What if you could taste light?

This week’s recipe transforms Olafur Eliasson’s luminous universe into a vibrant, plant-based dish. A feast for the senses, where color becomes flavor and perception is the main ingredient. Discover how art meets cuisine on the plate.

MASTERCHEFS & MASTERPIECES

Charlotte Madeleine CASTELLI

7/19/20252 min read

Eating Light: A Dish for Olafur Eliasson

In both the kitchen and art, everything comes down to light. Light that transforms an ingredient, light that sculpts the space of waiting, the same light that in Olafur Eliasson’s installations becomes body, temperature, vivid color. From this premise arises our recipe of the week—conceived as a true gastronomic transposition of his universe.

Beetroot gnocchi on basil cream.

A dish that enchants the eye before the palate: a bright green field, moist with chlorophyll, holds small, vibrant purple shapes, suspended in a kind of optical balance. The contrast between the deep magenta of the beetroot and the saturated green of basil pays homage to Eliasson’s work on sensory perception, inviting us to eat first with our eyes, and only then with our taste.

Recipe (inspired by the social kitchen of Studio Olafur Eliasson)

Ingredients for 4 servings:

* 300g starchy potatoes

* 200g cooked beetroot

* 100g all-purpose flour

* Salt and pepper to taste

* First-press extra virgin olive oil

* 80g fresh basil

* 20g pine nuts

* 1 tbsp nutritional yeast or Parmesan (optional)

* Fresh lemon juice

Method:

1. Prepare the gnocchi: Mash the potatoes and beetroot separately, then combine into a soft mixture. Add flour, salt, and knead quickly. Roll into cylinders and cut into small gnocchi, pressing gently with a fork to form ridges.

2. Make the green sauce: Blend basil, pine nuts, a drizzle of olive oil, lemon juice, and nutritional yeast. The result should be a velvety, bright, and fresh cream.

3. Cook and plate: Boil the gnocchi in salted water until they float. Drain gently and place them over a layer of green sauce, garnishing with a few fresh basil leaves.

A sustainable dish, like his vision: Olafur Eliasson is not just an artist of light, he is also a climate activist: in his Berlin kitchen, every dish is a microcosm of environmental ethics. Our proposal follows the same logic: few ingredients, plant-based, low ecological impact, and high sensory power. A gastronomic exercise in empathy that challenges the idea of “pleasure” as luxury, restoring it to its original dimension: that of care. In the gallery as in the kitchen, Eliasson invites us to redefine our presence in the world through experience. In this dish, synesthesia is served: color as flavor, temperature as emotion, matter as transformation.

by the Future's Kitchen Team