(left: deconstructed PB&J; right: Potato Truffle Explosion)
Grant Achatz’s Creative Process:
This video, posted to his restaurant’s YouTube channel 14 years ago titled “Flavor Bouncing,” puts Achatz’s creative process on display. The three-minute video shows him starting with one ingredient, white beans, and building a web of several flavors that complement the original ingredient and each new one added to the web. I think this vast knowledge of complementary flavors and ingredients shows that Achatz is clearly an expert in his culinary field.
In class, we talked about how “expertise” is one thinking style in the creative process. We learned that expertise is essential for solving common problems, in the context of cooking, maybe this would mean perfectly cooking a steak or perfecting the chiffonade knife technique. However, a problem that often arises for experts trying to be creative, is that they struggle to “see outside of the box.” Clearly, Achatz does not struggle with thinking outside of the box in the culinary world, his experimental menus prove that. However, would his hyper-creativity translate outside of the culinary field?
In Remote Associates Tests (RAT) performed on baseball experts, they were vulnerable to being misled because they thought primarily within their expertise, fixating their brains on their knowledge of baseball concepts. I am curious if Grant Achatz would succumb to the fixated knowledge problem in a RAT test or would the creative nature of his career help him overcome the fixation that other experts struggle with?
Connection to “The Creative Spark” by Augustín Fuentes:
I found that Grant Achatz’s creative process reminded me of something mentioned in my focus book, “The Creative Spark,” by Augustín Fuentes. Fuentes spends the beginning of Part Two of his book talking about how the diet of our human ancestors differed dramatically from other hominins. He makes the point that because of humans’ advanced tool use and the diversity of food consumed, they were able to be uniquely creative with their meals. Like our ancestors two million years ago in East Africa, Grant Achatz does not “stick to the recipe book” (Fuentes 52). These ancestors originated the process of “alter[ing] the chemical and biological properties of food to make it better, easier to use, and tastier” (Fuentes 55). Millions of years later, Achatz continues to push the needle even further, finding new ways to consume food just like our ancestors did.
Resources:
https://www.finedininglovers.com/explore/articles/7-iconic-dishes-grant-achatz
“The Creative Spark” by Augustín Fuentes
I also read The Creative Spark, and I agree that new innovations in food science and creativity in culinary arts are reminiscent of early humans finding new ways to process and cook food.
ReplyDeleteI found the notion of even the most prolific creatives struggling to think "outside the box" interesting -- when viewed from inside their own box, they are creative geniuses, though their efforts may very well fall entirely flat when they are tasked with expressing similar creativity through a different medium. Perhaps this is why we view creatives such as Da Vinci with such adoration: they are capable of applying themselves across a variety of creative methods and mediums, each reflecting a different -- and often new -- aspect of their imagination(s) and ability.
ReplyDeleteI never thought of cooking as being creative, but I see now that there is a tremendous amount of creativity that goes into not only preparing and presenting a dish but also conceiving of it. It seems that Achatz balances expertise with outside the box thinking, and that, as you mentioned, is no mean feat. I also appreciate the tie-in to your focus book. It is neat to think that humans have been experimenting with food like this for more than a million years.
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