Olive Me

Now that I’ve told everyone not to go to Barcelona in August (same old reasons you’re not supposed to head for Paris or Rome: nobody’s here except everyone from elsewhere, and all those lovely shops that close), I see the Palau de la Música Catalana has a reason to be in town every single night this month.

For instance, can you get there by Sunday, August 22nd? If so, you can make one of the most intriguing shows of the Palau 30′ a 30-minute concert series. That night, Palau 30′ features Consul Grau and Montserrat Carles on castanyoles (in Spanish, castañuelos, in English castanets). Who knew those ultra-portable percussion devices were invented by the Phoenicians 3000 years ago? That’s what the Palau website tells me––their way of pointing out I shouldn’t be surprised to hear there are hotshot Catalan castanyoles players.

Palau 30′ is part of the Festival Mas i Mas, and is doing it up with Fado, Tango, Jazz, Gospel, Flamenco, you name it, something every day in August for just 7 Euros (if you’re lucky enough to get the online advance booking system to work) or 8 Euros at the door. The concerts are in the Chamber Music Hall, so if you haven’t seen the main hall you’ve still got to find another way to do that (they do have daily tours, though it’s more fun to see it by going to a concert).

Then there’s Rumba Catalana a flamenco form developed by Catalan gypsies in the 1950s. It’s making a comeback, at least in Barcelona, and Papawa, some of the best musicians bringing it back into the mainstream now, are playing Thursday nights in the Palau courtyard. Concerts go from 9 to 11pm and they’re free, but go early because space is limited.

The free concerts are part of the Palau’s PaLounge series. There’s something every night except Saturdays through August 29th. Mondays there’s Cuban music, Tuesdays are for Tango, Wednesdays feature contemporary singer-songwriters, Thursdays there’s the Rumba Catalana, Fridays it’s Brazilian and Sundays, Celtic.

For the schedule, visit the website of the Palau de la Música Catalana and click on the +info area at the top splashed with news about Agost. You can view the site in English though the schedule pdfs are available only in Catalan and Castellano.

“Well, peel you a grape.” That’s what my mother always said to let us know we were asking for too much. Then I went to Spain, where I met Joaquín, a guy whose mother actually willingly peeled grapes for us and fed them to us for lunch. She floated them, ice-cold, in this garlic and almond soup. What  could I do? I married the guy immediately. That may have been a mistake, but this cold soup is one nutty, fruity, perfect marriage.

Ajoblanco would translate as something like “white garlic,” and this being one of the traditional cold soups of Andalucía, it does include raw garlic. Its piquancy is tamed by the green flavors of extra virgin olive oil and grapes (or cubes of honeydew melon) — the overall effect is soothingly cool. The almonds add lots of body, so small first course servings are in order. Ajoblanco in shot glasses makes a nice liquid tapa for a busy stand-up gathering. I think this soup is best eaten the day it’s made, but you can make it a day ahead and refrigerate it. Whisk it up good before serving in that case as the almonds separate when the soup sits. Either way, garnish it at the last minute.

Ajoblanco

Serves 6 or more (makes about 4 cups, enough for 6-8 small bowls or 12-18 shots)

1/2 lb almonds (about 1 and 1/2 cups), blanched and skinned

2 cloves garlic, peeled

3 oz. day-or-two-old white bread (about three one inch slices of a fat rustic batard), crust trimmed off

3 cups cold water (or use less and add a few ice cubes to speed cooling)

1/2 cup olive oil (1/4 cup for the soup + about another 1/4 cup for drizzling on top)

3 Tbsp. sherry vinegar

1 tsp. kosher salt

Green grapes or honeydew melon for garnish, you’ll want about 1/4 cup chilled grapes or cubed melon per bowl

Trim the crusts from the bread and soak it in the cold water for about a half hour. If you don’t have blanched almonds you’ll find it takes about that long to bring a pot of water to the boil, drop the almonds in for a minute, drain and cool them and pop them out of their skins. If you have blanched almonds, busy yourself peeling the garlic, and, if you’re feeling generous, peel the grapes for the garnish, too (or not, or cube some honeydew melon). Set the prepped fruit for the garnish in the fridge to chill while you finish the soup.

Lift the soaked bread from the water and plop it into the blender. Add the almonds, garlic, and the rest of the water, and blend thoroughly. Add the sherry vinegar, olive oil, and salt and blend again. Taste for seasoning — if you start with just a teaspoon of kosher salt you may want a pinch or two more.

Chill the soup well — a few hours — you want it really cold. It needs at least  an hour even if you’ve stirred in ice cubes in place of some of the water. Garnish with grapes or melon cubes and drizzle a little olive oil on each serving.

Cows are important on Minorca and have been going way back. Archaeologists have found evidence of cheesemaking on this tiny island dating from 2000BC, and historians say Minorcan cheese crisscrossed the Mediterranean with Moorish and Pisan traders in the Middle Ages. Eaters may be interested to know that you can now buy the good stuff — that is, artisanally-made raw milk Maó de Minorca D.O.P. (complete with the Spanish denominación de origen protegida “Mahón de Menorca”) — in the U.S.

This is one of the many cheeses of Spain whose quality is being recovered and rediscovered as it returns from one of those long strange trips down the industrialized path to ordinariness. As one of the country’s few cow’s milk cheeses, young Maó is mild and milky and melts easily, qualities a cheese industrialist would say make it “versatile.” The Mahón I met in Barcelona in the 1980s was made from pasteurized milk and sold young and pale. A rubbery slice yielded an almost-like-home grilled cheese sandwich good enough to get an expat through certain difficult junctures.

A couple of years ago, my friend Viçens, a chef in the Empordà who is probably fonder of butterfat than any Catalan outside the Pyrenees, told me that Maó was making a comeback. He pulled out a firm, orange-gold, aged piece, and dug a knife into it to show me how it crumbled into shards the way Parmigiano does. It tasted milky, lightly salty and earthy, and a little acidic or maybe lemony, but not anywhere near as piquant as Parmigiano. Viçens uses it to add a creamy finish to his elegant vegetable arrosos (rice grows along the Catalan coast and cooks here don’t limit themselves to paellas).

For the cheese to act this way, it’s got to be one of the ones classified as artesano. That means made with raw milk that has not been refrigerated or pasteurized; the cheese must be made immediately after milking, while the milk is still warm. These are the ones worth aging. They are rubbed with olive oil and pimentón as they cure, and by the time a cheese reaches the truly “curado” stage (more than five months), the rind is almost brown. I haven’t found one that mature in the U.S. Both of the cheeses I bought here were labeled “aged,” because they’re past the 60-day mark required in both countries for the aging of raw milk cheeses. But in Spain, they would have to be labeled “semi-curado,” aged for two to five months. And the two were pretty different from one another: the one on the left was supple in a younger, milder way while the one on the right was very firm, with a deep orange rind, tangy, and really beginning to take on the complexity of its age.

A fluffy pile of Vicens’s aged Maó, finely grated, went into this rich little crisp he taught a bunch of us visitors to make. Viçens serves it as a crust for his gussied up version of escalivada (a simply dressed warm salad of roasted red peppers, eggplant, and onions; darn, it’s covering the crisp in this picture). Cut the dough into smaller squares and you have a great homemade cracker on your hands. Either way, go for the old stuff for this recipe.

Maó Cheese Crisps

Viçens shapes this dough in a straight-sided loaf pan, then when it’s firm he slices neat squares that become his savory crusts. If you’re planning to serve these as crackers, cut each square into thirds or just roll the dough into logs and you’ll end up with rounds. This is a large recipe and since it freezes well, you can slice and bake as needed.

Makes about 40 individual crusts or 120 crackers.

1 lb. finely grated well-aged Maó*

1 lb. all purpose flour

1 lb. butter

1 large egg, lightly beaten

Combine flour with grated cheese. Cut butter into the mixture, then add beaten egg. Knead gently and briefly just to shape into rectangular or log shape (if you have a straight sided loaf pan, that makes the shaping easy: line the pan with plastic wrap and gently press in the dough… if you don’t have the perfect pan, don’t fret, just don’t overhandle the dough as you shape it).  Wrap and refrigerate or freeze.  These crusts or crisps are really best baked on the day you’re planning to eat them. Thaw the dough in the fridge overnight or at least a few hours so it won’t be too hard to slice. You want your slices to be a little slimmer than a quarter inch. Heat the oven to 350 F, slice ‘n’ bake about 10 minutes until they’re just turning golden.

* I bought both of the cheeses in this photo at Whole Foods in Providence, Rhode Island, and Artisanal (online) and Murray’s (in New York City) stock it, too.

Fava beans are a bother. But they make such a grand appearance in spring, you really can’t help wanting to give them a chance. They’re big and fat and fleshy and green when not much else is. In Barcelona, they start showing up in markets in February or March and disappear again by mid-June. I’m still seeing them in New York and New England (where people call them “broad beans”), so depending on where you are, it’s not too late to bring a pile of them home and make this salad. It combines the beans with fresh mint and tarragon and a major motivator for reluctant shellers: a good handful of chewy salty hammy bits.

I’m not exaggerating about the mountain of beans you’ll want to start with. That picture up top shows the two pounds I bought the other day.  Shelled, they weighed in at 3/4 pound:

And I still hadn’t reached paydirt. You’ve got to blanche the beans, then pinch a little hole in the tough skin of each one and gently squeeze out the brighter green, perfectly tender inner bean. Anthony Hopkins fights the tedium by pouring himself a nice glass of Chianti at this stage.

My two pound pile of favas in the shell yielded just six ounces of salad-ready beans — not quite enough, really, for the first course salad for four that I had in mind, though we made do just fine.

The flavors that come together in this salad are a springtime echo of those found in faves ofegades, one of Catalonia’s old-fashioned simmered winter bean dishes. Whereas dried beans might get a little ham bone to enrich their broth, and chunks of sausage too, these fresh ones get tossed with neat cubes of cured ham or bacon. The shot of anís that adds complexity to winter beans is replaced by fresh mint and tarragon here. This kind of seasonal revision now seems easy, but when we made this salad in cooking school 20 years ago it was the kind of thing people got excited about. It was lighter, prettier, and greener than traditional faves, but were still somehow true to the original. It is still a salad to get excited about:

Amanida de Faves amb Menta – Fava and Mint Salad

Serves 6

for the salad:

2 small heads frisée

4 lbs. favas, in the shell

1/2 lb. serrano or other salt-cured country ham or pancetta, cut into small cubes

2 scallions, chopped crosswise

1 bunch fresh mint, minced, to loosely pack one cup

1 bunch fresh tarragon, minced, to loosely pack one cup

salt for blanching the beans

for the dressing:

1 Tbsp. minced shallot

1/4 cup Cava vinegar or white wine vinegar

1/2 cup good olive oil

a pinch of sugar

salt to taste

Shell the favas, then blanch them in boiling salted water for one minute. Drain and cool the beans under running water. Once you can handle them, peel the tough skin off each bean: pinch a little hole in the edge of the skin and squeeze gently––the tender inner bean will pop out. Set the tender favas aside in a small bowl.

If you’re using ham, just cube it. If you’re using pancetta, sauté the cubes until they’re golden. Set the pork aside.

Place the minced shallot in a small measuring pitcher or bowl, then add the salt, sugar, and vinegar. Whisk in the oil and correct the salt.

Wash and prep the frisée, tearing bite sized pieces into a large bowl. Mince the herbs and toss them into the greens, saving out a couple of tablespoons of each for the garnish.

Lightly dress the frisée and herbs––you won’t use all the vinaigrette––then correct the salt and plate it. Dress the favas, drop them onto the greens, then distribute the ham or pancetta. Garnish each salad with good pinch of the remaining mint and tarragon.

Still in New York, sniffing around the Greenmarket for the first signs of fruit and smelling nothing but ramps. Of course, if I were in Catalonia right now it would be a whole different story: I’d be bathing in rose petals and eating fruits vermells, the red fruits of early summer. I’ve been working on a dessert as pink and tart as that fantasy. Here it is: a fresh strawberry and raspberry soup whose juiciness is jelled just a tad with agar agar, the better to flaunt your textural adventurousness like a Catalan chef. It’s got a little kitchen garden whiff of herbs and flowers too.

Sopa de Roses i Fruits Vermells
Serves 6

4 1/2 cups clean-tasting mineral or filtered water

3/4 cup (2 oz.) hibiscus and rosehip tea blend*

1/2 cup sugar + 3 Tbsp. (they’ll be used separately)

2 rounded Tbsp. agar agar

3 cups diced red fruits (any combination of strawberries diced, raspberries halved, or red currants left whole)

a handful of mint leaves, washed, dried and minced (finely minced, about a tablespoon)

Put the water in a saucepan and bring it to a rolling boil. Now add the sugar, the agar agar, and the hibiscus-rosehip blend to the pot; give it all a quick stir, then turn off the heat. Let the mixture steep for about 30 minutes to infuse the flavors and cool off. Pour the liquid through a strainer into a bowl and toss the bits of rosehip, hibiscus petals and dried fruits. Refrigerate the clear, pink-red “tea” for at least six hours or overnight.

To finish the soup, combine the diced red fruits with the remaining three tablespoons of sugar and the minced mint. Get it all macerating at least an hour before you want to serve dessert so the sugar dissolves and the fruit gets nice and syrupy. Meanwhile, plop the gelled “tea” in the blender and blend it for a few seconds (or stick your immersion blender into the gel and blend it right in the bowl)—it will become a smooth but still slightly thickened puree. Really, the dessert tastes best when it’s nice and cold, so I like to stash both the pureed base and the macerated fruit in the fridge for several hours while dinner is made and eaten.

Pile a scoop of the fruit into the center of your soup bowls and pour the cold puree around it. A little sprinkling or sprig of mint can decorate each bowl, or not.

* a citrusy mixture like this is available in herbalist shops all over Spain, and I found something similar called “blood orange fruit blend” in the tea section of my local market in New York. It isn’t really tea, you’ve seen the stuff—it’s got dried hibiscus flowers and rosehips, plus chunks of dried oranges, cranberries, and apples.

We never made chocolate desserts when I was in cooking school in Barcelona twenty years ago. Don’t get me wrong. The Catalans love the stuff, and so do the Spaniards: bread and chocolate have probably been the entire peninsula’s favorite after-school snack since around 1500, when Cortez came back to Spain with a freighter-sized stash he got from the Aztecs. But my teachers frowned on chocolate as too heavy to take center stage in an after-dinner role.

I’ve had plenty of time back in the States to think about how to show off that thick, dark chocolate from Spain at dessert time. The first trick is in serving a dainty-looking portion. Properly made xocolata is intense, so an espresso cup full is plenty. As for the bread, having it toasty is an upgrade, more like a cookie alongside the chocolate (or dipped in). More so if you make toast the way my mother-in-law always did, by frying it to a glistening gold in olive oil. I’m not just trying to avoid making cookies here: lots of big-time pastry chefs in Barcelona make bonbons filled with extra virgin olive oil.  The fruitiness of the oil is amazingly good with chocolate. Sprinkle crunchy sea salt on the toast and now the whole thing is seriously mouth-watering.

You don’t need any more of a recipe than that for this dessert if you can find a good Spanish or Catalan bar or grated chocolate mix marked a la taza or a la tassa or a la pedra. These are made especially for preparing hot chocolate — they’re dark chocolate spiked with vanilla or cinnamon as well as a small amount of cornstarch, which thickens the finished hot drink to a consistency somewhere between hot chocolate and a pudding. Of the brands available in the U.S., I like Blanxart. Just use the proportions on the package but keep in mind that since this dessert will be presented in demitasse cups you’ll want to figure small servings (at most about 1/2 cup milk per person).

If you can’t find the Blanxart or some other good chocolate from Catalonia or Spain, your Swiss Miss ain’t gonna cut it. So just in case, here’s a recipe that works perfectly as long as you have chocolate with 72% cocoa content.

Xocolata a la Tassa

Serves 10-12 demitasse portions

for the chocolate:

1 quart milk (whole or considering some versions of Spanish hot chocolate use water, 2% is fine)
10 ounces dark chocolate (72%)
2 Tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

for the toasts:

1 baguette, sliced in 1/2 inch diagonal slices — figure 2 slices per person
about 2 cups olive oil (pour to 1/2 inch deep in a small skillet)
crunchy sea salt

Prepare the chocolate: Measure cornstarch into a small bowl. Break dark chocolate into a heavy saucepan. Pour a few tablespoons of milk into the bowl with the cornstarch and stir to dissolve. Pour the rest of the milk into the saucepan with the chocolate, add the cinnamon, and bring the mixture to a very gentle simmer, whisking frequently to incorporate the melting chocolate well. You may notice tiny grains of dark chocolate, but keep whisking and know that adding the thickener will perfect the emulsion. Add the cornstarch-milk mixture, whisking constantly and allowing the chocolate to come to a gentle boil for about one minute (you want to cook off the raw cornstarch flavor but overcooking will make the cornstarch lose its thickening power). Serve hot or let stand and refrigerate to serve later. A skin will form on the surface of the chocolate, but whisk it in when you reheat and all will be well.

Prepare the toast garnish: Slice baguette into 1/2 inch diagonal slices, figuring two slices per serving. Heat about 1/2 inch olive oil in a small skillet — don’t let it get to the point of smoking, just let it get hot enough to make a test toast brown gradually. Fry the toasts, turning once to get them golden brown on both sides. Remove, sprinkle toasts with a pinch of sea salt, and place over or beside the chocolate cups. These are best fried just before serving dessert.

My friend Jaume called the other day to brag that he’s in charge of the annual calçotada in his village again this year. He grows his own supply of calçots, the sweet spring onion sprouts that are the raison d’etre of this particular Catalan eat-a-thon, but he’ll keep those to himself, as his little kitchen garden can’t produce enough for the event. He’ll have to buy them, though he won’t go so far as to import them from a grower down in calçotada country around Valls, Tarragona where calçots get the IGP seal of approval (indicació geogràfica protegida — the real thing, so to speak).

Jaume is in the Empordà, some 100 miles north of the calçot heartland, and while normally he’s pretty cocksure what they eat down in southern Catalonia is just not on a par with his own Empordanese cuisine, he is not above shameless imitation on this one. There is just nothing better than eating calçots in early spring and if you can’t get to Tarragona to do it you have to do it where you can.

A good calçotada has got to be big. Not big as in those tour bus feedings orchestrated by Tarragonese restaurants for Barcelonins who are too prissy to build their own fires. But big as in rusty old bedframes scavenged as grills.

Big as in guest lists that include friends of friends of friends. At a good calçotada, you’ll drink unmeasured amounts from a porrón. Grilled sausages are mere palate cleansers. Jaume figures he and his neighbors will go through 6,000 calçots and right now he’s working out the logistics of making enough salsa per calçots for 500 people. No question he’ll use a restaurant blender instead of the traditional mortar and pestle. “My problem is,” he says, “I like the sauce to be really smooth, but passing that much romesco through a chinoise is a bitch.”

So romesco and salsa per calcots really are one and the same sauce? “I didn’t say that,” Jaume hedges, “but everybody’s got their own little secrets.” Some people say that while  romesco can be made with raw tomatoes and garlic, salsa per calçots has to play up the flavor of the fire:  the nuts should be toasted, the tomatoes and garlic roasted, the red pepper smoked. The recipe I brought home from Valls twenty years ago has raw and roasted garlic. I call it romesco because Americans like that word. And I know for a fact it works well on all things grilled. After I hung up the phone with Jaume, I went out to the grocery store in New York City, laid in a couple of bunches of those big Texas spring onions (bigger and sweeter than scallions), and roasted them in the oven. You couldn’t really call it a calçotada, but slathered in sauce, they did me, Ed, and our two neighbors just fine.

Calçots in the City

a side dish for 4

12 big spring onions

a little olive oil

kosher or sea salt

Heat oven to 400F. Drizzle a little oil on a baking sheet and smear it around, lay the onions on the sheet in a single layer, and roast about 45 minutes, until the onions are very tender through and browning.

Serve with romesco. The prep work for the sauce eats up a little time just because there’s some toasting and roasting involved, but you can do that ahead of time, even the day before if you happen to have the oven for something else. Once the ingredients are ready, making the sauce is just a matter of whirling everything in a blender.

Romesco Sauce

makes about two cups

1 cup good olive oil

1/2 cup (about 3 oz.) toasted hazelnuts and almonds

4 small tomatoes (because they’re roasted, even the hothouse “vine” ones will do)

6 big cloves garlic (4 will be roasted, 2 used raw)

2 nyoras (these dried smoked sweet red peppers can be found in the US, imported from Spain) or 1 ancho chile (a smoked poblano pepper )

2 tablespoons sherry vinegar (red wine vinegar is OK too)

kosher or sea salt to taste

Put the dried peppers in a bowl and pour boiling water over them to soak and soften. Heat oven to 375F and roast the tomatoes and 4 cloves of garlic (skin and all) in a small baking dish slicked with a little olive oil for about 45 minutes, until they’re bubbly, caramelized, even and a little brown; peel the garlic after it’s roasted. Turn the oven down to 350F, and toast the hazelnuts and almonds at 350F for about 10 minutes, until they take on a little color and smell toasty. No need to peel the nuts, but after they cool take a minute to brush off skin that comes off easily.

Drop the roasted nuts, tomatoes and garlic in a blender.  Add the two cloves of raw garlic. Take the peppers out of their soak, remove and discard the stem and seeds, and add the pulp and skin to the blender. Add the olive oil and whirl until well blended. I don’t pay any attention to what Jaume says about straining the sauce — the slightly chunky nuttiness is nice.  Whirl in the vinegar season to taste with salt.

“Oceans cover seventy-five percent of the planet and yet we eat like there are only about 20 kinds of fish out there.” That’s Angel León again, talking at the French Culinary Institute in New York last month. He had a couple of mackerel in front of him–not an obscure “nameless” fish like the ones he coddles at Aponiente, his restaurant in el Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz), but one of the only small bluefish he could find in markets here. The fish was fresh and firm and he’d filleted it neatly; as he talked, he put the two fillets together again, gently pressing and smoothing them into a mackerel-shaped whole.

“One thing about a lot of the fish trashed at sea,” León said, “is that it is small. In thinking about how to use the smaller fish, I took some inspiration from, well,” he smiled sweetly, “fish fingers.”

León pulled out a few mackerels he had reconstructed earlier, each one plastic-wrapped into a perfectly round fish-loin-shaped tube. He sliced one to present in the guise of a sushi roll, nori-colored skin on the outside, pale fish within.

Next, he stoked his little countertop barbecue grill. “This charcoal is made of something we have a lot of in Spain,” he said, revving up a smoldering pile of olive pits with a blast from his portable hair dryer.

“What’s great about olive pits,” he added, “is that you can get them really hot–it’s easy to take them up to 600 C.” (That’s 1112 degrees F.) For the moment, he settled on a slower fire, 200 C (about 400 F), unwrapped another boneless mackerel, brushed it with a little olive oil, and put it on the grill. “You want crackling skin, but you also want the fish to gently confit,” León said, “to take on flavor from the oil but also from the olive pit smoke, flavor something reminiscent of olive trees themselves.”

Unless you live near an olive grove, you’re going to have to make quite a few martinis to collect enough pits for this kind of barbecue. One ambitious New Yorker in the audience asked about the dynamics of lighting the pits. Not easy, it turns out, until the pits have been carbonized as in the oxygen-deprived burning process that turns wood into charcoal. Best to wait until León adds ready-to-burn olive-pit charcoal to his roster of products for export.

León is one of those chefs with product ideas in the works. But his are no mere Food Flippin’ Mario Batali Tin Wind-up toys. There’s that plankton he’s farming, for one thing. And the Clarimax, his de-fatting gizmo that puts fossilized diatomaceous marine algae to work in the service of crystal-clear stocks. At the FCI, he unveiled a yet-to-be-named instant bottle chiller. These are things that are getting attention from chefs and sommeliers now, but won’t likely change things for ordinary cooks anytime soon.

It seems to me that for all of us, León’s re-fashioned mackerel is the invention that matters most. After spending time on commercial fishing vessels watching quantities of dead by-catch dumped at sea, León decided simply to stop serving big-name fish at his restaurant.

“Why do we think the only kind of tuna worth eating is sashimi-grade loin?” he asked. “In Cádiz, where I grew up, we could feed a family on a rice with meat scraps from one tuna bone. Heads are full of meat. We need to learn to cook this way again, to take advantage of the whole fish.”

A few days after his FCI talk, León prepared a blowout seven-course feast with Dan Barber at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Barber excused what appeared to be various eating-high-on-the-tuna sins on our plates: The caviar atop the Ibérico consommé was American paddlefish roe. The lubina (sea bass) was sourced at Veta la Palma, far away, yes, but an ingeniously designed environmentally friendly fish farm at the edge of the Doñana wildlife reserve in southern Spain.

“Sooner or later,” says León, “we’re going to have to discover the fish that have not been glamorized by marketing. Big beautiful cuts of tuna loin and all of rest of the fish we see on menus now will be gone.”

Back at the French Culinary Institute, León asked that the lights be turned down. “I brought a little video. I hope you don’t mind,” he said, not preparing us for the violent scene that came next: Andalusian fishermen balanced on the edges of their boats, sweating, yelling, working the underwater mazes of the almadraba. The water is roiled with waves of fighting tuna, captured as they swim from the Atlantic through the Straits of Gibraltar to spawn in the Mediterranean.

“We have to try to save this kind of fishing,” León said after the film clip ended. There was an awkward silence. I read later that almadraba means battleground in Andalusí (Andalusian Arabic of the early middle ages). How could a bloody man-on-fish battle like this be something to save?

León’s explanation: because it is historic. “The almadraba is a way of life dating back to the Phoenicians and after them to the Romans in Cádiz.” His real point: because it is sustainable. “That long history is possible because we had it figured out over two thousand years ago: enough fish get through to produce the next generation.”

The almadraba is seasonal. Because the tuna are culled live, this is a one-at-a-time confrontation that produces no by-catch. And, most important to a fisherman like León, it involves chance, and therefore is ethical hunting.  “Había suerte?–Any luck? This has always been the question asked of returning fishermen,” he explains.

High-tech fishing that has eliminated the concept of luck and the reality of mutual struggle is, in León’s view, what’s got us into this mess. “The kind of fishing that should scare us doesn’t because it’s done at a remove from the sacrifice. It’s carried out with helicopters and radar. The fish can be hunted down anywhere–that’s the kind of fishing that must be stopped.”

It was time to go, but Angel León had one more thing to show off. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a thick brown coin. “A friend gave me this coin,” he said, “It was found in Cádiz, but it’s Phoenician. See here? Stamped on it are two tunas. That is how important the tuna were then. I carry it with me always.”

Please don’t flash that thing on the street in New York.  And don’t show it to the full-body scanners over at TSA on your way back to Spain. Oh, Angel, I hope those tuna are still in your hands.

About the photos in this entry: these were taken by a talented photographer at Angel León’s seminar at the FCI and are posted at their blog, The Hot Plate. They are indeed, “hot,” I’d love to hear back from someone at the FCI for proper credit.

“I always wanted to eat plankton,” said Angel León, beginning the story of one of his culinary affairs. He seemed too sweet to be a chef, especially one of Spain’s most inventive ones. “When I was young,” he went on, “I remember they told us all about how whales feast on it.”

He looked hopefully across the room full of cooks and students who gathered to hear him last Thursday at the French Culinary Institute in New York City. “I mean, it always seemed to me it would be kind of like eating life itself — primordial.”

León grew up in Cádiz, the faded-gold southern Spanish port that sits right where the Atlantic and the Mediterranean meet. And he grew up fishing. But you know how fishermen are — it would take him a while to find other gaditanos interested in going out after something so tiny and unimpressive. Then there was the problem of finding a net fine enough to pull this nearly invisible fish food out of the ocean.

Eventually, León got a few friends to join his quest, and he persuaded a university biologist to give him some sort of scientific cheesecloth they use to measure plankton density. The day came for his plankton expedition. After hours of trolling, they came back to shore with exactly two grams of the stuff.  Plankton are really really small.

It took two more years, but León is now a plankton farmer, growing his own and harvesting it every three months from his swimming-pool-sized vat of autoclaved seawater. He brought a whole bowl full of green powder to New York last week. “This is freeze-dried,” he said. “At home, we use it fresh.”

When he says “at home,” he means at his restaurant, Aponiente, in el Puerto de Santa María, about 20 minutes outside Cádiz. “My love of fishing came first,” he said, “and one passion led to another.” But he was working as a chef during his plankton-pursuing years and before that, too, when he spent some time on commercial fishing boats. What he learned there — that about three quarters of what is caught is nameless by-catch that is dumped, mostly dead or damaged  – has had a huge impact on his cooking. Now he’s on a mission: to give those unknown fish a name and to put them on our plates. Plankton, it turns out, fit into that scheme.

Plankton are very very green. At his French Culinary Institute talk, the chef mixed plankton, mineral water, a pinch of salt, and just enough xanthan gum to make a syrupy paste. When you’re dealing with a food that looks like spirulina, maybe it’s inevitable that you end up saying things like “Plankton has 30 times more omega-3s than olive oil.” León said these things and added, “I’m working on making a plankton-based baby food.”

Wait a minute, we’re at the FCI, and Dan Barber, who knows when a thing tastes good, introduced this man. I’m working as his interpreter and am trying to focus, but I am starting to be distracted by worries about the f-word. He hasn’t mentioned what all these virtuous nutrients add up to, flavor-wise.

“Luckily,” chef León said (and now he used the Spanish word for a Cupid’s arrow of desire — for being lovestruck), “that plankton flechazo that struck me so long ago was a good thing.” He passed around a glass of his primordial soup: it tasted like the sea in that juicy, creamy way that oysters do.

And that means León can bring the plankton into traditional Spanish cooking in roles ordinarily played by expensive and overfished species. He talked about how he blends it into bechamél for croquettes and uses it to make “instant” fumet.

He poured a little cold plankton sauce into a wide bowl (“Maybe the biggest problem with this is really its name,” he digressed), placed a few oysters on top (“I bought these here in New York, but at home I would use a more humble clam, something with a nice texture but without the flavor of an oyster — the plankton is flavorful enough”), then garnished the plate with a little pretend seafoam made of beaten egg whites flavored with zested lemon rind (“A classic complement to seafood”).

“Emotionally,” he said “I feel this is just a very essential expression of the ocean.” It looked surreal, like a close-up from a National Geographic article about beaches.

Warm, he said, the plankton has a more “commercial” flavor, by which he meant less pungent, something more familiar to diners.

He stepped up to the big casserole he’d had on the back burner all that time; in it was a base for an arróz (paella is just one category of Spain’s many arroces — rices). But this base was plainer than usual, nothing but chopped onions simmered in olive oil. No fancy, expensive, or threatened shellfish in sight. In went the rice (in this case Arborio, but en casa it would be Bomba), then plain fumet. Taking it off the fire, he stirred a big dollop of plankton into the finished rice with a warning: “You don’t want to really cook this paste — it’s very high in protein and it will coagulate,”  and doled out plates for tasting.

The rice was perfect, buttery rich without being milky; it smelled like a jumble of fresh shellfish, and it had people murmuring about flavor. “We don’t have taste memory for plankton itself,” León said. “So a Spanish friend says it tastes like langostinos, a Japanese friend says it tastes like nori. What it tastes like to you depends on your experience.”

Some of you (especially readers around age two) may have felt drawn to the little guy peeking out from behind the pile of mantecados I wrote about last week. He’s my favorite caganer, a traditional rendition of the Catalan shitting man. He takes his place in all Catalan nativity scenes (even the ones in churches) to remind you of your humanity.  Here’s what it’s all about: no matter what kind of miracles may be going on around you, the arrival of kings and gods and so on, there you are, you and the call of nature, somewhere behind the manger.

I’ve noticed some of you don’t quite believe my annual claims about the importance of this tradition in Catalonia, though I’m glad at least a few of you are as charmed by it as I am. Either way, here’s a link to this year’s Catalan Christmas hit, ‘El Caganer,’  in which pop stars Albert Pla, Joan Miquel Oliver, Gerard Quintana, Estopa, and Quimi Portet i Manel wax nostalgic about what makes for the perfect nativity scene:  ”There’s Mary and Joseph, the three kings, shepherds and sheep, a little old lady roasting chestnuts… and above all, there’s gotta be a caganer.”

Although “cookies” have recently appeared in a few modern-chic pastry shops in Barcelona and Madrid, there is not really any equivalent of the American Christmas cookie tradition in Spain. For one thing, let’s face it: cookies are lumpy, loving-hands-from-home things and Spaniards are uptight about that kind of homeliness. They prefer to entrust their sweet endings to fancy pastry shops where they can count on perfect discs of mousse-filled genoises with glossy-gold caramelized sugar glazes.

Besides, except in the cooler, cow-studded, mountainous north, people just don’t have a lot of butter lying around the house here. What they do have is manteca. Lard. Yes, from pigs.

My ex was Andalusian, so even though we lived in Barcelona, his mother always laid in a supply of mantecados – a crumbly shortbread made with lard and ground almonds — for Christmas. Polvorones too:  they’re a more nutty, less floury formulation of the mantecado. They came from Estepa, delivered by visiting Sevillano friends. The story goes that mantecados were perfected some 150 years ago by a famously large woman known as “La Colchona” (translation: “The Mattress”) who baked them for her husband to sell along his pony express-style transport route from Estepa to Córdoba. Nuns in Southern Spain still crank out tons of these sandy sweets for the holidays (keeping cloistered, perhaps, for fear of nicknames).

Mantecados come individually wrapped in crinkly thin paper and dusted with powdered sugar. When you unwrap them you get only the faintest whiff of almond or cinnamon or lemon or anise seed — the classic sweet-enhancing flavors of Spain. You have to nibble carefully or the whole cookie just dissolves into a pile of crumbs in your hand. Joaquín always advocated squeezing the whole thing into a ball before unwrapping it, and felt it was crucial to pop it into his mouth all at once.

If you’re in Barcelona and missing Southern Spain’s mantecados, head for Caelum, a shop full of sweets supplied by convents and monasteries (C/ Palla 8 at the corner of Carrer del Pi, Tel:  93-302-69-93).

If you’re in the U.S., I know you’re tempted to slip on your wimple and start baking, but you’re probably afraid to go for the lard. So here’s my butter-based interpretation. This is an easy cookie of few ingredients, humble, crumbly-dry, not too sweet, meant to keep company with a good café solo or licor.

Cinnamon Almond Mantecados

Makes 30 cookies

3 oz. whole raw almonds (a steeply heaping 1/2 C)

5 Tbsp. confectioners’ sugar (plus 1/2 C for rolling the finished cookies)

1 tsp. cinnamon (or a Tbsp. or so anise liqueur, or a few drops lemon essence)

1 cup all purpose flour

a fat pinch of salt

1/4 lb. (one stick) butter

Preheat oven to 350F. Put almonds on a baking sheet and toast them, about 10 minutes. Give them a stir after 5 minutes and take them out if they’re very toasty, you don’t want them to burn… but in my oven they need another 5 to get a bit darker and aromatic.  Let them cool completely. I don’t bother to skin them; the ground skin makes the cookie more flavorful and rustic.

Whirl almonds, the 5 Tbsp. confectioners’ sugar, cinnamon, and salt in a food processor. Process until almonds are finely ground. Add the flour and pulse again. Add the butter and pulse the processor until the dough holds together — it will be crumbly.

(At this point I like to take the blade out of the processor, clean it, and get it put away somewhere safe. That way you can work right out of the processor bowl without losing any fingers.)

Gently roll dough in your hand to make small balls about 1-inch in diameter (or 1/2 oz each). Place on cookie sheet — they can all go on one sheet, they do not spread much. Using the bottom of a glass dipped in confectioners’ sugar to prevent the dough from sticking, squash each ball slightly, leaving the rounds quite thick.

[NOTE: The originally posted recipe was short of flour. I've corrected it: should be one cup. In re-working the recipe, I tried a different way of shaping the cookies and I love the results... If you want something more like what the nuns cookies look like, do this:  shaped the dough into a couple of logs 1 and 1/4 inch in diameter and sliced them 1/2 inch thick. The dough is very crumbly and doesn't want to make a neat roll, so that's why even for this small recipe, I made two rolls: they're easier to manage. I formed the roll on a sheet of plastic wrap and rolled it around the dough to help me shape and gently squeeze it into a neat round. No need to refrigerate before slicing and baking.]

Bake 10 to 12 minutes. They should be firming up a bit but not browning at all. Cool a few minutes on the cookie sheet, then remove and cool a bit more on a rack. Roll in the remaining 1/2 C confectioners’ sugar while they’re still a little warm and continue to cool before eating. Or storing. If you’re feeling saintly wrap them in little waxed paper squares.

I take back all those unflattering things I’ve said in the past about Bilbao. That stuff about how it’s the “the Pittsburgh of Spain.” Yes, it’s an iron city. Yes, the Ría that runs through it is brown. And yes, it’s annoying, if not panic-inducing, that the Guggenheim Bilbao is now listed in 1000 Places to See Before You Die. But the city that inspired a planning cliché, “the Bilbao effect” (build a Big-Name-Architect museum and you’ll soon be polishing up your rusting economy with wads of tourist dollars), is more than all that.

A month ago, we set out on the Camino de Santiago from here. There are historical arguments for starting in Bilbao – the city has figured on Camino trail maps since the 1300s – but I chose it for practical reasons: You can get to Bilbao from just about anywhere. And yes, there’s Gehry’s museum.

But while the Guggenheim lends this departure point an Oz-like glow, for me the real Bilbao effects, the things I want to go back for, are these:

Its green, green heart. You fly into Bilbao over rounded hills. “It’s like a fairytale,” said Ed, looking out the window at forests, meadows, and farmhouses coming into view through a mist. The Guggenheim is famously sited up against the city’s industrial edge, but here’s what nobody tells you: it looks pretty swell against that green farmland too.

Its good, good eats. The market has a whole floor, icy and sweet-smelling, dedicated to fish. An encouraging first stop. Afterwards, my Bilbaina colleague, Carmen, pointed us to her favorite bar on the Plaza Nueva for a pintxo (peppers and tuna and cod and countless other little bar bites) and a zurito (a little beer). The tap is a bronze hand by Lorenzo Quinn. And the fluffy scrambled eggs they fed us as a vehicle for buttery sautéed cèpes, well those cured our jet-lag, I swear.

Big colorful windows. It rained a few times on our first day here. Then again, the sun came out a few times, too. The Basques track it all from their pretty enclosed balconies, sometimes painted bright colors.

The Euskotran. The walks from old city to new couldn’t be better: fifteen minutes along pretty 19^th century boulevards and grandly gardened roundabouts or an equally easy stroll via the promenade along the river (and you get to cross Calatrava’s glass bridge). But it’s just so sweet the way this little tram zips quietly along the grass.

Bilbao’s big girl. You gotta love her. And also the shop selling boinas, those huge rain-worthy Basque berets. And the windows full of hiking gear including stuff for the people who are into ropes. Bilbao is just that kind of hearty, practical place.

Ongi etorri! Actually, nobody welcomed us with this greeting when we touched down in Euskal Herria (that’s the Basque Country, to you). But, with our comfort in mind, the airport did offer this helpful invitation to the komunak. Just the fact that the Basques have Euskara, their very own language that no one else can figure out, makes me want to write them a love letter in lemon juice.

In all, the plan was to land in Bilbao and get on the Camino without looking back. But that’s not the way it went.

For one thing, there was that last lunch at another of Carmen’s favorite places, a restaurant whose name I cannot bring myself to reveal (except to my clients): beautiful ham, and a “Rioja with Ribera tendencies” (my god, what was that?), a luscious stew of garbanzos with lobster, tiny squid with slow-cooked onions, a delicate shell of a cream puff, coffee on the terrace overlooking the city.

As I was leaving, the gracious owner-maitre, Patricio Valiño, discreetly handed me something. “Oh madam, I believe you dropped this…” It was the button from my pants which had, it seems, miraculously shrunk during our Camino journey.

Forget about butter and jam on your morning toast (and maybe all that pre-dinner double-dipping of bread in olive oil, too). The Catalans have a better idea: pa amb tomàquet, bread with tomato.  Add a smidge of garlic, olive oil, and salt, plus a slice of protein — sheep’s milk cheese or dry cured ham — and you’ve got a complete breakfast.

Pa amb tomàquet is like biscuits and gravy:  a perfect pairing that got its start down on the farm, but has since made its way to big city tables.  Here in the New World it is found on “tapas” menus and recipe pages described as a Catalan specialty but given a new name based on a translation, inexplicably, not into English but into Spanish:  “Pan con Tomate.”  Whatever you call it, it is just about the most scrumptious thing you can do with a late summer tomato.  And there’s nothing to it.  Just don’t go about it the way Melissa Clark did in the New York Times a couple of years ago:  Rubbing the toast with tomato after drizzling on the olive oil will not do — you need the crusty toasty surface to act as a sort of grater for grabbing the garlic and the tomato and you want the olive oil to dress the top juicily.  Here’s the proper order of business:

Oh, wait.  Did I say there’s nothing to it?  There is one challenge to getting this “recipe” right.  It’s the ingredients.  With something this simple, the flavor of each element matters exquisitely.  The bread should be real bread, a rustic round or a ciabatta, substantial, crusty, hole-y.  The salt should be sea salt or kosher salt with a nice crunchy texture, but not that great big coarse stuff.  And the tomatoes should be the small, juicy, thin-skinned kind — this year, after a summer without tomatoes, the fall ones here seem just perfect.  In Catalunya when the last late fall tomatoes ripen, people pull the whole plant out of the ground and hang it upside down in a cool, dark pantry or attic.  And here’s my kind of transubstantiation:  The tomatoes last deep into winter this way, their flavors concentrating to perfection.

Once you’ve gathered these few good ingredients, here’s what you do:

Pa amb Tomàquet

Serves 4

For four people, toast four big slabs of bread or eight smaller pieces.  If you happen to be grilling, toast your bread on the grill, but the oven or broiler or ordinary toaster will do.  Do both sides, why not?  Meanwhile, cut a couple of garlic cloves in half crosswise, and do the same to four ripe little tomatoes.  Have your pitcher of olive oil and bowl of salt at the ready.  Let people gather around and do up their own:  first rub the hot toasts lightly with the flat side of the garlic — don’t be compelled to use the whole piece, a little goes a long way; next rub the tomato halves onto the toast, gently squeezing so the pulp mashes onto the toast  — do be compelled to use lots in this case; then drizzle with olive oil; sprinkle with salt.

Pa amb Tomàquet

A fancier version

Here’s a tidy make-ahead version that works well for a big party or one that doesn’t invite the do-it-yourself scene described above.  To prep the tomatoes ahead of time, I use a great Catalan cooking trick:  halve them and grate the pulp — yes, just press the halves, pulp side down, along the big holes of a plain old grater, catching the juice and pulp in a bowl.  Just before serving, cut a ciabatta in half crosswise, expose its hole-y bellies to the grill or toaster, and when it’s toasty, scrape on the garlic, lightly.  Now you can spoon on the tomato neatly and quickly, drizzle the whole show with oil, sprinkle with salt, whack into pieces like a pizza, and bring the whole thing to the table on a platter.

It’s August and I keep thinking about cold gazpacho.  I picture myself gulping it under the shade of a fig tree.  But I’m stuck in New York City right now, and, at least down here below penthouse level, we don’t have many fig trees.  And what’s worse this year:  we don’t have tomatoes; there’s a tomato blight on.  For once, rather than whining about what they’ve got that we ain’t got, I’m endeavoring to change my inner tune.  Today, borscht is my song.  This one goes out to my Spanish friends who do love beets, thank you very much, in their potato salad, and who have, after all, become suckers for foods with other-worldly looks, con un abrazo, desde Nueva York — toma ya, Ferrán: (more…)

If you think the harried shop shopkeepers of Barcelona are ignoring you just because you’re a tourist, you would be wrong (oh, all right, you might be wrong). Maybe it’s just that you don’t know the seemingly disorganized, fabulously efficient, time-honored rules for waiting your turn in Spain. (more…)

“Oh, no, not me.  I don’t drink cocktails,” I said, as Xesca mixed up a pitcher of rebujito, her favorite summer potion.  “And especially not cocktails made of wine,” I added snootily to myself.  I mean, there’s a reason spritzers are so 1970s, and that reason is wine.  Yet here she was, a friend I truly admire, blithely swizzling up a bubbly drink with, of all things, a delicate Manzanilla. (more…)

As I pulled these creamy blocks out of my suitcase after my last trip to Spain, Ed was standing by as usual, salivating, and asking about how I had eluded the food-haters at U.S. Customs this time.  Then I broke it to him:  “It’s not cheese, it’s soap.”  (more…)

Wait a minute, I remember that face from somewhere.  Yes, he’s back, hanging on subway walls and lampposts in Barcelona, sometimes staring out alone, sometimes looming amongst other scoundrels like Berlusconi, Aznar, and Putin.  W is now part of the Catalan socialists’ red-hot, retro-designed, European Parliament election campaign.  The copy: “Poden treure’ ns de la crisi els que ens hi van ficar?” Do you really think the ones who got us into this mess are going to be the ones to get us out of it?

I’m working on creating a walking and eating route across northern Spain — the drizzly part of the country travel marketers call Green Spain.  I realize the pairing of drizzle and green may not sound all that exciting, but we’re going in September, close to grape harvest time, so we can take advantage of the fact that entire villages will be praying for good weather. (more…)

The New Yorkers I’ve shown around Barcelona always seem to connect easily to the energy of the Catalan capital.  They get its contrasts, I think, of seediness and elegance, of old and new, and its palpable creative and mercantile drive.  When they return to the Big Apple, they invariably find themselves jonesing for more.  For a while, that big screenfull of lovesick images in Vicki Cristina Barcelona provided a fix.  But now what?  I might have suggested heading downtown to eavesdrop on vacationing Catalans as they ransack Century 21.  But the Institut Ramon Llull, a Catalan language and culture organization, has come up with something far more tasteful:  Catalan Days — an arts mashup spanning music, dance, literature, and food.  April 15 through May 20 at venues around New York City.