René Redzepi
Redzepi's restaurant in Copenhagen, Noma, has been voted No 1 in the World's 50 Best every year since 2010 and his belief in the importance of time and place in cooking has had global influence. He is a co-founder of Cook It Raw and has attended all five events: Denmark, Italy, Lapland, Japan, Poland
There is one moment I will never forget from the first Cook It Raw in Denmark in 2009. David Chang, the extraordinary chef from Momofuku in New York, is walking in a forest outside Copenhagen and he falls to his knees in a patch of wild garlic. "Holy shit!" you can tell he's thinking. "What I'm looking at isn't scenery, it's food!" I see it in my cooks all the time. You might be at a farm and you take some asparagus fresh out of the soil, heated by the sun. You chew into that crunchy mouthful and you know your idea of asparagus has changed for ever. You will always be searching for that quality again.
That moment of realisation is magical: the world is edible.
My friend Alessandro Porcelli came to me in 2009 and said: "Listen René, I have an idea." Cook It Raw would bring together a small group of chefs from around the world and ask them to prepare one dish each using local ingredients but with as few appliances as possible. Ideally we would cook with just our hands, a knife and some fire. That first event would coincide with the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which was being held in my home city of Copenhagen.
I liked the idea straightaway. I knew it would be meaningful for these people to bring their culture, their brains into our world and to have them look at things that for us are natural and normal. To me, Cook It Raw is about collaboration, sharing ideas and using knowledge as a way of increasing innovation. I have always believed that we could move forwards faster together than alone.
That first time in 2009 was one of the meals of the decade, probably one of the meals of my lifetime. There were 11 chefs in Copenhagen: I had met all of them before, though I didn't know any of them well. Sure, I had been drunk with several of them, but it was something new and intimate to spend three days together, showing them my restaurant and my favourite little part of the beach where I think the plants are most delicious. It felt like going to camp: you get on the bus and it's really exciting because you are free from your everyday responsibilities.
Cook It Raw often feels like free-falling into the unknown. You have to step out of your daily routine and put yourself on the line. In a restaurant, you have a perfect set-up, everything functions as you want it. Then, for the duration of Cook It Raw, you erase that. You have to do things very differently, and maybe it will fuck up, but it is this change of routine that pushes you into new ideas and new ways of looking at things.
The Cook It Raw in Copenhagen, for example, was the first time I ever served live fjord shrimp. We have done it for years now in Noma, and lots of people expect it, but that idea came out of thinking about rawness and also, "What can we serve that can only happen today?" One way of doing that is taking fjord shrimp, which you can only get once a day, because if you keep them longer they die. They are the way that the ocean tastes on that particular day. At Cook It Raw, I served them in a container that was closed and when people opened them they just saw these animals jumping back and forth.
We often eat things that are alive, that you kill by putting in your mouth; the big difference is that you don't usually have two eyes looking at you. But it gives an amazing sense of camaraderie. "Oh, she ate it, now I have to do it, too…"
The first Cook It Raw in Copenhagen will always be special to me, but since then we have gone to Italy, Finland, Japan and Poland – all of them unique. Each event pushes you, you see new places, you meet your peers and the Cook It Raw family grows.
I always tell the chefs at Noma: as a restaurant we have two feet planted in the soil here, but our minds should wander and explore everywhere. Cook It Raw is a way of doing that.
Has it helped me in my endeavours? Absolutely. I wouldn't want to be without it – there's no question about that.
Ben Shewry
Shewry was raised on a farm in New Zealand, and has foraged wild plants for as long as he can remember. He moved to Australia in his 20s, and has turned his Melbourne restaurant Attica into one of the best in the world. He attended Cook It Raw in Japan and Poland
When we arrived at Tokyo airport, there was a media scrum, with maybe 35 journalists and photographers. I remember walking through with René Redzepi and saying: "I wonder who they're waiting for?" And he said: "I think they're here for us, chef." It was surreal. We got on this big tour bus and a few of them chased us down the highway. At one point a car pulled alongside us and this guy with a video camera, his head and shoulders out of the window, was just filming the bus.
My first Cook It Raw was a tough one, personally. Right before I was due to leave, a friend of mine, a fish wholesaler called Jason Jurie, died. I also had a touch of depression – that's probably not a word I like to say, but the truth is I was feeling really blue, and being with the guys in Japan gave me a lift. When you reach a certain level as a cook there's only so many people who understand what you go through. Being with my friends at Cook It Raw gave me the spirit to continue.
Japan as a society is very structured and at times I felt like a bull in a teashop in terms of etiquette. Poland, on the other hand, was more like going home to New Zealand. For my dish, I looked to my own heritage: a Maori tradition of cooking called the hangi. Basically you dig a pit in the ground, light a huge bonfire, and when it has burned down you put food on the hot rocks, cover it with soil and leave it for about 10 hours. So we recreated this in Poland with two baby wild boars.
When it came time to serve the dish, we played the Ramones song Pet Sematary and people were dancing on the tables, going nuts. Everyone was laughing and I was like: "Man, we've done this in the right country!"
Massimo Bottura
Bottura's Osteria Francescana in Modena has three Michelin stars and came fourth in the World's 50 Best list in 2012. He has attended the Cook It Raw events in Denmark, Italy and Finland
The first dish I cooked at Cook It Raw I called Pollution. Before I arrived in Copenhagen, I read a newspaper article that looked at the future state of the world's oceans. Already 90% of large fish have disappeared from our seas and some scientists believe that by 2050 the waters will be so polluted that only the prehistoric creatures – squid, monkfish, jellyfish and algae – will be left. I wanted to create a dish just from these ingredients: it would serve as both a warning, but also a reminder that chefs need to adapt as well. The finished plate looked a little murky, like a dirty riverbank, which I think was shocking to people. But whoa, when you tasted it, it stung the palate. The world is changing, and we as chefs have to change with it. That is why in my cooking I stay close to my "territorio", my area. I work with social projects in Italy to clean the Po river and I passionately believe that we have to protect our agricultural schools, because they are in very bad shape, and if we don't fight we will lose them. We speak about these aspects a lot at Cook It Raw. It is fantastic to see the younger chefs so focused on those messages. They are very influential, these guys, because they are almost rock stars now.
It is great fun, too. My abiding memory of the trips is sitting around a fire in Lapland, with a beer in our hands. There was René, Albert Adrià and Dave Chang and we were just laughing so hard. I thought: "Oh my God, this is perfect." There was a fire in the middle, we weren't chefs, there weren't journalists – just a group of people, a group of friends.
Alex Atala
Atala's restaurant in São Paulo, DOM, has been voted No 5 in the world. He cooks ingeniously and indigenously, using produce from Brazil and particularly the Amazon. He has attended the first four Cook It Raws
The beauty of Cook It Raw lies in the fact that by presenting us chefs with challenges, reducing the ingredients available to us, taking us out of our comfort zones and stripping away out egos there is a real chance of failure. With the chance of failure comes fear and this is the fear that really gets our collective creative juices flowing.
In Japan, the final dinner was about to begin and I had succeeded in destroying everything I had made the day before. I didn't have any idea how to salvage my dish so I swallowed my pride and asked my fellow chefs for help. The kitchen was fired up with the spirit of the event: a bunch of chefs constantly improvising and adapting, creating and learning as they go. Professional chefs are traditionally fiercely competitive, secretive of their recipes and techniques and jealous of others. Not so with us, we have become a brotherhood.
Albert Adrià
Albert worked with his brother Ferran at the groundbreaking El Bulli in Spain for more than two decades. They are now partners in Tickets and 41º in Barcelona
In Lapland I remember being cold and I hate being cold. I will also always remember the incredible trip to get from Helsinki to our final destination, with everyone together in the train all night, and all the beer and all the vodka. From the first Raw, in Copenhagen, I remember the craziness of Davide Scabin who served us raw meat in cinnamon sticks. In general, I'd say that first Raw was the most important. It was at René Redzepi's home and exceptional, with a magical last night full of happiness because of this feeling that we all had done a good job, together. In Italy, at Collio, I made an apple dish that I liked and I made it again, afterwards, to serve it at El Bulli. In Finland, I tried a red and white dish that was supposed to look like deer blood in the snow, but it didn't taste that great. And in Japan, my mackerel dish was a mistake. But did we ever eat well at Umi on the last night. They opened it just for us after service. When I left that Cook It Raw, I said to myself, I have to go back there at least once before I die.
Claude Bosi
Bosi is the chef patron of the two Michelin-starred restaurant Hibiscus, in central London. He was born in Lyon, but made his reputation in Ludlow, Shropshire, before moving to the capital in 2007. The only British-based chef invited to Cook It Raw, he has attended all five events
It was at the Cook It Raw in Collio, Italy, that I drank raw blood for the first time. They slaughtered a pig in front of us, and the Italian chef Davide Scabin asked me: "Have you ever tasted blood?" I replied: "Get lost!" But he said: "Go on, try it." So I had some and the flavour was just fantastic. I said: "Davide, I'm going to do a blood soup!" So I kept the blood and made my dish with it. At Cook It Raw, you never know what to expect. We served the blood in the evening, mixed with cream and served with local cockles. You could never recreate a dish like that: you do it once and it's finished, never again.
At the first Cook It Raw in Copenhagen, I left London with some of my own produce, but I didn't use any of it when I found out what was available there – giant king crab, Danish beach herbs and flowers. That event changed my approach to cooking. I realised: "Fantastic food is all around us – why are we not using it?"
Cook It Raw is not a holiday, it's more like doing a stage in a great restaurant. Every time you go somewhere different: you see different people, cultures and produce and different ways of thinking about cooking.
Iñaki Aizpitarte
Aizpitarte is one of the leading young chefs in France and runs two highly regarded restaurants in Paris, Le Chateaubriand and Le Dauphin
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of the first Cook It Raw, in Copenhagen, is the couscous we ate for lunch on the last day. It had been prepared by a French chef named Bernard who'd been living in Denmark for a while. It was really good, we were really hungry and as we were eating by ourselves, by the water, the sun came out. It was a perfect moment. That night, the ending of the big dinner, with everyone celebrating together, after sharing so much, was rather euphoric. And very moving. Then we all went a bit crazy.
The Cook It Raw I liked most was the one in Lapland. I'll always remember the day I spent with Petter Nilsson gathering all kinds of ingredients. We went in the wood, we fished. We smoked our fish. We picked herbs. Everything we put on the plate, at the end of the day, came from our efforts. That feeling of making a dish from scratch, with another chef, was fantastic.
When does such a thing happen in the daily life of a cook, especially when you live in Paris? Seldom. In Italy, what I liked the most was their varieties of lettuce – there was one that looked like a rose. I have never seen anything like it elsewhere.
Alessandro Porcelli
Porcelli is the founder and director of Cook It Raw
I do not want to broaden Cook It Raw – you could not do it for 300 chefs; it needs to be intimate – but I do want to broaden its spirit. My hope is that in the future we will tackle more serious issues. Instead of sitting round a fire talking about football, we need to discuss how to deal with problems such as obesity.
I wouldn't have said it at the first event, or even the second, but I would like Cook It Raw to influence worldwide cuisine. This movement started small but now we have a voice, let's bloody use it. Why not? OFM
For a photo gallery of Cook It Raw events go to guardian.co.uk/inpictures.
Observer Cook it Raw event
To launch the Cook it Raw book, published by Phaidon Press, Observer editor John Mulholland is joined by CIR co-founder Alessandro Porcelli and leading chefs René Redzepi, Albert Adrià, Alex Atala and Daniel Patterson for a panel discussion, a series of talks and an audience Q&A. For more details of the event on Sunday, 28 April, click here. To make a booking, click here.
