Spanish chef thinks 'nose to tail' for special dinner

Aitor Olabegoya, his "chef's whites" still crisp after an hour in the kitchen, is poised like an eagle over a steaming pan of soup.

"Black pepper consomme," he says, offering the hovering reporters spoons for tasting. It sounds simple enough, but the result of a long, slow simmer is so rich that we're scanning the counter around him to see where the magic came from.

The culinary director of Migas is not working in his own Sanlitun restaurant kitchen, but across town in Wanjing, mixing it up with his friend Rob Cunningham, executive chef at Feast in East Beijing hotel. Cunningham orchestrates what he calls the Carnivore Club every couple of months - a special dinner with a guest chef who joins him to make the most of every cut of meat from the animal of the day.

Today, the duo has pork in their sights. They're taking the Feast kitchen on a test run for a dinner that will be June 25.

The soup will be a companion to Olabegoya's house-made blood sausage - dark, cloying and eerily soft to the uninitiated. As we nibble and slurp, the voluble Spaniard has moved on to knead a stuffing for his roast suckling pig.

"This pork mince isn't from that pig," Olabegoya says as he mashes the meat with foie gras and chunks of apple, fennel and citrus. "Suckling pig is very lean, so you need this mince - which is two-thirds fat - to keep it from drying out during roasting." As he churns and chats, he's directing an assistant who's making chimichurri sauce with pistachios, olive powder and sweet chilies.

Olive powder?

"You blend the black olives to paste," he says patiently, talking to a circle of reporters but seemingly with one eye on the sauce and the other on his stuffing. "Then you dry it in the oven to reduce it to powder form."

After mixing the stuffing with his guest chef, Cunningham steps up to the kitchen's next workstation to prep the pig. It looks small and innocent - more like a sleeping pet than, well, lunch, but the farm-raised chef approaches with hands that are gentle but all business. He spreads open the pre-sliced cavity, packs in the stuffing with practiced hands, and then quickly stitches the carcass closed with kitchen twine.

All the while the two chefs are kidding each other, like competitive brothers with their toques down. What looks like an immense amount of work as they prepare a chorizo "lollipop" appetizer, the consomme and sausage, an Iberico ham carpaccio with that now-fragrant chimichurri and the photogenic pig seem like all in a day's fun to the merry masters of this kitchen.

The finale for the dinner has evolved with two names: During the test run, it's a pavlova, an Australian specialty of Cunningham's, with a Spanish twist of whiskey cream and citrus sorbet. On the final menu, it's rechristened pastel ruso from the Basque country, topped with mandarin sorbet, whiskey and candied zest reduction, cream fresh orange and pink grapefruit. The picture looks identical, which is good news, because this reporter has been eager to go back for a second helping.

michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn