Hello. You're watching Vagabrothers.
I'm Marko, and right now we're in one of my favorite cities in all of the world:
Donostia, San Sebastian, Basque Country.
San Sebastian is a mecca for foodies
and has more Michelin stars per person than anywhere else in the world.
Alex and I both lived here for two years and fell in love with the city, Basque culture, and of course Basque food.
In my two years here I ate some amazing dishes,
but I never learned to cook them,
and then two weeks ago, I got an email from Mimo Food,
a travel and cooking school based here in San Sebastian with an amazing offer.
Hola Marko. We know that you love to travel and eat,
so we want to invite you to a very special trip to
learn how to cook in San Sebastian,
Sevilla, and Mallorca. Te vienes?
All right.. so the adventure begins.
We are in downtown San Sebastian in front of the Maria Cristina Hotel,
which is a ultimate luxury hotel.
This is where I'll be staying for the next night.
The cooking school is right down below,
and we're about to start a bit of an adventure, bro.
Let's do it. I'm fired up.
I'm fired up as well. So first things first,
we're going to go explore some of the flavors that make Basque cuisine what it is.
We're going down the coast to try a local drink and some local seafood. Let's go.
Our first stop is here in the beautiful fishing village of Getaria.
We're about 30 minutes west of San Sebastian.
Originally this was a whaling village.
It's now a major fishing port.
It was the home of Juan Sebastian Elcano, the first person to sail around the world.
He was Magellan's first mate, but when Magellan died in the Philippines,
Elcano took over, so he's famous here.
It's a great place to sample some local produce,
so we're going to have a little walk around town
and then go up to the local wineries.
Our first stop is here- just outside the beautiful fishing port of Orio.
We are on a hill wedged between the Basque countryside and the coast.
We're on a txakoli vineyard. Txakoli is a
local white wine that is unique to the Basque Country.
It's naturally effervescent.
It's got a very good mineral taste,
and this area produces some of the best in the whole country.
It's sweet; it's floral; it's fresh.
In the old days,
this is a kind of grape that the monks brought from the Camino de Santiago,
and it settled very well in our soil here.
It usually needs to be grown close to the sea,
and it's got the saltiness characteristic of the wine, as well.
It's very rainy here, so it needs to be growing in a hill
to allow the dripping [run-off] of the water.
We tried the txakoli, and now we've just gone down the road
to the parents' house of the people who own the bodega.
Orio is famous for a couple things:
txaloi, their rowing team, and also sea bream.
It's a local fish
that has been harvested here for hundreds of years.
And they do it over an open grill,
and we're going to try that right now.
The vinegar, olive oil, garlic, pepper emulsion is killer.
It's cooked to perfection and this is a place that's not..
It's not a Michelin-starred restaurant,
but it's a place that has a ton of notoriety.
People come from all over the world to come to this place,
and you can see how well it goes with txakoli.
We're having txakoli, sea bream, living it up Basque style, and
life is good.
Just checked into the Maria Cristina Hotel.
This is a five-star hotel in the center of town.
It's extremely historic.
This is where all the celebrities stay during the San Sebastian Film Festival.
It's named after the Queen of Spain who used to frequent San Sebastian.
This is a luxury hotel,
and the rest of the trip is going to be pretty five-star.
We are going to be traveling by a private plane all the way to Sevilla and Mallorca.
I'm going to be learning tomorrow the secrets of Michelin-starred cooking..
basically, spherification foam- all that sort of stuff.
We're going to take things up a notch as the evening progresses
and go to the pinxto bars at the old town.
You ready to go for some pinxtos?
So ready. I was born ready for that. Let's do it
Cin cin. Topa. "Topa" would be for "cheers."
But the Basque word for "salud" is "osasuna."
The pinxto tour continues, but my night finishes.
Tomorrow we're going to learn how to cook molecular gastronomy in the MIMO cooking school,
so I need to go to bed and learn how to do that.
Buenos dias. Egun on.
Hello. Good morning. Welcome to San Sebastian.
It's a beautiful rainy day here in the Maria Cristina Hotel.
Today we are getting down to the whole reason that I came to San Sebastian,
which is to learn how to cook,
specifically to learn how to cook molecular gastronomy, the secrets of
Michelin-starred restaurants of which San Sebastian has so many.
The cooking school of MIMO is downstairs.
Everyone's in the classroom except for me.
So I've got to go. Let's go.
The cooking class is about to begin.
We are downstairs below the Maria Cristina Hotel at the cooking school of MIMO.
We're in good hands. We got our boys Auguste and Miguel who are two awesome chefs.
They've been teaching me a lot over the last couple days because I showed up here early
and I was like.. before I do a
Michelin-starred cooking class, I've got to learn the basics.
So they taught me already how to do chipirones en su tinta,
Merluza, which is hake, the green sauce, and other Basque classics.
We're going to take it up a notch.
We're going to learn spherification foams,
all these cool crazy techniques that make Michelin restaurants really stand out above the rest.
Okay.. so we're going to start talking about the minimal ingredients,
and then we are going to do them mise-en- place all the preparation in that station and then
once the mise-en-place is done,
we are going to start cooking.
This is the dynamic of a normal class that we do here in MIMO Foods.
Cin cin. Halfway? No, no, no,
but we just finished mine-en-place.
It's interesting because we start slowly, start with the basics... how to cut,
how to chop, how to divide work up. Oh yeah.
But then we're getting into making different
spherical membranes with lychee and other stuff.
But right now we're just having a glass of txakoli....
little halfway point..
And life is good...so back to the kitchen, brother.
One of the things that I really admire about the Basque Country and Basque people
is that they're very noble people and they're very humble.
And it's interesting because if you go to the Basque Country and say,
"So why is your food so good?"
They always say it's great because we use the freshest, best
ingredients ever, and I look around I see...
yes, you do use the freshest best ingredients.
The standards there are super high.
Also, they take those fresh ingredients and then do crazy
scientific experiments with them and make emulsions
and bring in other ingredients from other parts of the world and
They present it as this very simple basic thing,
and at the foundation, it is basic and simple,
but then they layer it with so much knowledge and technique on top of it.
It creates something really unique and beautiful.
Okay, so the first dish is olive oil in four different ways.
It's just kind of demonstrating the different ways that molecular gastronomy
allows you to present the same ingredient.
We've got creme ingles.
We've got a fake ice cream
We've got a powder,
and we've got these little caviar balls
that are full of olive oil, as well.
Auguste just let us know that the idea of
molecular gastronomy is from Ferran Adria
who is the chef behind El Bulli.
It was a restaurant that used to be in the Costa Brava of Catalonia and basically
Auguste told us that he was inspired by the idea of the egg yolk,
the way that the membrane is really thin and translucent
but holds together all the flavor,
and the second you break it,
it explodes all over the plate.
The fact that we're using an egg yolk
is kind of demonstrative of the whole idea behind molecular gastronomy
and the way of creating these thin translucent
membranes that hold a bunch of flavor inside.
So now we have some salmon; we prepared this by covering in salt and sugar
to start, putting it back in sealed bags and poaching it a little bit.
We made a beatstock reduction with miso, which gives it that edamame flavor and
basically like a mayonnaise of garlic mayonnaise using the
collagen from the salmon itself.
We took the parts of the salmon that we did not use
and we reduced them in the sous-vide machine in order to take out the collagen
We mixed it with olive oil and garlic in order to make the aioli sauce.
We took the fish skin and made it into a crisp,
put it on top, covered it with these....what looks like caviar..
but is actually spheres of olive oil and a little bit of greenery.
Bon appetit!
We've got the last course of our meal.
We've got some frutas del bosque, which is mixed berries with lychee,
which we've taken into the sphere of eyeball;
the ironic thing being that it's almost exactly the same form as it was originally,
but we've deconstructed it and reconstructed it,
and we're drinking with Patxaran, which is the scotch of the Basque Country...
very, very much an acquired taste.
If you end your night with this, you've done it proper,
but you're going to regret it the next morning.
It's a slow berry liqueur, and it is dangerous.
Cin cin.
All right so Basque Country has been fun. So fun.
We learned how to cook.
We're finishing off right now with some idiazabal cheese
at a place that some of you Vagabuddies might recognize as
the spot where Alex and I stayed two years ago.
He s**t on my hand.
How's the cheese? How's that cider?
The cheese is insane; the cider is great, as always "appley" and delicious.
What do you think about the cooking class?
I thought very interesting...
Spherification not as complicated as I thought.
Don't know if I'm going to be able to replicate it right away.
Might need to read the recipe.
I think you will, Marko.
You do great dinner parties. Come on, man.
We've got to read the recipe again though, for sure.
But definitely cool party tricks to be able to make
something like that molecular gastronomy at the dinner party.
Cooking class was awesome. I really enjoyed it.
It was cool to get to see all these great ingredients:
local ones, ones from all over the world.
the traditional cooking methods mixed with a little bit of the new school influence,
and it was great to be part of it.
Hey Alex, all I've got to say is we're missing you, buddy,
but got Griffin here, too. It's super fun
It's a good time, and you know what?
We're continuing. We're going on to Sevilla right now.
We're about to go catch a flight.
So if you guys liked this video,
make sure you give a thumbs- up;
share with your friends; subscribe to Vagabrothers,
and turn on notifications, if you've not already.
And Griffin, do you know what we say at the end of every video?
You blew it.
You know that's what your phrase is.
Stay curious, keep exploring
Yeah, right, and then you have to say,
and we'll see you on the road.
Okay. We'll see you in Sevilla.
It's all good.