30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASEAsador Etxebarri is in Axpe, a village of a few hundred people in the Atxondo valley in the Basque Country. Bittor Arginzoniz grew up there, worked in the woods and opened the restaurant in 1990. He has never been to culinary school and never trained in anyone else's kitchen.
Everything he does is over fire. He has built his own grills with pulley systems that raise and lower the grates over the embers to the millimetre, he makes his own charcoal and chooses the wood according to the ingredient, and he has designed vessels that make it possible to grill things that cannot be placed on a grate. Caviar, mussels and the milk for the ice cream.
He does not travel, gives almost no interviews and is in the kitchen every night. Etxebarri has one Michelin star, while at the same time the restaurant has ranked as high as number three on the list of the world's best. He appears not to give a damn.
The book is by Jon Sarabia and documents the way Arginzoniz works, the equipment and the level of detail. Chefs make pilgrimages to Axpe, which says more about his standing within the profession than any guide does.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 356
Language: English
First published: 2018
The Kitchen Lab Selection
Arginzoniz turned fire into a complete discipline rather than simply a cooking method. The thread from there runs straight into Nordic cooking, and once you have seen it, it is easy to follow. Despite the subject, this book will not primarily make you better at grilling. It is more likely to make you impatient. Afterwards, a bed of embers is no longer a state but an instrument with as many settings as a cooker: the type of wood, the distance, the timing, what you allow the smoke to do and when you choose to do without it. It shows how far you can get by taking away rather than adding, and offers new perspectives on fire as a source of heat.
