Quote · Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Grant Achatz (award-winning chef)
Where this was said
The Creative Process: How Dishes Are Made
At 52:27 · chapter starts 51:20
Great dishes don't arrive in a dream for Grant Achatz — they come from obsessive research. He reads about what other chefs are doing now and did a century ago, hunts for forgotten dishes to resurrect, and travels to markets in Japan, Mexico, and Italy to touch ingredients and be moved by traditional techniques. But the process is also wildly lateral: a Caravaggio painting led to a dish concept that evolved into something Mondrian-geometric; a hard abrupt break in a Rage Against the Machine track prompted the question 'how do I do that in the progression of a tasting menu?' [1] — Grant Achatz "There was a track that they had — it was intense. But there was an area in the track that broke really hard, really abrupt. And in my head,…" 52:27 He confirmed to Dax that he uses AI heavily for research, noting that since 2002 his most important kitchen tool has been Google — AI is simply the next evolution of the same impulse. He can pick up a tomato, smell it, and his mind immediately starts building. Everything, inevitably, passes through a food filter.
The five basic tastes on your tongue are blunt instruments. Everything else — the chocolate you 'taste' in wine, the depth of a great dish — happens in the nose. When Achatz lost his ability to taste during cancer, he built entire dishes solely on how their aromas interacted.
