Yelel Cañas was born in Valencia, he has roots in Teruel and also in Italy, but he could be from any other part of the world. Precisely wherever it is is the least important thing in the life construction of this chef who lives as he learned: enjoying nature in all its dimensions.
His story has so many stories that choosing one is not easy: more than a decade ago, when the craze for gastronomy was still incipient, he opened a bio-cuisine restaurant, self-supplied with food from the family farm, which was a pioneer in his neighborhood, the Carmen de Valencia. Years later he closed it, and he is still nostalgic for that room of his attached to the earth in which he opted for flowers and mushrooms as the true protagonists of the dish. Without artifice.
The brand remained with Kiaora, which still embroiders her jackets and gives its name to the social gastronomy project that she shares with her partner, Silvia Fraccaroli. Because Cañas continues cooking, he never stops doing it. His life journey in recent years has taken him to Barcelona, where he advised restaurants such as The Green Spot, and finally to settle in the Gúdar-Javalambre region, in Teruel.
There it resides now, although it never stops still. Due to his ambition to “discover, try, learn and participate in social projects”, as he explains, a few weeks ago he undertook a trip that will take him through Portugal and, through the south of Spain, to Morocco. Accompanied by his family, which includes his three-year-old daughter, he hopes to spend three months in the motorhome and says his plan is to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas cooking for “whoever needs it.” It is his maxim.
We talk while they move to the Portuguese Algarve to learn about an organic farming project, one of their great passions. Before, they passed through a self-sufficient pasture thanks to the production of sheep, goat, cow and deer meat, black-legged pork, honey and all types of vegetables. From there they got the idea of exploring the possibilities of the acorn as a raw material for pâtés, flours or coffees. An idea that he plans to exploit in Rubielos de Mora, in Teruel, where his house is now.
“We have collected boletus, strawberry trees, chestnuts, acorns, wild aromatic and spicy plants, and even mussels and barnacles! Traveling you can also be as self-sufficient as you want. We have not gone to any supermarket in three weeks, only to small shops of local producers,” she explains. There's a reason he calls himself "the Mountain Chef", a nickname that pays tribute to his belief in the multiple opportunities that nature provides, a philosophy that he has learned during his travels, from Panama to New Zealand, India and Bolivia, where They promoted the social gastronomic festival, the Ishanka San Javier.
As on those trips, but now older and more experienced, Yelel Cañas seeks to learn. “We want to investigate gastronomic contexts through the wildest and wildest territories, learning and sharing from the smallest and most unique producers and using cooking as a social tool,” says who, for this purpose, focuses mainly on getting closer to local communities, He defends that they are the ones that support "more coherent and responsible" consumption, and even work on reconstruction work after the recent earthquake. He says that they have a clear direction, "never stops" and until the end of March he does not think about returning home .
The journey they undertake, and which Cañas is recounting these days little by little on social networks, will be part of the documentary filmed about his life by film director Patxi Uriz, winner of the 2016 Goya Award for Best Short Documentary for Hijos de la Tierra. Uriz's project wants to show how those who, like Cañas, have chosen the rural world as a space live because in the cities they did not find a way to work to live instead of living to work. He will return to the mountain, but first he wants to make sure that his daughter—"my motivation"—absorbs well everything that happens. "She's understanding a lot of the 'whys' of food and that's amazing," he concludes.
