Sumptuous San Sebastian

Our first day in San Sebastian was mostly about walking. We started the day by heading to the main market downtown. It's a large, indoor, food market with specialized stalls. Some sold charcuterie, some sold meat, some sold fish, some sold fruits and vegetables etc. We ended up getting roped in by a stall that sold dried fruits and turkish delight and tried a number of interesting creations. The best of which was dried, green pomello rind.

Catherine's feet had been hurting a lot, so when we started walking, we switched shoes. It made a big difference, so, near the market, we went into an athetic shoe store and bought her some more comfortable shoes.

Amusement park overlooking
San Sebastian

After than we went in to gourmet food shop and found some pimente d'Esplette and rosemary honey. The pimente d'Esplette is larger chili flakes made from a pepper in the French Basque town of Esplette. It's AOC specific. We knew about it because a grower in the Anderson valley produces it after learning about it in Basque country. However it's quite expensive. Since it's similar to the Turkish chilies I found in Istanbul, we were hoping that we could get large quantities on the trip, but it was only available in small jars and still relatively expensive. It's amazingly delicious though, so we did get a jar.

After shopping we hunted for some lunch in the form of pintxos. They are the Basque version of tapas. It's a little different than further south, like Grenda, where you order a drink and they will give you a simple tapas for free (e.g. bread smeared with fresh tomatoes). San Sebastian pintxos range from a simple piece of ham on a piece of bread, to a tower of ingredients on the top of the bread so high it needs to be held together with a long toothpick to warm dishes, served in small portions. When you walk into a bar in the old town, the counter is covered with creations, while if you want something warm, you can order it from the bartender. Two of the traditional drinks are txocoli (an acidic, low alcohol white wine) and cider poured from a meter up into a wide glass in order to express the carbonation. Most of the space is standing only, but there are a few bar stools around. The idea is that you get your snack, a drink, and consume quickly before heading home after work. It's way more healthy than a bag of potato chips! Our first sampling included some incredibly fresh anchovies served on ham and topped with a fried green pepper, a jaw dropping langoustine ravioli, and some perfectly cooked squid with caramelized onions.

After lunch, we meandered over to the beach and walked along the 6km crescent. There were hundreds of people enjoying the perfect day. Some were sun bathing, some were surfing, many were just walking in the surf, either stridently or leisurely. The boardwalk is actually on one of the arms of the Camino de Santiago, so there were even some hikers going by. It's a gorgeous protected harbor with perfect sand. I can see why it's just a tourist destination to enjoy the beach!

At the other end of the beach, we took the old funicular up to the top of the cliff. Up top, there is this bizarre, semi rundown amusement park. It was built in 1914 and was surely the height of fashion then to go on the flume ride with a view of the city, or to play carni games. Half of it was closed, but some parts were still opened, so you could play some of the games, or go on the mini roller coaster.

For dinner on our first night, we had a special treat! We went to Akalare, one of the three star restaurants in San Sebastian. The city has the most Michelin stars per capita in the world and Akalare was an experience. It's not one of the super avante guard restaurants as the dishes are quite recognizable. However, they do surprise you at times. We chose to go here because there are three different tasting menus that you can choose from and so we could each order a different one and try twice as many creations. Expert tip: do the wine tasting! The somellier put together one of the best wine tastings we have every had. He did an incredible job matching the dishes and delighting us. It also wasn't very expensive relative to ordering by the bottle. The pairing wasn't listed in the menu or the wine list, but ask for it. Every other table was ordering two or three bottles, not getting as good a variety or pairing, and paying more that we did. The highlights of the meal were:

Spilled yogurt desert

- Oyster leaf and hake. It's a succulent piece of hake with a delicious sauce, but the unique piece was a garnish. It was garnished with an oyster leaf. It's a green from Greenland, Newfoundland or Norway that tastes exactly like an oyster when you eat it. I'm going to try and get seeds to grow it in the garden.
- Pungent leaves with fois gras. It's a dish that looks like a plate of leaves with morning dew on it. The dew is actually a lemongrass jelly. The "leaves" at the bottom were actually fois gras shaped like leaves and colored with an herb dust. The real greens were some of the most pungent I have ever tasted.
- Pork shoulder with garlic 3 ways. The pork was cooked medium rare while the garlic on the dish was 1) a bitter, green garlic sauce 2) a slice of black garlic and 3) not really garlic, but it looked like a roasted clove and was made of a foam in a candied shell.
- A coconut egg. It looks like an artistic sunny side up egg, but the white is a block of hard coconut foam that melts in your mouth, while the yolk was a passion fruit and coconut custard shaped into a ball.

Fish with sauce twirls

It was a ridiculously filling meal. To the point that we couldn't finish some of the later dishes. Especially the wine. We didn't roll out of there until 1am, 4 hours after we arrived.

For our second day in San Sebastian, we slept off our food coma and then went to the San Telmo museum. It's a museum of Basque culture and history. It was a well done museum with good use of interactives. It talked a lot about how the Basques are the industrial engines of Spain from the ship building era where they were the primary ship builders and sailors, to more modern times where there is a lot of heavy industry and manufacturing. The church attached to the museum was painted with a sequence of modern impressionist murals that was very different than churches I'm used to seeing.

A small pintxo spread

For the rest of the day, we wandered around the old town going into shops and trying pintxos. We also did pintxos for dinner, but closer to the apartment where we were staying. One highlight was a squid covered with a black chestnut, ink sauce. Another was a desert made of three cheeses that were sweetened and put in a dish for spreading. We finished with some 3 euro glasses of PX sherry, which shouldn't have been that cheap: it was over 20 years old.

On our last day in San Sebastian, we did a cooking class at Mimo. It's a tourist cooking school in the basement of the Maria Cristina Hotel. As a class, we made a 5 course meal and also had an opportunity to get a couple of tutorials. Our teacher was very good and focused on highlighting the ingredients while at the same time, explaining what is going on, how we are manipulating the temperatures, liquids, etc. From an overall standpoint, there were two interesting recurring themes: first, use lots of olive oil and second, only add salt at the end unless it's in a cooking liquid and will get absorbed. Otherwise, you're going to change how the dish cooks. For instance, when sous videing meat, if you add salt, then it will extract moisture from the meat as it cooks, which you don't want.

Mural inside the church in the San Telmo museum

The tutorials he gave were about octopus and dealing with fresh fish. They received some gorgeous Hake that not only had crystal clear eyes, but if you run you hand along the flesh, it is firm, not mushy. It was line caught and handled well. If the fish is caught in a net, or handled harshly, it can get bruised, which makes it not flake properly. You can tell if it's bruised by running your hand down the fish once it has been descaled. The octopus tutorial was really interesting. When you think about well cooked octopus, most people think of it being soft, but he argued that it needs some tooth to it and should have collagen around the main muscle. The collagen is usually cooked away. To get the collagen, but still breaking down the tough muscle, you first freeze the octopus. As the ice crystals form, they break down the muscles just like whapping it on a rock did in the old days. However, this forces liquid out and you need to add it back in. So, you do a sequence of quick dunks of the raw octopus in a flavourful liquid. It will suck the liquid right up and the collagen will blossom. Then, you cook the octopus at a simmer until it's done. Too long and the collagen will melt away. To hot and the muscle will turn rubbery. It was the best description I've seen on how to cook octopus.

As for the actual dishes we made, it started with sauteed chantrelles and a sous vide egg. He showed us cleaning the chantrelles with a damp towel, which worked really well. Then, they were cooked in a dry pan at very high heat where you throw in olive oil at the end to finish the cooking. This carmelizes them, cooks them through, but doesn't release all the water.

The next dish was a fois gras and apple puree with a coffee, chocolate dust. We processed raw fois, which was a first for me. There's just so much fois everywhere in this city. It's nuts! It needed to be deveined, rolled into a cylinder, frozen, then sliced into rounds, deep fried and finished in the oven. It's the process from Mugaritz. The apple sauce was super simple. Just roast whole apples in the oven with butter in their core and take the resulting drippings & apples and blend.

After that, we had a dish of bean soup with clams. They were fresh, local beans with a texture similar to canelli beans, but smaller. The new thing for us was how to cook the clams. He showed us that people usually overcook clams & mussels. To avoid overcooking, use a shallow pan and heat up a small amount of fish stock. Put the clams in. Do not put on a lid, because that will steam them, which you don't want. When they go in, they will close tight and try to survive, but as they warm up, they will start to open. As soon as a clam starts to open, pop it out of the pan. It's done and will be perfectly tender.

The Miramar Palace. A traditional
stop on the Camino.

The mean meat of the meal was lamb, first cooked via sous vide and then broiled in the oven hot. It was served with some melted onions (made with lots of butter) and a fresh rosemary/thyme/mint sauce. It's a combo we need to use more often, especially since it's in our garden year round.

For desert, everybody but Catherine had a custard creme pie. The shell was a shortbread shell pressed into the pan, while the custard was a standard egg yolk custard, thickened with corn starch and steeped with cinnamon and lime. Apparently, cinnamon is the only spice that the Basque use when flavouring deserts and they use a cinnamon that's closer to the Mexican canella than the Vietnamese cinnamon.

At the end of the class, we ate all the food, with a pairing of wine along the way. Then, we hopped in a cab to the car rental place to rent a car and drove down to Rioja for the next stage of the trip.