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Donostia-San Sebastian. The Basque-Argentinean chef, Itziar Aguirre, is in the Basque Country doing a masters class for a month in the restaurant kitchens of Arzak and Azurmendi.  For fifteen days she worked at Arzak’s stoves, as part of his team, learning techniques and details and being amazed in his laboratory.  Now, she will head to Azurmendi, directed by one of the most promising young Basque chefs, Eneko Atxa.

Her stay is part of a project supported by the Directorate of the Basque Communities Abroad and the Delegation of Euskadi in Argentina, whose goal is to give a qualitative boost to the restaurants at Basque clubs in that country.  “The idea is to take the best Basque cooking back to Argentina,” Itziar explained to EuskalKultura.com.  “We want to up the quality at the Basque club restaurants, to make them more reliable and solvent.”

[Itziar Aguirre at work at the Azurmendi Restaurant in Larrabetzu, Bizkaia, one of the three Michelin stars in the Basque Country]

Don’t lose the Basque essence

Aguirre speaks very highly of her experience at Arzak where Juan Mari and his daughter Elena welcomed her with open arms.  “They were very generous,” she explains. During her two-week stay she worked full time at the restaurant in Donostia.  “It’s incredible how this team of 30 people works together, the quantity of products and ingredients that they use – 20 for one dish alone – and that they don’t lose the Basque essence,”

“In Argentina, a new mode of cooking has begun where there is so much de-structuring taking place that it loses its reference,’ she says. At her restaurant, she offers traditional Basque cooking but, as a chef worries, she also offers dishes that entail the use of new trends.  “I follow everything that is happening here from there.  I read and do a lot of research and every time friends or family visit, they bring menus back for me!”

Pilpileando Argentina

Itziar Aguirre is very well-known in Argentina where she has presented several cooking programs on TV as well as directing the Zazpirak Bat Restaurant in Rosario.  She has also worked hard in the area of Basque culture and in Basque clubs.  “I feel like Basque culture is largely made up of gastronomy, it all goes together.  From my kitchen I try to work for the Basque culture,” she says.

[The Basque-Argentine chef during one of her classes of solidarity at the Basque club as part of the Pilpileando Argentina program in 2011 (photoNBWalter)]

Aguirre has also found a way to use gastronomy to carry out solidarity projects.  One of the most important is the “Pilpileando Argentina” program, that took her to several Basque clubs in Argentina offering Basque cooking classes.  Participants paid for classes by donating non-perishable food that was then given to families in need in the northern province of Chaco through the Pequeños Gestos Foundation (Small Gestures).