It’s early afternoon, and I’ve just finished shopping for fresh fish and vegetables at Mercado San Martín. Now I’m standing at the bar of a small restaurant located deep in San Sebastián’s Old Town, eating txipirones en su tinta, a Basque dish of small squid cooked in its ink, and sipping a glass of house txakoli, the white wine from this region. Around me are the sounds of dishes clattering, wine bottles plunged back into ice buckets, and conversations in different languages. The air smells faintly of garlic, tomato, and fried food. I’ve returned to the Basque Country this summer for a month, but this time in San Sebastian.

There are a handful of reasons I came back, but one of the top ones on my list was to deepen my knowledge of Basque cuisine and improve my skills in cooking it properly. I’ve admired it’s blend of tradition, technique, and regional pride for years, but respect from a distance feels insufficient. In addition to cooking Japanese food (more specifically, Washoku), I cross-train in and want to master Comida Vasca. Slowly, yes, but seriously.

The appeal of Basque cuisine runs deep. It’s not just the Marmitako (fish stew) or the pintxos or the Chuletón (i.e., fire-grilled meats). It’s the variety of flavors, the regional variation, and, in my estimation, once you can cook Basque food, you can almost master any other. It’s how a dish can be both simple and impossibly technical, how a cider house dinner can feel like both a celebration and a history lesson.

Like my experience in Bilbao two summers ago, to immerse myself, I enrolled in a week-long Spanish class.  I’ve managed for years with broken Spanish, but it was time to move beyond survival mode. (Although Spanish isn’t the only language here. Euskera, the Basque language, is everywhere, from street signs to the hum of the market.)

Unfortunately, unlike my previous experience in 2023 when I took a week-long workshop at the Basque Culinary Center, it had closed for its summer break. (Welcome to August in Europe).

And like hell was I going to do one or more cooking classes with tourists (typically young couples and families with bored teenagers) that last a couple of hours and focus on completing pre-prepared and basic dishes. Been there, done that.

At one point, I seriously considered doing a stage (an unpaid internship) at a local Basque restaurant. But the idea of getting barked at in a foreign language (cuz I’m incredibly slow in food preparation and slightly deaf), while working on a book deadline (more about this later), gave me pause. 

So I turned the limitation into a challenge: learn as much as possible independently, shop and eat with intention, visit the markets, the highly ranked restaurants and pintxo bars, speak to and observe the people who work there, and the ones who visit, ask for recommendations, and push beyond my culinary comfort zone. For example, when I go to the market, I watch what locals purchase. I ask them why they are buying particular types of food, and how they are preparing it. Also, understand that certain types of food are in season throughout the year. At the beginning of July, for example, fish like Bonito del Norte and Sardines are in season, and both are served simply grilled.

To the extent possible, my days were like a ritual. I went to the market and purchased what I would prepare for one of our meals, then ate lunch or dinner, sometimes alone or with my wife at local joints, using these situations to study breadth, technique, and ingredient combinations. 

Since committing to this cross-training approach (a few years ago), I’ve become a relentless student. I’ve read cookbooks and articles, watched documentaries, taken notes, snapped photos, and pinned enjoyable and promising restaurants on Google Maps. Just like my practice with Washoku, I constantly try new recipes. These are typically dishes that I may have eaten somewhere but have never made. Part of this process involves trying to emulate the masters. 

At a sidrería, I watched cider poured from enormous barrels, caught mid-air in tilted glasses, a technique that aerates the cider and connects drinkers to centuries of tradition. The ritualistic precision fascinated me: the angle of the pour, the timing, the way the server never looked at the glass but somehow never missed.

Instead of formal instruction, I’m building skills and knowledge through sustained observation, deliberate practice, and immersion in context. Like an athlete improving their ability through different exercises, I’m developing my Basque cooking technique through study, ingredient usage and substitution, cultural exploration, and repetition. This method requires patience. The ability to excel at cooking Basque food, or any other cuisine, improves through sustained attention, the willingness to understand why certain combinations of ingredients work, how regional variations affect the end product, and what makes a perfect txuleta or a properly balanced salsa verde.

I’m learning that mastery in any cuisine (or activity) demands more than fidelity to a recipe. It requires understanding the culture that created the food, the ingredients that define it, and the techniques that are used. In the Basque Country, that means respecting both tradition and innovation, precision, intuition, and improvisation.

Curiosity, consistency, and humility are also important. That’s how I’m moving forward, one dish at a time.

Photo credit

Title: txerri txuleta (similar to a pork chuleta)

from https://www.instagram.com/adventuresinbasquecooking/

Photographer: Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D.