Iberia · Volume 04, The Cider and Cod Coast
Txangurro a la Donostiarra
Basque Country
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour
- Researched
- 16 sources cited
Created by the chef Félix Ibarguren, known as "Shishito," in the early twentieth century at Spain's first cooking school, co-founded with Loreto Capella Olasagasti in San Sebastián and operating 1901 to 1913. It adapts French lobster à l'américaine, substituting local spider crab for lobster, the meat shredded and gratinéed back into its own shell. Multiple sources describe it as the only typical Basque dish born directly in haute cuisine, though those sources largely recycle one another rather than an independent primary account, and this chapter holds that origin story with a light hand rather than full confidence.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour.
Ingredients
- 2 spider crabs, cooked, meat and shell reserved
- 1 onion, finely chopped
- 1 leek, finely chopped
- 2 cloves garlic
- 100 ml brandy
- 200 g tomato, crushed
- As needed breadcrumbs, butter
Method
- Pick the crab meat from the shells, keeping the shells intact for serving.
- Sweat the onion, leek and garlic slowly until soft.
- Add the crab meat, flambé with the brandy.
- Stir in the tomato, cook down to a thick mixture, 15 minutes.
- Spoon back into the reserved shells, top with breadcrumbs and a little butter, and gratin under a hot grill until browned.
What a modern chef changes
Elkano's grill logic applied to a dish that has never needed it before.
Rung 2
Method
- Grill the whole spider crabs briefly over oak ember before picking the meat, a genuine departure from the boiled tradition, borrowing Etxebarri's live-fire discipline to add a restrained smoke note underneath the dish's existing richness.
- Reduce the brandy separately to a syrup before folding it through, for a more concentrated flavour than flambéing alone gives.
- Finish the gratin under a very hot, brief grill only, protecting the crab's own texture from the extended heat a slower gratin would apply.