There is no trace of Isma Prados (Sabadell, 1974) on social networks. Not Instagram, not TikTok, not Twitter… With a single exception, but it’s a professional network, it has a profile on Linkedin. Though no longer in the spotlight, the chef is still very active in what he calls his gastronomic-technical office. After five years in the media (2003-2008), during which he arrived in the homeland of the Catalans through cooking shows on TV-3 (Cuina per solters or La cuina de l’Isma), Prados directed his professional career to other places. He is self-employed and provides his services to food production companies such as Ametller Origen or La Sirena. He has also been a professor in the Culinary and Gastronomic Sciences course at the CETT University of Barcelona for five years. A task that he has given up this year because new projects are waiting for him next year that he cannot reconcile with his teaching.
His last television appearance was the show Hoy cocinas tú by the producer of Karlos Arguiñano on La Sexta. It was 2011, and then he wanted to regain his identity as a chef, but reconsidered what format he wanted. He’d gone through set menu and haute cuisine restaurants, taught shopping and cooking on TV, written a dozen recipe books… And, with all his baggage in the kitchen, he decided to close his gastronomic-technical office as a freelancer open and provide services to companies in the food sector.
“I’ve always known that my job is to be a chef, not a presenter or a communicator,” he says in the dining room of his home in Barcelona’s Eixample, where he has a professional kitchen that serves as his base of operations. For him, the media was a means to achieve other things, he admits. “You can’t establish a profession or modus vivendi in the media,” he adds.
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With diverse causes and an in-depth discourse on the profession that’s as broad as the products we bring to the table, he believes fame is “like a carrot on a fishing pole that takes you places you don’t go wants to be.” “. He recalls having a good time and enjoying the years on television, but says he always understood that fame, “which is very fleeting,” should not be confused with success He was stopped in the street during his media years, but he’s now part of the city’s crowds.
So he started research and development. “At the time, I saw a way forward in research and development, but in large-scale food production.” It was a challenge for him to “learn how to prepare food,” he says, and bring all of his cooking knowledge into such a large department with very high consumption and expenditure data. “I knew when a broth was ready, when the sauce had lost the acidity of the tomato… but I passed all that on to food retail production.” [venta al detalle] “It’s complex,” he says. The processes must be described 100%, and many factors play a role here, such as food safety, shelf life and whether the product is good.
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The first project he carried out was in the Horeca sector (abbreviation of hotels, restaurants, cafeterias) and consisted of setting up a food production kitchen to serve the fifth row cooling lines for the restaurants on the Grau Roig ski slopes in Andorra. where you can’t have structure to cook with. It consisted of making the production, transporting it to the tracks and having the final assembly done there. He became Executive Chef of various types of restaurants on the slopes where budget control is crucial. He controlled the scale of a production, particularly from a budgetary perspective. “You have to know where to touch a recipe to optimize costs. When producing 150,000 preparations, saving five cents per serving can mean a lot of savings,” he adds.
But then he switched to retail and worked in the development and research departments of food companies such as Ametller Origen or La Sirena Frozen Foods. 70% of the work is analyzing and thinking and 30% doing and counting, and the tests are done by himself in his kitchen. “I’ve been very fortunate to be able to take part in very diverse projects that give you a broader view of my job,” says this chef, who first started studying engineering but was immediately drawn to the stove. Before he went into the media, he worked in various restaurants. First in Bar Canaletes in Caldes de Montbui, then in several by Ramon Parellada, such as Fonda Europa or Senyor Parellada. He was also at the Drolma, at the Hotel Majestic, where he studied under Fermí Puig, a chef he cites several times as a reference, or at La Vinya del Senyor, where he learned a lot about wine culture.
He says he has always had a liking for human disciplines that have a specific geometry or language of their own. “The ability of the human intellect is related to all languages that one can identify with,” he points out. “I like jazz, sailing, chess, cooking…” he lists. The first becomes clear as soon as he crosses the entrance, where he is given a John Coltrane Blue Train poster and an electronic drum kit is glimpsed in a room at the end of a corridor lined on either side with books. “My wife is an editor,” he explains.
He usually eats at home or at professional tastings, but he says there’s an Italian restaurant in his neighborhood that he frequents, LeccaBaffi, and that the last place he ate was at the Thai Garden. He says he doesn’t watch media cooking shows like MasterChef or Joc de Cartes. And he claims a historical TV-3 show, Cuines. “It was an open window for all chefs. I don’t understand how the chain killed it, it was one of the most original things. That’s where I discovered Carles Gaig, Ferran Adrià, Joan Roca…” he laments. For him, this was a cooking show he created. In fact, it claims that nutrition education should take place in schools. The canteens should be a classroom where students participate in the preparation of their own food, doing age-appropriate tasks so that everyone learns to cook and eat. “The really disruptive act today is to buy a product at the market, cook it at home and eat it,” he observes, with the same smile and kindness that he receives.
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