserve food but for cooking, “by contributing our vision and expanding what traditional cuisine has passed down to us”. With the touch of the salt, with its contact even though this is in brine or directly in saline atmospheres (which he has achieved by setting up a salt tunnel), Dacosta creates large complete pieces,  roe, and large pieces of fish that were presented in the dining room with a “certain almost Neanderthal brutalism”, he explains.

This is what happened until the Covid pandemic has said enough is enough in the dining room at the restaurant in Dénia, where chefs and waiters presented the pieces with a trolley in a   highly-crafted staging. “I thought that it was important to represent the pieces like they do in France with cheeses”. The salted items arrive at the table whole, and there they were cut up. Now, the pandemic has brought this activity to a halt and Dacosta has re-planned the experience.

“Now because of protocol we cannot push the trolley of salted dishes around, so we have switched to creating dishes in the kitchen with them”. But this is not cooking, he explains, because “they are not submitted to heat. The cooking process only involves exposure to the air, salt and time, and we play with a variable that is the humidity that we have here in the Mediterranean”. With these precepts, Dacosta now presents dishes based on salt, that are always “harmonious and beautiful” along the lines of the cooking of the Valencian three-star chef.