Gold bread, fish-eye fritters, mushroom wine and other oddities from Madrid Fusión

Created by Juan Manuel Moreno and costing €1,380 for a 400g chunk, the élite loaf was unveiled yesterday (Tuesday) at one of Europe's largest gourmet trade fairs.

Master baker Moreno says the 400g loaf contains a gram each of edible gold and silver, plus 20 grams of edible flowers, and uses salt which is hand-extracted from rocks in order to avoid having to 'blow them up', causing damage to the environment.

Moreno presented another VIP bread at Madrid Fusión last year, which was then one of the most expensive in the world – but 'only' a seventh of the price of this year's, at €200 a loaf.

Yesterday, he showcased two, of the same weight, price and ingredients, but the second also included quinoa and chia.

Moreno's Pan Piña in Algatocín, Málaga province, is considered one of the best bakeries in Spain and his regular clients include Arab Sheikhs and Chinese and Russian billionaire tycoons.

Other weirdness to come out of Madrid Fusión is Ángel León's sea-honey, sea-sugar and fish-chips.

Owner of the three-Michelin-starred restaurant Aponiente, León showed how slow-boiling the marine plant ruppia – harvested from the coastal marshes in the province of Cádiz – could produce honey.

He and other chefs have started using a type of worm used for fishing and found in the marshes as main ingredients for some of their dishes, insisting that the public's repulsion at the idea of eating worms is 'purely cultural' and 'should be challenged'.

Last year, León presented a type of sugar he had created from sea water, but admitted later it had 'not gone down very well'.

In a bid to get kids to eat more fish, León has been working with school catering firm Compass to create foodstuffs that do not, in fact, look like fish – pieces that appear more like chicken, plus pasta, and even chips made entirely from fish with no potato in them.

He uses hake, as it is cheap, so as to keep school meals in the province within normal price ranges.

More useful than sea-honey, perhaps, is 'Leggie', a vegan 'meat' made in Madrid – adding to numerous other types already on the market – in response to growing demand, given that vegan takeaway and home delivery requests have multiplied fourfold in the last two years in Spain.

Also on the subject of fish, Spain's Dani García joined Australia's Joshua Niland on stage for a presentation that totally blew apart everyone's beliefs about this foodstuff – claiming it does not need to be fresh, or washed in water.

Niland said he leaves fish over three weeks between catching and cooking, and that it does not go off since, once it is out of the water, it should not come into contact with it at all – scraping off the scales and top layer of skin and then blotting it with paper to remove as much moisture as possible.

It is the moisture that makes it go off, Niland explains, and by preventing this, the fish remains edible, safe and even improves in flavour, plus the method cuts waste and, as a consequence, reduces over-fishing.

Perhaps not something we should try at home.

Rather like a popular saying in Spain concerning pork and ham goes – that every part of the pig should be used – Niland has the same convictions about fish: whilst Spanish chefs and ordinary households use the bones and head to make stock for paella and casseroles, Niland uses the liver to make pâté, roasts the heart like a chicken, and even uses the eyes.

He describes how he puts fish eyes through a liquidiser with tapioca to make a paste which he then fries and serves up as a snack.

If this description is enough to make even the most hardened carnivore turn vegan, the Girona restaurant which used to be number one in the world and remains consistently in the top 10 has the solution.

Joan Roca from El Celler de Can Roca says ripe, mature and roasted beetroot has a similar texture to meat and serves it up in vegan dishes, which he says also responds to the climate crisis as it grows well even during a drought.

His vegan fish roe, or caviar, is made with purple carrot cured in cocoa butter.

An increasing number of restaurants in Spain use mainly plant-based ingredients – one of which is the Michelin-starred Bagá in Jaén, which says 80% of its dishes are vegetable-based.

Russian twins Ivan and Sergey Berezutskiy from the acclaimed Twins Garden restaurant in Moscow - who own a livestock farm and allotments to supply them with ingredients straight from home – presented their 'grapeless wine list', which features over 20 types.

Grape substitutes include mushrooms fermented in Bourgogne yeast, and yellow tomatoes which are baked to increase their sweetness before being fermented and then aged in barrel.

The brothers also serve up 'squid' made from white bean paste using a 3D printer – and theirs is not the only use of new technology in the catering world: Siro Foods and IBM have jointly created a tool which studies masses of online data to find out the types of food diners all over the world like and dislike, in order to serve as inspiration for chefs when trying out new recipes and creating menus.

Photograph: Pan Piña