Jordi Artal’s Potatoes Make Your Potatoes Look Like Garbage

The humble baked potato is so full of possibility. The possibility of fluffy, hot, simple perfection when served alongside a medium-rare steak. The possibility of mythical classiness, like the baked potato Jackie Onassis reportedly ate daily, topped with sour cream and beluga caviar. And alas, the possibility of grey tuna and sweetcorn gunk served on top of a sad, raw-in-the -middle baked potato.

With the season for root vegetables upon us, food mags are bursting with recipes to inspire you to cook a spud that doesn't suck. Think your tuber game is good? Trust me, no matter how awesome you think your potato is, Jordi Artal's baked sweet potato will make your baked sweet potato look like a sack of garbage.

Artal's restaurant Cinc Sentits in Barcelona earned a Michelin star in 2008. Focusing on contemporary Catalan cuisine, it was an early advocate of the tasting menu format in Spain, and it's serious about seasonality. "The mind and the body craves seasonality," Artal says. "I don't want to have cherry or strawberry now, and in summer, don't bring me venison and sweet potatoes! Then I want something cold, because it's hot. [We] try to stay very close to eating and cooking things in season, looking at where we're at in the year."

The whole seasonality thing might sound like a bit of restaurant cliché at this point, but in Catalunya it's not just a way of being fancy about food. Here, seasonality really is a way of life.

In Barcelona, October and November are the time of the , when sweet potato season is in full swing. You'll find stalls on street corners around the city sellingroasted chestnuts and baked sweet potatoes wrapped in foil, and food shops and markets are brimming with the most beautiful sweet potatoes you've ever seen. At Cinc Sentits, the menu has begun to incorporate ingredients like black truffle, game, mushrooms and root vegetables.

For someone whose restaurant has been called one of the best restaurants in Spain, Artal's background is slightly unusual. Being a chef is actually his second career; his first one was in Silicon Valley, working as a marketing manager in tech. He's never been to a cooking school or worked in a restaurant other than his own. During his California years, he and his sister used to invite friends over for elaborate dinner parties.

"People would come over expecting pizza, spaghetti, or whatever, and we'd make a seven-course tasting menu. My sister would find some crazy wine and at the end of the meal people would say, 'Oh, you should open a restaurant.'"

At that time, opening a restaurant seemed a ridiculous idea. Artal and his sister both had high-paying jobs in Silicon Valley, and times were booming. Soon enough, however, the bubble burst. Burnt-out on tech and office work, Artal told himself, I'm done—I'm ready to go home now.

He moved back home to Barcelona and opened the restaurant with his sister in 2004. "I had no preconceived notion about how to do things. My way is a bit different perhaps," Artal says. "That has been good and bad—I don't have any blinders like 'We have to do it this way because that's the way it's always been done.'" Instead, the siblings have relied on old-fashioned trial-and-error. "That's how we got to where we are today. Passion, sweat, work, and long hours."

It paid off. In December of 2004, Cinc Sentits was named as one of best six new restaurants in the country. Four years later, it got the Michelin star.

Artal was born in Canada and learned to cook from his Catalan mother and grandmother. He says that the food at Cinc Sentits is "what my grandmother would recognise as being her kind of food, but modernised, brought to the current day. A lot of Catalan food is what we call 'brown food' because a lot of it is very long cooking times, and it all end up being very brown. So we try to avoid brown!"

You might know what he's talking about if you've ever come across a horrendous-looking dish in Catalunya that also happened to taste fan-fucking-tastic. This stems from necessity, Jordi says. "Having to eat cheaper cuts of the animal, to eat the whole animal—the basis of Spanish food and Catalan food is necessity:finding ways to turn cheap, inexpensive things into tasty things."

Catalunya is a place that has access to both sea and mountains, which means access to amazing produce. The ("sea and mountain" in Catalan) is a classic category of dishes mixing seafood and meat. Artal notes that in the past seafood was cheap and abundant, but chicken—most often an heirloom breed—was harder to come by."[These dishes] began because you wanted to stretch out the very expensive chicken with very cheap lobster. So the idea of mixing seafood with meat began because Catalunya and Spain was a very poor place for a long time."

That approach—elevating humble and widely available Catalan ingredients—is apparent in Artal's sweet potato recipe. He roasts the tuber whole until it's super-soft, and then scoops most of the insides out, leaving a little flesh close to the skin. He purees the flesh and transforms it into a foam with the help of a siphon. Then he places a poached quail egg—barely cooked, so that the yolk is still liquid—in the bottom half of the scraped-out potato. He tops that with the warm foam, a thin slice of French 'épices, and cubes of gelled sherry. The top half is put back on so that it looks exactly like the typical baked sweet potato you get from a stall during the Castanyada. To capture the feeling of the fire from the stall, Jordi pipes smoke inside the potato. When you open it, smoke rises from the orange flesh.

"It's very seasonal, very local, and fun to eat because there's texture in there from the potato, roasted skin, the foam," Artal says, with a dreamy look on his face. "[And] also the texture from the crunchy bread, and the yolk is runny. I love egg yolk with sweet potato."

That's all well and good for an award-winning chef, but does he have any cooking tips for us mere mortals without siphons and smoking machines?

"Get a few regular, small potatoes. Take some coarse cooking salt, whip an egg white, and mix it with the salt. Then pack the potatoes in this salt mixture, so you can't see them. Stick them in the oven and bake them, 190 to 200 degrees [Celsius] for an hour to an hour and a half. Take them out, let them cool, crack open the now-hard salt mountain. And inside you'll have these truly amazing, tender, and slightly salted potatoes."

Now that's a dish even we hobos can pull off.