• Interview Ángel León: "We have stopped looking at nature with hunger"

  • Madrid Fusion The best ham croquette in the world is eaten in a restaurant in Albacete

The "madness" of Ángel León and two years of intense work have allowed him to develop techniques to turn

the parts of the fish that were going to the garbage in the tri-starred Aponiente

into edible

and

sweet , where

popcorn and marine trinkets

will be served , a luminescent pole of squid or

sea bacon ice cream with brown skin.

It will be from March 8, when the new season of this restaurant in El Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz) opens, where some time ago León noticed that of the

10,000 kilos of fish

they bought a year, 2,475 left in losses.

"My challenge has been to take them and examine them, from another perspective: if in Aponiente we already have a lot of use in the salty world, why not take it to the sweet one?", he exposed in Madrid Fusión.

To do this

, he teamed up with the confectioner David Gil,

who worked with Albert Adrià, and later with the pastry chef from Aponiente, Idoia Lacambra, with whom he faced the challenge of

making confectionery with skins, eyes, tails or scales.

It was not easy, he has acknowledged, and there were many "moments of frustration" and of being on the brink of giving up before achieving the desired results.

A new technique is applied to each part of the discarded fish, so that, in addition to the dishes created for Aponiente, this research "is going to open a super beast way for cooks", as it already did with the incorporation of plankton into human nutrition. .

León has managed to

deodorize and remove the flavor

from the skin of the fish thanks to casein, which allows him to make a marine eclair dessert filled with waffle cream or a cut of sea bacon ice cream in which the biscuit is replaced by brown skin.

The scales are used as a crunchy element of a cake with sponge cake foam and lisa roe, the sclera or little white ball of the eyes are turned into popcorn - which she has tested with her son and "he loved" - and the less perfect sprigs move on to a dessert with croissant cream and soy ice cream and PX.

In addition to saving ten tons of parts that used to go to the trash each season at Aponiente,

Ángel León

has also set out to amuse his diners in a way that he will take advantage of an enzymatic reaction from the squid to create a luminescent ice cream based on almond milk that it will illuminate the mouths of the customers during a certain moment of the menu in which the lights of the restaurant will be turned off.

He has called it "20,000 underwater languages" in homage to Jules Verne.

Caramel with fish collagen

, swim bladders turned into sweet zarajos with egg spun from mullet roe, invasive algae transformed into kataifi paste, scolding algae that "due to their texture and flavor are difficult to eat" and noble algae tatin such as kombu with marine honey, are some of this "crazy of the sea", as it is defined.

But the most fun has been fulfilling the dream of making "marine sweets", taking advantage of the fact that the algae have ingredients such as agar-agar, similar to the usual collagen in jelly beans (donkey, cow or pig, he explained).

Once submerged in liquid nitrogen and coated in the chosen flavour, you can enjoy an original "marine treat".

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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