Hi everyone, welcome to potluck food talks.
And because you asked for it, we're going to talk about Mugaritz part two.
I think there's still a lot to talk about Mugaritz.
Yeah, that's true.
What did we talk about the last time?
Where did we end?
I have to say, like, while I was in Mugaritz is when I fell in love with the city or the
bus country in general.
Yes.
I can remember two special moments.
One was going to a cider house.
Oh yeah.
I was like, what is this?
I think it was Petritegui.
Like in the back of my memory, rebuilding the whole thing, I think it was Petritegui.
I mean, this was like 20 years ago.
And then going for pinches.
I remember the first time I went for pinches because we would work so hard.
And then we had just one day off and this experience of getting into one bar, one pinch
or one drink next bar and doing the same and doing like eight bars in a night.
Wow.
That was so nice.
It's super fun.
Yeah.
It's the same for me, honestly.
So, you know, for me, it's a mixture of San Sebastian, but also like the Basque countryside.
I really still today when I smell like wood fire, often remember getting out of the car
in front of Mugurids and smelling the like the fire burning, the charcoal burning, you
know, and just like mix of like cold mountain air and just like fire aspect is really stuck
in my mind.
You know, that actually happened to me when I first returned to the Basque country.
It was at least 10 or 11 years after I was in Mugarids.
And I remember smelling the air and having that memory effect of, oh, I've smelled, you
know, like this forest air before.
And it brought me right there, right back.
Yeah.
What about techniques?
Are there any memorable techniques that you remember?
What was your time in Mugarids?
Well, there's obviously a few classic ones, no?
There's most notably the caseina de ajo and the fine parsley dust particles.
I think we talked about that, right, in the last episode.
Yes.
I mean, there were lots of amazing, amazing techniques that were kind of impossible to
do.
I remember, you know, I told you, I started in the pastry section and I spoke with my
friend Kevin about this the other day, actually, because we were just laughing about it because
we had a pastry section at the same time.
And he heard the episode.
By the way, he's invited to do like a Mugarids episode.
He said he wanted to do like, let's say a part three.
Yeah, we have to do it.
Yeah, for sure.
He's got some stories to tell.
It's really funny.
So there were a couple of dishes that I was doing on the pastry section that were actually
so infuriatingly impossible to do.
So for example, we had a dish that was called licorice, right?
It starts off kind of okay.
You take kaolin, which is like an edible clay.
You blitz it with star anise.
Then you take celery sticks and you cut them into, you know, sort of rectangles and you
vacuum pack them with the star anise kaolin for I think it was like 23 days.
So I had to make my mise en place 23 days in the head.
That was the first thing.
So then you take the celery out of the kaolin after 23 days, you brush it off.
Then you take sugar cane honey.
You color it with charcoal powder.
So it's pitch black.
You bring it to a certain temperature.
It was like a hundred up to 160.
Drop it to like 130 and it had to be just right so that you could take a stencil, dip
it in this caramel and it formed a clean film on the bottom of your stencil.
Then you would take this celery stick.
And you would drop it through this caramel film and it had to be the perfect temperature
so that the caramel would coat this stick of celery perfectly.
If it would be too hot, it would just goop down and you'd have a sticky hot black mess
all over your section.
You do this in the middle of service by the way.
You had to do it a la minute because this thing had a life of 15 seconds to, you know,
to like be edible.
If it was too cold, the thing would goop fall down and just kind of shatter, you know, and
just look like shit.
And you drop it into lactose powder.
So it would be covered.
Anyway, long story short, it would look like a licorice sweet, black, shiny, covered in
like a white powder.
But you'd eat it and it tastes like licorice but it's celery.
Incredible.
And like I just said, this thing had a life of, I don't know, a minute max because it
was in the middle of fucking summer in Spain and you had a table of four and it'd be like,
yeah, we need four licorice right now.
You'd make the first one.
You'd be like, you know, like, just like a retard with like hot caramel, like burning
yourself like, ah, shit.
Trying to get it right.
Obviously the caramel doesn't stay at the same temperature.
So you're like looking, you're checking the temperature, the first one is on the plate.
You're like, fuck, you make the second one.
Maybe you make the second one.
Maybe you even make the third one.
You're not going to make the fourth one.
And even if you would make the fourth one, by the time you make the fourth one, the first
one's inedible.
I did this dessert in service, absolutely in the shit, or I think a month and a half.
And then they dropped it.
They were like, all right, it's not like, um, we're going to change you from the pastry
section to like a different section.
Don't remember which one.
And they were like, we're not going to have anybody else learn this dish.
It was an experiment and it's not working.
We don't want to, nobody has time to learn how to make it.
I think, I think that probably all the chefs were laughing at you like, oh, look, he's
actually trying to do it.
Probably you know, the guys on the fish section just like fucking drilling their salmonella,
you know, like it's like it's a Sunday afternoon.
I'm just, you know, whipping kuzu meringues and making fucking caramel.
Oh, it was, it was hectic.
It was not fun because also, you know, you could only do salt so much.
And then somebody screaming at you because they don't, you know, like they also know
it's like very difficult and not like it's super possible, but, um, they don't care.
They want to put their, I see, we're going to push them anyway.
We're going to see maybe he makes it possible.
And then at some point they were like, ah, no, it was never possible.
Sorry.
Yeah.
You actually said something really important.
Like back in my time, they would write this by hand in a, in a blackboard with chalk,
you know, but then they actually printed and put it on the wall.
That is this mantra.
Like the kind of like the kitchen slogan of Mugari.
That is something like the, the impossible from the, how is it the possible from the
impossible gets measured by the will of a human being.
Yeah, basically.
Yeah.
The difference between what's possible and impossible.
Exactly.
First of all, that like the interest, like the, the history of the quote is interesting
because one day I was, I don't know, like watching random quotes on Wiki quote and I
found the quote and I was like, oh, here it is.
And it was from a basketball coach from the States.
And I sent this to Ramon once and he was like, ah, like, well, our history of that phrase
is that it came in the label of a wine someday and somebody really liked it.
And so it stuck, you know, and that's it.
Yeah.
But for me, it was a very strange, the, the, that it was like a basketball coach from like
some college team in the States.
Yeah.
But yeah, like that thing of doing impossible things, I think that's one of the key things
of Mugari.
You know, like they, they don't like the goal of a dish.
First of all, that's also something like they have very clear, how to say, like a hierarchy
of values where, and this is absolutely counterintuitive flavor is not on the top.
Yeah.
Like, like if they cook a dish, it's not for it to be tasty.
Not necessarily.
Maybe it's more important that it's intellectually challenging, that it's tell that story, that
it's technically very difficult.
Like all these kinds of things.
Right.
Yes.
And for that can be the interesting.
And at the same time, the uninteresting part of going to eat there, because that that's
actually the reason why it's not on my places where I go to eat, because that's not what
I look for in, in a restaurant.
That said, I think it's a super interesting place.
Like I, I talk a lot, for instance, with, with teachers from the Baskin-Linari Center
and they go there a lot because for them, they get a lot of ideas, concepts, things
that they, they can then talk about and teach and stuff.
And like in that regard, also like as a chef going there to do a, a train ship, you learn
all these techniques, all this difficult stuff that you can then somehow translate into the
normal world, which is not Mugaritz.
It's not the normal world.
There's like this crazy culinary monastery with, that's a strange technique.
And yeah, like techniques that I saw that I really liked, like I also have to say in
my time, it was very, very different from yours.
It was maybe 10 years difference.
Yes.
And, and in my time there were two menus.
One was called Natura and the other one was called Sustrayak.
So nature and roots.
So the roots one was actually pretty classic cooking, you know, like you wouldn't get a
squab, you would get a French toast, you would get like, you know, this kind of things.
And the other one Natura, it was more creative and crazy and this kind of things.
A super nice technique that I later, later found out that it is a technique from Michel
Braud.
It was a foie gras.
Oh yeah.
It was at first, it was first, I think soaked in milk, but I don't remember the temperature
of the milk, if it was warm or cold and it was to take the beans out of the foie gras.
So you would soak it in milk, then take the beans out with tweezers and then it would
be frozen like really hard frozen, like in a blast freezer until it was hard as a rock.
And then it was, and this is a counter-intuitive part, thrown into a fryer, the whole rock
of frozen foie gras.
And so you would get like a perfect cross on the outside and on the inside what's perfectly
creamy and then you would slice it and just serve it like that.
Really?
And I tried that and it's by far the best foie gras I've had in my life for sure.
Incredible, incredible.
In the fryer, really?
Yeah, man.
And I asked Paco Morales, where is this technique from?
And he said Michel Braud.
So that's actually the only source I have for that.
Man, I love Michel Braud.
Yeah, your time in Muguriz was definitely a much different time.
I am also more of a, you know, classical chef in the sense that I want things to taste good.
I mean, you know, fuck me, I guess.
But regardless, they were very interesting techniques.
One that I found really amazing.
I mean, the blood macaron is great and it's also delicious.
What was it, pork blood or?
Yes, pig's blood.
For people who don't know, they realized that pig's blood behaves the same as egg white.
So if you take raw pig's blood and you whip it in the kitchen, it starts foaming up like
egg white would.
And so they made a macaron, a recipe with pig's blood and filled it with a liver cream
kind of sort of like a pate and they made a macaroon de casa, which means a basically
hunted meat macaron.
Yeah, and like a game, game macaron.
Game macaron, yes.
And I mean, it's an amazing technique.
It's very delicious.
It's really, really very tasty.
And it's it's ingenious.
On the same note, I think the use of kuzu, very interesting again for people who don't
know.
Yeah, kuzu, Japanese type of starch from a mountain yam.
And I, when I was in the pastry section at Mugarrat's, we were making a, it was called
russo, which is basically just, it just means Russian, but it's a term for like almost like
a honey cake.
So it's like a meringue layers with like a buttercream in between.
And so we were making a meringue, a coffee meringue on thickened with kuzu that would
whip up when it's cooled down and we would dry it in the oven.
It was very fragile.
But what you would get was a very crispy, very light meringue that as soon as it came
into contact with water would completely disappear.
So the idea of this dish was that you had this coffee meringue, a buttercream also with
coffee and you would make this little meringue sandwich, which looked thick and rich and sweet.
But as soon as you eat it, it completely disappears in your mouth, but leaves the same flavor,
which actually, you know, which, you know, we know by now Mugarrat's likes to do.
They like to have this like mindfuck game.
But in that case, it did quite work.
It was just an absolute fucking nightmare to make, because you would, you had to assemble
these little sandwiches a la minute when they were called away because they were so fragile
and it was so hot.
It was like 30 degrees outside, you know, that's these, these, these meringues were
just melting away in your hand.
You know, it was horrible to make.
Really, really horrible.
I had something similar.
We had this dessert.
It was, how do you call like this time and the spring when snow melts?
Like in Spanish you call it the cielo.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, like, yeah, yeah, I know what you mean.
You know, when you can see the grass, but the, and the snow is melting.
So the spring is starting, right?
Like, and it really evoked like that, that visual.
And it was again, a kusu.
This one was of matcha tea, so you would have like a green kusu.
And the thing with kusu is that, yeah, it's like this liquid gel kind of like, you get
this effect of having like a liquid gelatin.
So it's super cool to make sauces with it.
Then it was like a pistachio biscuit.
Then we have like this frozen air, you know, like air when you take a tour mix and you
make like a foam, like a very light foam.
And that would be frozen and the blast freezer or with liquid nitrogen.
It was the first time I worked with liquid nitrogen.
And what else?
Yeah.
This was with orange blossom was the aroma.
So you had orange blossom, matcha tea, pistachio.
It was like a super nice dessert.
It was just super delicious.
Sounds really good.
Sunflowers as well.
The thing is there was this Gastronomica at that time.
And I don't know their name, but it was like, you know, this international fair of chefs.
So international chefs would come and we would have dinners of the restaurant completely
full every week to cook the dessert.
And that wasn't my mise en place.
So they took pictures of me like doing the portions of that thing, you know, with six
jackets in a freezer of minus 40 degrees doing the whole portioning of the things, man, because
it was, you know, working inside the freezer just to get it done.
It was just so absolutely insane to get that dessert executed.
You know, I saw other things that I actually really liked.
You know, I mean, if you hear me talking about Mugarets, you'll hear me hating on the food
a lot.
But you know, there's a lot of things that I enjoyed a lot also.
One was the use of Inulina to make creams with a very particular texture.
And we were making our pea Inulina to stick the Santa's lagrima together.
It's like little pea teardrop peas.
Inulina is like a type of sugar or?
No, it's a what is it actually?
Yeah.
Well, Eric, don't you know that Inulina is a polysaccharide produced by many plants?
So which makes it which makes it a kind of sugar?
No, it makes it a kind of sugar.
Yes.
Okay, thank you.
Yeah.
You know, plants often use it as a means of storing energy.
And it's typically found in roots and rhizomes.
Yeah.
These are the sort of things.
Yeah.
Come on, try that again to make it sound more natural.
A DJ, doctor, whatever the fuck.
These are the sort of things that you learn when you start with Mugarets.
Anyway, so but like you would thicken, you know, juices and like stuff with it and it
would have this really particular type of like hand cream kind of like texture is really
cool.
But you know, one thing one dish that really, really stuck in my mind where I was really
kind of like, I really thought to myself, man, I'm just here like a little bit too late,
you know, for me to see the food that I would have liked to see in Mugarets.
Just when we were in the in the game season, some autumn, and I remember we just did a
small batch of these dishes and it was snipe, which is what's snipe called in Spanish again?
Snipers or snapper?
The bird with the really long the game bird with the really long beak.
Bekada.
Yes.
Bekada cooked in like in like an intense juice sort of sauce together with the tripa de bacalao,
which is the tribe of salt cut.
Yeah, it's actually the swimming bladder of the codfish.
And my god, that was delicious.
That was like for me, real gourmet cooking, you know, like that combination and like the
fishy salt cut flavor, which sounds really weird, but like together with the game bird
and like the texture that the fish gave to the sauce, the gelatinous texture.
Like that.
That's the aspect of Mugarets I like the most when they would do that kind of cooking.
Yes.
Like exactly what you're saying.
We also had like the codfish tribes and we also had this different kind of little birds,
game birds.
I remember once there was a table, I don't know who they were, but they were like this
super VIPs that they went, I don't know, three days in a row to Mugarets.
So they had all the dishes up to the point that there weren't any more dishes to serve
them.
And for me, this was really interesting to watch.
So Andoni went into the kitchen and he started like freestyling, you know, he started like
cooking.
There were like this pork tails here.
There were like this little piece over there and he started doing like a surf and turf
with the different ingredients that he had.
And he started like freestyling some dishes and he sounded just like that.
And that was like super interesting to watch.
Speaking of which, the pig tails, amazing technique, amazing product, amazing technique.
Super, super nice.
Yeah.
Like we, we had that.
Do you have to shave them as well?
Yes, of course.
Of course.
That was like a super, super nice thing to do.
You know, you're there in the production table, like 12 chefs and there are like these boxes
full of hundreds, if not thousands of pig tails, hairy pig tails, hairy dirty pig tails
with dirt.
You know, you have to wash them first and then shave them with, with, you know, razors
one by one.
Yeah.
Okay.
You were saying amazing technique.
What, what, what makes amazing technique?
Yeah.
By the way, same, same razors that Juliette, the head chef at the time would make me a
shave with if I, if I had a stubble, come into work.
Ah, the one of the, just to make it more humiliating.
It's like go shave.
No shaving cream, you know, no, nothing.
No shaving cream.
Just three stars because they had no shaving cream for the last 10 years.
Yeah.
But the pig tails, they were so nice.
I mean like, yeah, you clean them and you vacuum pack them.
Uh, you, you know, poach them off and then when they're still hot, you take them out,
really carefully open them up, take all the, you know, the spine.
Oh God, what do you call them?
Well, the bones out, the little bones, right?
And then put them on parchment paper and weigh them down so that basically you have one layer
of skin and one layer of meat.
And my man, it's just so nice.
And then you cook them on the plancha just on the skin side.
They become so crispy.
The meat is super fatty and succulent.
It's like the perfect bite of pork.
If you think of it, super underrated.
Yeah.
Those cuts, man, like they really work with strange cuts like tendon, lamb trotters.
Yeah.
Like these kind of things.
Tendon was very cool also.
Yeah.
What about Andoni in your times?
Was he in the kitchen?
Not so much.
I mean, I, you know, I'm, I like Andoni a lot.
In the year that I was there, I saw him, I think twice.
I have to say, you know, but like the few times that I saw him and talked to him, I
liked him.
I left like one day earlier than everybody else actually, because of, you know, just
circumstances.
And I had a little bit of a chat with him because there were cameras there, you know,
so.
And I think he's very inspirational.
I think he is a poet in the way that he thinks.
And you know.
Yeah.
A poet and a philosopher, I would say as well.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So I'm a, I am a big fan of him.
Unfortunately, I didn't get to work with him very much.
Yeah.
I, I agree.
Like in my time, he was more in the kitchen, but I mean, like the, the man in command was
Paco Morales.
He was running the place.
He was super young and super ambitious.
He was 24, just fresh out of El Bulli.
That time was a peak time of El Bulli, you know, 2005.
Yeah.
Back then, El Bulli was the placement and he was just out of it.
And he was, you know, fighting so hard.
It's not, not for no reason that, that year, Mugari's got its second star.
And I remember the moment it was actually, we were having staff meal and Andoni walks
in and he's talking like super loud on the phone.
Like probably he wanted everybody to listen, you know, like, oh yes.
Okay.
Good.
Thank you.
Thank you for the news.
And then he hangs up and said, we just got a second star.
And then he walks into the office, just like, like if nothing happened, you know, and all
the chef, the party stood up and went to the office.
What is this?
What?
So we delivered service and, and I was, I remember I was cleaning something in the basement.
I was completely alone in the basement.
You know, the basement, they had some stuff like the ice cream machine and some other
stuff.
And, and I was doing the cleaning there.
It was my, my task at that moment.
And then suddenly I see like from the very end that there was a door where, where the
suppliers would come in.
And I see a guy coming in and completely in his chef whites, uh, walking in and I look
in it's that's Martin Berasategui and he walks into me and he, he touched me so in the face
like congratulations, congratulations.
At that time, and this is also something interesting at that time, Mugaritz was part of Martin
Berasategui group.
And this was the first years of Mugaritz.
I don't know what happened, but they had like a real fight.
They didn't talk to each other like for over 10 years.
The moment they talked back to each other, it came out in the newspapers, but also interesting
like Martin Berasategui, he made his name and he climbed up in his family restaurant,
which is in the city center of San Sebastian.
It's called El Alejandro.
It's like a super classic restaurant.
So he got his first mission in Star there before he moved to his venue where he's now
or where he has three stars.
And I know in the, how to say the, the divorce settlement between Andoni and Martin, Andoni
took Bodegon Alejandro, which is part now of Mugaritz group, you know, like that feels
like a, like a big fuck you in your face.
You know, I didn't even know that.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
Bodegon Alejandro is Ixogroup is not, and that's a Martin's historical family restaurant.
And they cook the classics of the place, you know?
Wow.
That's crazy.
I know, I knew they had beef, but I didn't know that.
Yeah.
That's, that's heavy.
Back then we, they would send us like a lot to Cruzal and Bodegon Alejandro to do reinforcement,
you know, like sending some staggers from Mugaritz there, which was also super interesting
because you would see like completely classic recipes from, from a classic Basque restaurant.
Yeah, that's very cool.
Which is fresh air, you know, if you're in an avant-garde restaurant peeling walnuts.
And when I say peeling walnuts, it's already peeled walnuts.
You're peeling the outer skin of the, of the brain looking piece of, of walnut, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
But you know, actually what's, what really stuck with me, like from the time Mugaritz,
you can't really call it a technique, but you know, because you have this stark difference
of you have Mugaritz, which at my time was already so high end, so away of everything,
you know, and then you have this vast culinary landscape of really traditional and really,
really good food and seeing the connection between that, like the two extremes, you know,
and also the way that's the tradition and the terror and the produce gets translated
through such a very finely designed lens.
That was very, very, you know, that's, that was really informative, you know, that gave
you a completely new perspective on what food can be and where it can head.
That's it for this week's episode of Potluck Food Talks.
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