Olive Me

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.”  The stuff is so pure you could almost eat it.  It’s made out of nothing but olive oil, water, and lye.  So even though Ed is not much interested in things you can only almost eat, I think the recipe is worth sharing.

My soap coach on this trip was the fabulous Paquita Funes, andaluza and mother of  Señorita Bragas Limpias, a friend who earned that nickname on her last trip to the U.S. for the meticulous care she lavished on her deluxe dainties.  Little Miss Clean Underthings never leaves home without a bar of her mom’s homemade soap.

Paquita recycles her family’s olive oil into amazingly soothing slabs six liters at a time.  “I like to make the soap out of the oil I’ve used for frying roscos,” she said, referring to her plain little doughnuts — they leave the oil nice and sweet and clean.  She filters her olive oil by pouring it through a cheesecloth-lined sieve, and because she fries the roscos gently, she re-uses it a couple of times before turning it into soap.

Andalusians are shameless consumers of olive oil.  And why not?  They produce more of it than anyone else in the world.  My former mother-in-law swore the secret to my ex’s fabulous skin was that his first bath involved no water whatsoever: “It’s much better to massage newborns in olive oil,” she always said.  For those of us who don’t generally have six liters of oil in circulation, I’ve reduced Paquita’s recipe to proportions based on one liter of olive oil and converted it into U.S. measurements.*

Paquita Funes’s Recycled Olive Oil Soap

1 Quart olive oil (it’s fine to recycle used oil for this purpose, especially if the oil was reserved for frying mild foods on gentle heat and you’ve strained it clean)
1 Quart water
3/4 Cup additional cold water for diluting the lye
6 Oz. lye (also called “caustic soda,” chemically it’s sodium hydroxide, NaOH)**

Place the olive oil and the quart of water in a large nonreactive bowl (ceramic, glass, or plastic).  In a separate nonreactive bowl,  carefully add the lye to the additional 3/4 C cold water — it will bubble and steam, and the lye can burn, so do this carefully***.  Then add the lye solution to the olive oil and water base, stirring in a bit at a time, and again using great care.  Stir the mixture with a long wooden spoon, mixing always in the same direction, until it thickens to the consistency of a thick bechamel — this can take some time.  Pour into glass, silicon, or metal loaf pans (or an official soap mold) and leave to set for at least 24 hours.  Turn out the soap, slice it into bars, and wrap in parchment paper to cure for another two weeks before using.

*Paquita’s recipe uses the simplest cold process method.  And by the way, this soap is technically “pure Castile,” sometimes called “pure Marseilles,” in that it uses 100% olive oil.  Check out Walton Feed Company’s soapmaking pages for loads of details on the soapmaking process, including charts for double checking your measurements, which are especially important if you want to mess with this recipe by, say, swapping out 20% coconut oil for harder bars or tarting them up with oatmeal or essential oils.

**Good pure lye for soapmaking is not to be found over the counter in the U.S.  Various soapmaking sites I’ve browsed recommend Camden-Grey, an online supplier of lye, essential oils, and other supplies for soapmakers.

***I recommend suiting up in goggles and gloves and otherwise doing this project the personal-injury-lawsuit-conscious American way.

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.

A few years ago I convinced my husband Ed that spending a week as guests in a country farmhouse in Spain would be the perfect vacation.  We’d be surrounded by history, eat some real home cooking, and get to know the people – and more important now than it was then:  it would be cheap. (more…)

Thanks to the Internet I suppose I could read El País every day.  But I get bored after a while looking at the never-ending stream of news (and ads) that the Internet delivers.  What I want is to browse the actual paper, noticing what makes headlines when editors are constrained by the real front page.  I like to sip my café con leche and look around at everyone else’s paper, too, comparing, say, the Pais’s political spin to the Vanguardia’s white-shoe one to Avui’s Catalan perspective.  The Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages gallery delivers some of that browsing fun on its online gallery every day. (more…)

Those Michelin star folks are troublemakers, if you ask me. A couple of years ago, their meddling came between me and my favorite Barcelona lunch date:  Restaurant Saüc. It’s not that Saüc’s star wasn’t well-deserved, it’s just that it brought lots of new suitors to the table. Prices went up and our lunchtime thing had to end.

We have “La Crisis” to thank for a recent e-mail from the restaurant, wooing with a 27 Euro prix fixe lunch special. The note also mentions a pumpkin salad, beef cheeks with wild mushrooms, almond and pear tart with sheeps’ milk ice cream.  You better believe I’ll go running back for more. (more…)

I don’t really know Alberto Romero but thanks to the Internet, I have seen what he has for breakfast and I love him for his dedication to one of Spain’s perfect meals: a little crema-topped café with a glass of water back, olive-oily bites of crunchy fried dough in the form of a churro (or a puffier porra, since he’s in Madrid), and that excellent newspaper, El País.  Thanks, Alberto, for the photo above.

I rejoice when I hear that Starbucks has overextended itself and may have to close a few stores. As if that sameness they bring to city streetscapes weren’t tiresome enough, the coffee — ordinary beans, overroasted — just isn’t that good. And it gets my goat that the megachain has made inroads in Spain, where a well-priced, very good cup of coffee, served up quickly enough to make takeout seem like a waste of effort, is a long-established tradition.

Walk into any decent bar here and order a café con leche.  You get a nice, dark, crema-covered shot with freshly steamed milk for maybe a Euro twenty-five. (more…)

The Catalans paid special homage to Obama this year at Christmas by creating one of their traditional nativity figurines, the caganer, in his image.  I’m assured by the friends who sent me this one that it is intended entirely as an honor.  The caganer — that man who’s gotta go just as events unfold at the nativity scene — is , after all, a beloved character in Catalonia.  And since he’s meant to remind us of our humble humanity, I figure Obama would be flattered.

Let the txotx season begin!  Today is the day they tap the ‘08 harvest kupelas in the Basque Country.  Astigarraga, just outside Donostia, is, of course, the place to be.

More specifically, the place to be is probably Sidrería Petritegi.  That’s where, this year, after the Mayoral speechifying whereupon the virtues of the most prodigious (10 Million kilo) and most aromatic apple harvest in 30 years will be extolled, and after the apple tree planting (if you want the bounty, give back to the land) is done, at 1:45pm, the txotx season officially opens with a shout of “Gure Sagardo Berria .” That’s so many daunting Basque words for:  we’re talkin’ cider here, folks, the hard stuff, come and get it — fresh and fruity and flowing from kegs all over town. (more…)

Even before La Crisis took hold, the smart chefs in Barcelona detected a growing fancy food fatigue in this trend-crazed city.  Several of them set out to focus on toning down the tricks,  emphasizing top-quality ingredients over knock-out design, and keeping prices within reach.  Their “bistronomics” — economical bistros — are one of the best things to happen to good eating in Barcelona in a long time.   (Lisa Abend wrote about the movement in the New York Times last July).

My best meal in Barcelona in 2008 was at one of these wise little places, Embat, where chef-owners Santi Rebés and Fidel Puig are doing their own fine thing with flavor lessons well-learned in the kitchen at Espai Sucre where they cooked before. (more…)

Everybody knows about the Napolitanos’ pizzas and the Provençals’ pissaladières.  The Catalans, however, seem to prefer to keep their cocas on the DL.  (Below, a pastry shop owner puts his sweet coca under wraps.)

Coca is a flatbread made in sweet and savory versions depending on the occasion and strewn with different toppings depending on the season or on where you are in Catalonia.  I love a savory coca de recapte, a Tarragona-leaning combination of roasted and peeled eggplant, red peppers, and onions found in bakeries all over Catalonia. “Recapte” means provisions, and in that spirit, a savory coca can be topped with whatever is on hand, but it is never slathered with tomato sauce nor draped with cheese.

It’s hard to find a bakery coca that’s as good as a homemade one.  Fortunately, they’re a cinch to throw together.  (more…)

Continental Airlines just sent me a letter containing a $200 travel voucher to be used on future trips.  They say they have God on their side in not sending the 600 Euro cash compensation  that European Union consumer protection laws require when an airline orchestrates a 24-hour mechanical-failure-induced fiasco as ridiculous as the one in question here.  They’ve excused themselves by declaring the snafu “force majeur.”

Unless Continental can do something to improve customer service on this most skimpily-equipped and poorly-staffed route, my advice is don’t fly Continental Newark to Barcelona.  Right now, the Delta flight from JFK is a better choice. (more…)

Fina Puigdevall is probably the most committed locavore among her fellow Michelin star-winning Catalan chefs.  Her restaurant, Les Cols (”the cabbages”), occupies a family masía (Catalan country house) in Olot that dates back to the 15th century, though she hasn’t shied away from a few modern improvements–like the dramatic glass wall separating one of the dining rooms from the chicken yard.

The design is radical, the chef says, “but the most radical thing I’m doing right now is this:  I’m not serving fish anymore, even though we can get fresh fish from the coast of our own province. It’s only an hour away, you know. But we’re gradually retiring it from the menu because it’s not part of our local cuisine, our landscape.” (more…)

They have lulled you into believing, perhaps, that jamón Ibérico de bellota is the only smuggle-worthy delicacy produced in Spain.  Well, I’ve got news for you:  the farmers of this peninsula’s northern provinces are over there in their little mountain villages quietly making more and more fabulous cheeses.   (more…)

The Film Forum in New York City is showing Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1984 film, “Antonio Gaudi” starting today through next Tuesday, November 4.  Details and tickets are available online at the Film Forum’s website. (more…)

As far as I’m concerned, you don’t need scientists prying into DNA samples to prove that Columbus was no gentleman from Verona.  All you need is a day with Joan Santolaria, a geographer from Barcelona who captains the antique Catalan fishing vessel El Rafael out of the port of Palamós.  The man possesses precisely the sly charm, curious intellect, quick step, and wildly curly red hair one would expect from a Catalan pirate of Columbus’s magnitude. (more…)

In an interview on Miami’s Radio Caracol on Wednesday, John McCain was stumped by questions about what America’s relationship with Spain ought to be.  I’m trying to get ahold of the folks at Republican HQ to offer McCain a seat on one of my Spanish Journeys.  The man clearly needs a vacation, and a little taste of Europe. (more…)

After so many years of romancing food technology, it sounds like the Catalans are getting their feet on the ground again. The incursion of genetically modified corn on an organic farm where local varieties were being grown got people’s attention here last year.  Then a group of Catalan farmers — La Assemblea Pagesa de Catalunya — began to organize in favor of a law banning the production of GMO foods in Catalonia. The first step toward getting such a law considered by the Catalan parliament would be the collection of at least 50,000 signatures on an anti-GMO position statement. Som lo que Sembrem (”We are what we sow”) emerged to take up the challenge. (more…)

Walking down Carrer Parlament in Barcelona’s Raval one day in June, I came across a place that brought back sweet memories of summers in that city. The neighborhood has become trendy, but Horchatería Sirvent is still there, righteously unhip. (more…)