News Source: ABC

Original title: El vergel de cítricos valenciano que inspira a la alta cocina

Author: Adrián Delgado

Date: January 25, 2025

The Valencian citrus orchard that inspires haute cuisine

Vicente Todolí, ex-director of London’s Tate Modern, and chef Luis Valls, of El Poblet, link activism, gastronomy and art from the countryside to the plate

Vicente Todolí slips into a blue coat and the smoke from his cigarette. It’s December and high pressure and a Mediterranean glow are shining on a cold morning for this area, in the Valencian region of La Safor, between Oliva and Gandía, with the sea in the distance. The friction of their hands, seeking warmth, sounds rough. His skin, like that of the half a thousand citrus trees in his garden, is tanned by the sun and the sea breeze, by a lifetime of work. And also by the professional success he has achieved in the elite of international contemporary art and which goes unnoticed by the common mortal, walking in boots, in this sort of orchard open to arranged visits called El Bartolí.

In another fruitful field, the artistic, he became the director of the Tate Modern in London for seven years -before the IVAM in Valencia or the Serralves in Oporto- and, in the meantime, a renowned curator. His friendship with Ferran Adrià – he is an advisor to elBulliFoundation – brought him even closer to gastronomy three decades ago. In his botanical orchard, which is a unique atlas for citrus fruits, he has forged a love for the ‘terreta’ and an altruistic activism to stop the speculation that threatened his village, Palmera – 1,028 inhabitants.

Around his father’s orange grove, he has been adding, even paying more than its real value, the adjoining land where the brick sector was threatening to build single-family houses. To this end, he created the Citrus Todoli foundation to annex 4.5 hectares that represent one of the largest biological reserves of rutaceae on the planet

. ‘My first visit to elBulli, in the 90s, was an epiphany’, he tells ABC during a walk around his estate together with the chef Luis Valls -two Michelin stars at El Poblet (Valencia)- in which he confesses that it was Adria who pushed him to create this space that is admired around the world.

He did so during a visit to Perpignan (France) in 2010 – a year before elBulli closed – when they toured a garden of citrus fruits in pots together. “In that climate they had to move them to greenhouses with the arrival of cold weather. And I said out loud: ‘How is it possible that they could do it there and in Valencia, which is a perfect place for citrus fruits, we didn’t think of it? Ferran looked at me and said: “Do it”,” he says as the fifth generation of a family dedicated to citrus fruit – to the trees, not to the sale of fruit.

In the face of the urban pressure that this area of the Mediterranean still suffers from, he resists the conservation of half a thousand different citrus fruits and their research for scientific, artistic and gastronomic purposes. It does not market them. In the space where Todoli’s father kept the tools, there is now a gastronomic laboratory and a vast library with everything related to them.

Among his closest collaborators is Valls, who has filled El Poblet – a space that belongs to the Quique Dacosta Group – with the aromas, flavours and textures of the fruits that grow and mutate there, and which break the schemes of the minuscule offer that is handled in the markets. Oranges, lemons, grapefruit and mandarins have their own surname and character here to inspire the Valencian haute cuisine that Dacosta has delegated with complete autonomy in his hands since 2017.

Like Todolí, the work of this chef – one of the most committed from the very first moment with the solidarity aid he provided to give food to the victims of the dana – is a tribute to the land they both love. Exploring, knife in hand, from tree to tree, is the chef’s way of discovering that flash of creativity when he puts, for example, a meiwa – which is like a sweet, fragrant kumquat that evokes stone fruit – to his nose or mouth. He is seduced by the plurality of nuances he finds, from bitter to sour and sweet, from astringency to the unctuousness of its essential oils, from the rinds, the albedo and the juice-laden vesicles of its segments.

Valls goes beyond the obvious use of these fruits in desserts and petit fours. Although with them, he has precisely one of the most surprising results for diners who come to this centrally located restaurant, just a minute’s walk from Valencia’s Town Hall square. This is a torrija that he makes without bread, replacing it with the thick, fleshy albedo of a lumia de Valencia that he makes with white chocolate and mandarin orange juice -Todolí preserves some of the old varieties of Valencia, which have now disappeared. This fruit, as unknown as it is historic, has had its roots in this part of the Mediterranean since the 15th century. ‘There is a reference that Pedro Pintor, doctor to the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, taught the people of Naples how to prepare a medicine with Hyacinth and the juice of this lily’, Todolí explains.

The maximum use of these citrus fruits, above all as aromatics – there are some with hints of vanilla or cocoa – runs through his dishes, which delve into the pantry and the traditional recipe book. Their menus – “Territori”, nine courses and 165 euros; and “Ciutat Vella”, 11 courses and 195 euros – start with the signature cured meats made in the restaurant itself. A part that connects with the popular, bringing to the table morsels such as Easter sausage, horse loin – in a tribute to the deep-rooted consumption of this meat in Valencia – or ‘figatell’ – a mixture of lean pork, dewlap and pork liver wrapped in ‘redaño’ – converted into a ‘sobrasada’.

Rice, eel and lemon

Another reference to the ‘terreta’ as the eel is in his menu with a sequence in which he cooks an ‘allipebrat’ rice – a nod to the ‘all i pebre’ – with salted lemon. He works with curing, maturing and fermentation in which kombuchas and vinegars made with oranges or limes appear. Rice also forms an indirect part of another jewel of the Albufera, the duck, which he cures with this cereal inoculated with koji, following the ancestral preservation formula that in China gave rise to the primitive sushi.

Valls is not the only chef who has found inspiration in this sort of paradise of vibrant yellows, intense oranges, greens, pinks and pastel shades. Dacosta himself, Albert Adrià, Ricard Camarena and Bruno Verjus have fallen in love with citrus fruits such as Buddha’s hand or poncil -whose albedo has a crunchy and sweet bite, with spicy points such as ginger-, with paprika such as yuzu or sudachi, or with Australian limes -from which comes a hit of today’s cuisine such as blood citrus caviar-, as have Dacosta himself, Albert Adrià, Ricard Camarena and Bruno Verjus. The latter is French, at the head of Table, in Paris, number three in the world in The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.