Reference of botanical cuisine, Maximo Cabrera will be in Buenos Aires to give a series of seminars at the Professional Pastry School. Plant-based cooking is no longer a niche trend; It became a cuisine that demands precision, study and understanding of biological processes. In this framework, Cabrera will inaugurate an intensive academic cycle during the month of March, under the seal of its educational platform Raw.
News: You are Argentine, born in Balcarce. Did it have to do with the local potatoes?
Maximo Cabrera: No, but I am the son of the countryman Cabrera who was a reference in Argentine gaucho poetry, a reciter of verses. He passed away a long time ago.
News: When and how did your passion for this vegetable cuisine begin?
Cabrera: My mother was a cook and I studied biology in Mar del Plata… There was a passion for eating and a desire to expand the sensory library. Science began to enter my universe. I saw that if I ate a certain thing, my performance was different…I left home and started cooking for myself. And there I embarked on the development of a kitchen that, at that time, 30 years ago, did not have a great projection. I wanted to eat delicious food and not use animal products, because performance-wise they didn’t suit me. I opened up a mystery and as time went by, it became a challenge. Because by not using the usual, I expanded the opening to cook, applying techniques, investigating flavors, cultures…
News: Where did you train in the specialty?
Cabrera: When I arrived in Buenos Aires I dedicated myself to research, as a self-taught person because there was nowhere to study botanical cuisine and neither is there today. Because Crudo ends up being like a master’s degree for those who want to learn not only about plants, mushrooms and ferments, but also to know what happens with the anthropological and sensory issue of food.
News: What are the differences between vegetarian and botanical cuisine?
Cabrera: I don’t like to speak from lack; because my proposal is more cuisine of inclusion than exclusion. It is not a cuisine designed for vegetarians or vegans… everyone can eat this food without thinking too much. I like to call it botanical cuisine. I do not follow fundamentalist guidelines nor am I apprehensive about the rest of the cuisines. Mine is a design that includes ingredients, digestion, the planet, pleasure and everything on the same plate. It is about not only repeating what has already been done, but also giving yourself the opportunity to generate new things with the usual products. There is no need to try a vegetable meat. It’s about using a handful of carrots well.
News: You propose a professional training system whose objective is to “demystify vegetable cooking through a clear working method, moving away from improvisation to focus on pure technique.” Why demystify? What technique are you referring to?
Cabrera: To demystify is to remove prejudice from a cuisine that for a long time was depreciated, because organoleptically it did not contribute much, because it was not in the hands of professionals who were interested in good eating, but by people who came from macrobiotics or places where health was more important than pleasure. Then the cooks began to get interested, but they had more questions than answers. When they saw that there were characters like me, they said wow! It’s more than a broth or steamed vegetables, there is much more fabric to cut. And they saw the work with fungi, the fermentations… the possibilities that the same product has multiplied. Here appear techniques that are executed differently, achieving new textures and changes at a sensory level. And on an intellectual level too, because when you go to a restaurant you are going to look for something to happen to you. And things happen on a physical-chemical level, for example. Many cooks do not know how taste works, how the neural network works, what is a flavor instead of a flavor. That there are five flavors and the rest are flavors. (Flavor involves sensory perception of all the senses: sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste. It is different from flavor which is limited to appreciating sweet, salty, bitter and umami)
News: Did you work for a long time with living cuisine, raw food?
Cabrera: Yes, the premise was not to cook the food, to maintain the enzymatic load… I can work a product at a low temperature so that a type of enzyme is activated… By observing this, you build your sensory library. And so, you add a mushroom, a little-known fungus… For example, you use a lion’s mane, which is an adaptogen that regenerates neurons. Look at the level this goes to! 20 years ago neuronal regeneration was unthinkable. A cooked lion’s mane has the texture of a gizzard. I think applying many cooking vectors is a new discipline. You have to start with what seems obvious such as flavor, taste, the digestive aspect. Then you move on to the techniques and you are new to cooking.
News: I was able to interview the chef, restaurateur and educator Matthew Kenney who brought to Buenos Aires, before the pandemic, the guidelines of plant based food, gastronomy of plants, fruits and seeds, without ingredients of animal origin. Do you know Kenney? Do they have an analog focus?
Cabrera: I was in this before it was called plant based food. I developed in Argentina, I didn’t go to learn with anyone. I know Kenney. We opened the first Crudo restaurant with Diego Castro who came from that side. Kenney had to live and develop in the USA and have references… it was not my case. But I had my challenge: if it doesn’t exist, I can generate it.
News: There is much left to generate…
Cabrera: Clear. And in that sense, I don’t like naming Crudo as a school. A school has a dogma, it has immovable concepts. For something that is constantly developing, the word study is the best. I have no problem undoing what I’ve already done when I find something better. You have to be humble to say up to this point it was good and now you have to retrace the path.
News: Fronda Pasaje is the restaurant that you founded in the El Born neighborhood, in Barcelona. It is a contemporary bistro that managed to position botanical cuisine in haute cuisine and was selected by the Michelin Guide. When did it open?
Cabrera: We opened a year and a bit ago. We go from raw cooking to smoked and roasted, and everything in between. I incorporated the fries with good local olive oils and coconut oil, which has a higher melting point. The restaurant has a wood-burning oven and there are no more authorizations to set up another one. The Catalans accepted us because they love innovation. We appeared with this madness and they gave us a Michelin mention last year and another mention now, in 2026; and a sustainability award from Time Out.
News: As for alcoholic drinks?
Cabrera: Allowed. At Fronda we have a variety of natural wines from the area, biodynamic, without sulfites; and different types of cavas. We prepare enzymatic drinks, with red fruits and adaptogens.
News: He lives more in Barcelona than in Buenos Aires.
Cabrera: Yes. I have a son, Moro, 12 years old who goes to school. And I am married to Clo Naser (43), his mother, my partner, a fundamental part of Crudo. We already travel a lot. We have to live here because of the school, although we return to Argentina a few months a year.
The agenda of the Pastry School It begins by trying sourdough bakery with the course Gluten-free breads with sprouts and live ferments (March 9 and 10), continues with an immersion in the flavors of the East with Plant-based Pan-Asian cuisine (March 11 and 12), where the concept of vegetable umami will be explored. Midway through the month, the topic will be functional nutrition with FUNGadelik (March 13), a module dedicated exclusively to the use of mushrooms and adaptogens.
News: What is plant umami and what are adaptogenic mushrooms?
Cabrera: Umami is the fifth taste, along with sweet, sour, bitter and salty, it is the taste that tells us this is delicious. It is challenging to discover umami in plant products. Professor Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University identified in 1908 that the glutamic acid in kombu seaweed was responsible for the umami flavor. Other products also generate umami, such as roasted tomatoes. Adaptogens – and the redundancy is worth it – adapt to the needs of each person, they are intelligent substances. For example, each fungus has a function that adapts to each organism, to regulate its homeostasis.
News: Bring in the Spanish pastry chef Toni Rodríguez, a world leader in plant-based pastry.
Cabrera: He is a relevant personality. Prepare what we call invoices and the pastry part that is difficult, because it is based on flour, egg, butter and milk… And there is a lot of work to develop a sponge cake, a puff pastry in another way.
For those seeking to professionalize online, the Crudo platform maintains its annual membership active as a continuity tool, with more than 200 hours of on-demand content and digital certification.
“I think we can say that the cuisine I make can be called cuisine of the unknown. Here there are new inputs that in the future will be part of our cultural heritage,” says Máximo before finishing the talk.
