Alex Atala is quite literally a rock star chef. A former DJ and punk musician, the tattooed Alex Atala is a Brazilian media sensation and runs what is claimed to be one of the top 50 restaurants in the world.
What makes him different to many other carbon copy celebrity chefs is that he shuns high-end ingredients. He’s turning French restaurant traditions on their head and has recently taken the gourmet delights of foie gras and truffles off the menu of his 10-year-old Sao Paulo restaurant DOM. He is one of the growing number of world class chefs to shun the staples of high-end Michelin starred cuisine to focus on local and sustainable ingredients, such as the manioc root, of which there are some 98 varieties.
Brazilian staples include manioc, rice and beans, Portuguese and Spanish inspired dishes, and barbecued meat known as churrasco and gaucho grills.
Atala didn’t always want to be a chef. At the age of 18 he worked as a DJ and travelled to Europe. Whilst there, he painted walls and worked in construction and only trained as a chef for a visa. Subsequently, he worked in restaurants in Belgium, France and Italy.
Atala’s influences are classical French. Chef Michel Bras (Atala recently travelled with Bras’ son Sebastian to the Amazon when he was travelling through South America looking for inspirational ingredients) known for his use of local and foraged wild ingredients is his food hero.
What Atala has done is take classical techniques and the Brazilian ethos and given them a unique twist with a focus on indigenous ingredients. “When I came back to Brazil I decided not to be one more Brazilian doing Italian food or French food,” he says.
Instead, he took his classical French training and experience of Italian cuisine and applied it to local ingredients such as the giant piraiba fresh water fish, cambuca fruit, manioc and tucupi juice. “I decided to rescue flavours I remembered from when I was a boy,” he says.
“We have a lot of different regions and a lot of different cultures and a lot of different regional foods as well. Brazil is a huge country.”
Atala says when people come to Brazil they don’t want to taste foie gras and truffles. “It is our local ingredients; our wild flavours they want. And I am focused on these types of flavours.”
Atala is developing the ethical sourcing of food and he’s helping take local people from Brazil’s regions and organising them into co-operatives to grow local indigenous ingredients. This, he says, also helps preserve the forests while developing local agriculture. “Once chefs start to use these ingredients we are helping the culture and there are economic and social benefits there.”
As part of his plan Atala has a farm 4000km away from Sao Paulo in the Amazon and is trying to encourage other chefs to take similar actions. “The attitudes of the chefs must change and tray to help the native population of the land,” he says.
“It is something that will take me certainly 10 years more.”
One example of his work is reflected in the dish palm heart fettuccine. Palm hearts are a popular traditional food in the south east of Brazil, where they are native. But the tree takes 80 years to grow to give 700 grams of fresh palm heart.
Fortunately, a friend of Atala was researching the Amazon palm heart, which in two years yields 1.5 kilos. It is also more sustainable because it is possible to cut one root of the bunch of palms growing together and not kill the whole tree.
The palm heart is made into a dish, which has the appearance of fettuccine and is served with prawns and the coral from their heads. “We employ the same techniques as with pasta and the results are amazing,” he says. So amazing, that the dish is now sold in local supermarkets.
“Visually it looks like pasta. We you taste it has much more crunch. The texture is completely different,” he explains. “The flavour is also different to regular palm hearts that you can buy in cans. I think palm hearts in cans are awful. I don’t like that.”
Atala is doing similar work with other ingredients. He is using the Amazon native root priprioca, something better known to The Body Shop than restaurant diners for its aromatic essential oil, which is used by Amazon natives as a perfume.
He says that any recipe that uses vanilla can use priprioca instead and has taken the essence and started experimenting with it with bananas, liver and chocolate. “It tastes amazing,” he says. “It is completely edible.”