In the wake of last year's presentation of developments in their spherification work, the Disfrutar threesome wowed the congress again this year with their work on starches, specifically amylopectin - in an oven or in a microwave, it produces new "airy, blown, different" textures, for both sweet and savoury recipes. Oriol Castro, alone this time - his colleagues were unable to be with him - explained the details of this task, which produces new recipes with different ingredients alongside amylopectin in the cooking process. “This has some incredible applications”.

The Barcelona chef also presented Disfrutar's "penultimate" creation, "where we want you to eat snow", produced with a crush-drink machine. The recipe is accompanied by pineapple confit, and a bonbon with a forest fruit tree arrangement. “We want people to remember how they used to take snow and put it into their mouths, and so you eat this with your hands as if it were a sorbet". Then a waiter comes along with a blowtorch and burns away the rest of the snow, which disappears "like in real life". "This isn't just eating, it's feeding the soul". Disfrutar.

The chef at what is currently the world's third best restaurant rounded off his talk to touch on their "initial" work on koji and its spores. “We've done a lot of testing but we still have work to do, and we hope to demonstrate it next year”. And so the talk was more of an example of how research is conducted at a state-of-the-art restaurant, because at Gastronomika Castro showed the panels they use to set out ideas at the restaurant. “We don't know everything and we have to learn, from colleagues, and most of all by testing and then more testing, and the tests are written down here". It was like watching Messi at a course on football.