Chef Iñaki Aizpitarte – Pushing Le Chateaubriand to the Top

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It was a big jump for Le Chateaubriand as they climbed from the 40th spot to the 11th in this year’s S. Pellegrino awards, and credit should be given to its owner as well as its head chef, Chef Iñaki Aizpitarte for this very great accomplishment.

Prior to becoming a chef, Chef Aizpitarte has been a lot of things. He has been a stonemason and a landscape painter, and he has even been a dishwasher in Israel. In fact, it was this stint in Israel that pushed him to become a chef.

Chef Aizpitarte made a decision to visit Israel, and to support himself, he became a dishwasher at the Rozata restaurant. However, he decided to leave the job yet again to take on a gardening job, but its Serbian chef asked him to cook and placed him behind the stove. It was like a “eureka” moment for him as he realized that being a chef was what he has always wanted to do, so he soaked up everything that the head chef taught him and created some of his own techniques.

Four years later, Chef Aizpitarte went back home to France to become a chef and to practice all the self-taught techniques that he learned during his traveling around. Since he does not have enough money for cooking school, he honed his skills and became an apprentice to other chefs in the city of Paris. He also began studying classic culinary books to improve his skills.

It was in 2006 that he, together with Frederic Peaneau, bought Le Chateaubriand, and he turned the old establishment into what is now considered as neo-bistro, but its heart and soul is the Basque cuisine with a contemporary twist, a style that he has mastered and perfected during his self-taught culinary education.

Chef Aizpitarte’s cuisine is his personality personified. His dishes are unpredictable that it never fails to surprise his diners, but they are straightforward that you know exactly what you are going to get. He believes that the fewer flavors his dishes had, the better the fundamental flavors become. One might be inclined to think that fewer flavors mean boring dishes, but one can never be more wrong. In fact, Chef Aizpitarte has this knack in blending flavors that clash, the end result of which is a very pleasing concoction that will delight not only the sense of smell and sight but most especially the sense of taste.

He gets his inspiration for his cuisine in just about anything and anybody. You can the traditional Basque cuisine that he learned from his mother, but then again, you will see the distinctive influences of the great chefs that he has worked with all during his culinary career. Chef Aizpitarte’s cooking style is so flexible that he can turn even a very simple cafeteria dish into a high-end cuisine that speaks of fresh home-cooked meals and multi-awarded international cuisine.

With his restaurant’s recent addition into the top 50 best restaurants of the world, we can expect more from Chef Aizpitarte.

Chef Iñaki Aizpitarte’s Boudin Noir

Ingredients:

2 l pig’s blood (available from good butchers. Pre-order.)
1 kg hard back fat pork, diced
40 g garlic chopped
800 g onion fine dice
100 g apple ½ cm dice
300 ml red wine
300 ml cream

Directions:

Preheat oven to 160C.

Gently heat the onion in a pan until they are translucent. Add the back fat and garlic, heat for a further few minutes and finally add the apple.

Continue heating this until it forms a paste like consistency, about 20 minutes. Add the red wine and bring to a boil, simmer gently for about 5 minutes, then add the blood and cream. Gently warm the stir until it reaches 55 degrees, remove from the heat, puree in a liquidiser and strain through a fine sieve.

Pour the blood mixture into a deep tray or terrine and place in a water bath in an oven preheated to 160C.

When the mixture has set, taking about six minutes or so, remove from the oven and water bath immediately and cool overnight in the fridge. The following day turn out the boudin noir and trim the edges. Slice the boudin noir into rectangles and trim. Warm gently in the oven.

Best eaten straight from the oven.

Image Credit: espresso.repubblica.it

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