Olive Me

People around the Empordà differ on the subject of who makes the best recuit––the wheyful cheese of Catalonia that’s so perfect on a little toast with tomato jam. Or drizzled with honey for dessert.

There are those who like the cow’s milk recuit made by Quim, a sweet guy with a roadside stand just outside Fonteta. He makes a good goat’s milk version too, and I prefer its tang. Others swear by the recuit––also goat’s milk––made by the crotchety Nuri in the village of Ullastret. I’m in their camp.

Despite the inviting cursive of the “Nuri d’Ullastret” sign hanging above her door near the road out of that village, you can pretty much count on Nuri to act annoyed to see you coming. There’s something exciting about wresting a little pillow of cheese from her. You tell yourself her attitude is calculated to keep outsiders from scooping up the small batches meant for regulars.

Now there is another recuit in the neighborhood. Made by Manel and Natalia at Formatgeria Mas Marcè, this one is in a class by itself. It is also hard to get because most of the production goes to restaurants. Sometimes they have it at their farm stand in Siurana d’Empordà, near Girona.

I met them at the region’s big cheese show, La Fira de Formatges Artesans del Pirineu in La Seu d’Urgell with some of their prize-winning aged cheeses: El Set is a dense, butter-colored cheese with a natural rind, firm and slightly shardy at two to four months. Llanut is whiter, soft, and melting, eaten just a few weeks old. Manel wraps it in a layer of clean wool––you remove that, of course, before digging in. It makes the cheese just a little sheepish.

But it is their simple recuit de drap that matters in my memory right now.

What makes their little cloth-wrapped fresh cheese so unforgettable is fat. Ewe’s milk fat. And not from just any ewes. Manel and Natalia are raising Ripollesas––a breed of sheep native to Catalonia, but now so rare they’ve been put on the Slow Food Ark of Taste for salvation.

The milk Ripollesas give is much richer than that of other breeds at upwards of 8% milk fat. But hardly anybody raises them because they produce damn little of it: each ewe gives only about 30 liters per year. Meanwhile, Manel tells me, farmers here have gotten used to imported breeds that produce up to 600 liters a year. “You can see why my father, a sixth generation shepherd, who grew up with that level of production, thought ours was a terrible idea.”

A smile takes over Manel’s face as he looks out over the pasture. “That’s him out there with the sheep. He works as our shepherd now.”

The formatgeria is small, but the family’s commitment to it is huge. Besides bringing the Ripollesas back from the edge of extinction, they’ve brought the land into line with standards for certified organic pasture. While they were at it, they decided to revive another lost tradition: they make their cheese with vegetable rennet. The thistly cardoons they use to produce it grow wild on their land.

One more thing Manel’s dad thought was crazy: Manel and Natalia wanted to bypass large cooperatives––a guaranteed outlet for their milk––and keep everything from grazing to cheesemaking right on the farm. Manel set out looking for customers who would care about their project, taking samples of his milk and cheeses directly to chefs. Sure enough, Ferrán Adrià (mastermind at El Bullí) became a customer for the milk, and Jordi Roca got Mas Marcé to start making yogurt for their Michelin three-star Celler de Can Roca.

The difficulty of getting to those places for my everyday cheese has had me thinking about raising a couple of ewes.

Meantime, there’s this: if you can get your hands on good buttermilk and whole milk, turning them into a decent homemade version of recuit is only slightly more taxing than boiling water.

Manel and Natalia would not approve, but even they would have to admit that this stuff, made with organic cow’s milk and no gums or fillers to give it listless water-weight gain, is a hundred times better than store-bought ricotta.

Recuit

Makes about one quart

1/2 gallon (8 cups) whole milk
1 pint (2 cups) buttermilk
1/2 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
cheesecloth and kitchen twine or a rubber band

Warm the milk, buttermilk, and salt in pot––an enameled one, pale and weighty, is perfect: it seems never to scorch. Slowly heat the mixture, stirring now and then to be sure it isn’t sticking on the bottom of the pot.

If you’re a Catalan countrywoman you probably know by looking just when to turn off the fire. It’s not too far south of the boiling point, when the milk is wiggly and threatening to simmer, that you’ll see the milk seem to separate a bit, and a few curds begin to form. I use a candy thermometer and this all happens between 170 and 180 degrees F.

As soon as you get the beginnings of curd formation, turn off the heat and stop stirring. It won’t look like much at first, but if you keep cooking, the cheese loses its delicate flavor and texture. The recuit will continue to develop as it stands. Let it stand for five minutes.

Line a strainer or colander with four layers of cheesecloth. Be sure you use squares of cloth big enough to allow you to wrap around a quart-sized blob of cheese. Using a skimmer or slotted spoon, scoop the curds into the cheesecloth-lined colander. Keep scooping until all that’s left in the pot is the whey and the itty bitty squigles that are hard to catch with your slotted spoon.

(Why not just pour the whole mess through? You can. But then your cheese is wetter and takes longer to drain. Instead, use a separate piece of cheesecloth to strain the last bits of curd out of the whey, chill it, and drink it later on. I sense a healthy bottled whey drink craze coming on.)

Now gather up the corners of your cheesecloth and tie it with a piece of kitchen twine or a rubber band. Tie the bundle to your faucet and let it drip into your sink for 20 minutes. Don’t let it go much longer or it gets too dry.

This is so good just unwrapped and drizzled with honey while it’s still at warm room temperature. But you can leave it wrapped and store it in a shallow bowl for a few days in the fridge, and use it as you would ricotta.

“Melmelada de tomàquet is not so much a tradition as it is a necessity,” says Georgina Regàs, the creator of Catalonia’s Museu de la Confitura. “You know how tomatoes are, they come in such overabundance.”

That’s easy for her to say. She lives in l’Empordà––a kitchen-garden-rich corner of Catalonia with a ridiculously long tomato-growing season. No one on my cold New England sandbar would dare to speak so casually of that kind of success with tomatoes, for fear of being struck down by blossom end rot.

But this year we did have tomatoes. And once the thrill of tomato sandwiches (thick slices, white bread, mayo, salt) eased up, the season kept on long enough to allow us to act like Catalans. That is, pa amb tomàquet for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Until I remembered the tomato jam with locally made fresh cheese at Georgina’s little confiture workshop in the village of Torrent.

When I called, she didn’t really want to talk about tomatoes. She was gearing up for her autumn classes. “The madrones are so beautiful right now. They say if you eat them in full sunshine, they’ll get you drunk. Plus, they’re loaded with pectin.”

“Wait a minute, is madrone jam traditional in Catalunya?” I’ve seen madrone trees there and in California, but I never knew those little orange fruits were edible.

“Probably not,” she says. “Catalans are not really a serious jam-eating people. But I’m into the recovery of the art of preserving. I’m not interested in limiting myself to traditional Catalan jams.” Georgina started her museum after an English visitor turned her on to lemon marmalade as a way to use the fruit that was littering her dooryard. “This project is more about nature’s treasures than it is about national ones.”

I think maybe Georgina is herself a Catalan national treasure. She is 79 years old and started this project just seven years ago. She does have a business partner, Teresa Millàs. “I had to cut her in,” she says, “Because I’d go to the bank for a loan on kitchen equipment and they would say I needed someone who was going to be around a while to back it up.”

“But really,” she goes on, “the only part of this I’m too old for is Facebook. I’ve lived my whole life without it just fine.” (Nonetheless, you can “like” the museum here.)

Teresa and the rest of the museum’s small staff all share Georgina’s passion for preserving and teaching. And in spite of their prize-winning forays into foreign jams (they won a gold medal for their kumquat marmalade at the Dalemain Marmalade Festival last year, which landed their jars on the shelves of Fortnum & Mason in London), they do teach classics from her region, including tomato jam.

Georgina approves of my totally simple recipe, though she would add an apple to the pot. Its pectin will make the jam set faster, which she says translates into fresher flavor. She also recommends another combination locals are fond of: tomato-watermelon jam. Both are traditionally eaten alongside fresh cheeses for breakfast or for a mid-afternoon snack. A smidge on a cracker loaded with goat cheese makes a nice American style hors d’oeuvre. I predict we’ll soon see see tomato jam as part of a fancypants restaurant dessert in New York or Barcelona. I imagine it alongside, say, basil ice cream, with a drizzle of arrop.

“After the war, when nobody could afford sugar, preserves were made with arrop––grape juice, boiled into a thick, slightly caramelized syrup,” Georgina says. “But yes, I hear arrop is in fashion again.”

Melmelada de Tomàquet — Tomato Jam
makes about 4 half pints

3 1/2 lbs perfectly ripe plum tomatoes
1 1/2 lbs sugar
1 oz (two tablespoons) freshly squeezed lemon juice
a big pinch of salt
a sprig of fresh thyme

Blanch the tomatoes for half a minute in boiling water. Then peel and core them and drop them into a large, heavy jam-making pot. Add the sugar, lemon juice, salt, and branch of thyme. Bring to a simmer, then a steady boil, stirring every few minutes. Watch the jam closely as the water cooks off and the juices become syrupy: you’ll need to stir it steadily to make sure it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Squash any big chunks of tomato while you’re at it. Skim off any sticky foam that forms on the surface, too, since those dense little bubbles will cloud the jam’s sparkle later. The jam will begin to set up in about 25 to 35 minutes. When it’s softly set, remove the thyme and ladle the jam into clean hot jars and seal.

If you need instructions on testing jam for doneness or on preparing, sealing, and processing your jars properly, the people at Ball jars are more than happy to tell you what to do.

El Museu de la Confitura is on the Plaça Major in the village of Torrent, Tel: +34-972-30-47-44. Summer classes are for kids, but during the rest of the year, the museum offers classes for adults, about once a month. A typical Saturday class covers techniques, hands-on preserving, and a light tasting menu that can stand in for lunch. Don’t be afraid to join a class just because your Catalan is rusty: Georgina speaks Spanish, French, and English and, besides, when people are cooking, they nearly always understand one another. Coming up, Saturday, October 4: madrone jam and picapoll grape jelly. Winter classes move on to preserved pumpkin, and for the holidays, there’s Cava jelly, and citrus marmalades.

Once I placed a few shards––say about five bucks worth––of Spanish tuna, the kind packed in olive oil, on my tongue, there was no going back. Does it do any good, in this economy, to argue that a fabulous lunch for two can be made with just one eighteen-dollar tin?

What does it matter when the fact is, the kind of tuna salad I grew up on now tastes distinctly like a bowlful of fish oil soaked spit wads?

Now it’s Ortiz or bust. The ventresca is ultra-luxurious, even though it comes in a can. One that looks just like the same ring-topped oval that my dad would pop open for his Saturday post-golf ration of cottonseed oil-laced sardines. This is so much better. Scroll back the lid and you’re face to face with a few perfectly delicate long strips of tuna belly.

The larger, firmer, but still luscious slabs of loin that come in a jar are great in a puttanesca or a salad.

Whether ventresca or not, it’s bonito del norte you want: Thunnus alalunga, which is known as “albacore” in the American market. (For the species conscious, albacore is not to be confused with thunnus albacares, which we Americans call yellowfin tuna but the French, naturally, call albacore.)

Maybe the best use of a stash of this stuff: Toast a diagonal slice of baguette; drape on a forkload of tuna; give it a pinch of crunchy sea salt (because this tuna is not overly salted, the way the American tunas are) and a twist of black pepper, and away you go.

Maybe too, just a few slices of tart pickle or sweet onion on top. Definitely a piece of pimiento de piquillo, if there’s an open jar in the fridge.

And for a summer lunch, here’s a whole ‘nother tuna salad. I won’t give it a Spanish name, but it does have a Spanish accent.

Summer Rice Salad with Spanish Tuna

Serves 2

3 ounces Ortiz bonito del norte (part of a jar, or for the profligate, one tin of ventresca)
2 cups leftover white rice, cold
2 heaping tablespoons pesto (preferably a supply that hasn’t had any cheese added yet)
about a dozen cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
1/4 small sweet or red onion, sliced thin
one small unwaxed garden cuke, diced small
sea salt and fresh black pepper

Put the rice and vegetables in a bowl and stir in the pesto to dress it all. Taste and season with salt and pepper if need be. Gently toss in the tuna, so it doesn’t get too busted up.

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.

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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…)

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…)

If you thought the pimientos you ordered in New York or Madrid this winter were good, belly up for another round pronto. What you get, especially if you happen to be in Galicia, in the northwest corner of Spain, will put those wimpy winter peppers to shame. Midsummer is the season for the intensely flavorful, rarely spicy Pimiento de Padrón. (more…)

Getting to the Penedés wine country from Barcelona is as easy as last week’s New York Times travel section article (“Catalonia’s ‘Champagne’ Country“) makes it sound. About an hour’s drive gets you to the big-volume producers travel writer Sarah Wildman mentions. What she doesn’t offer a clue about is that another half hour and a good map will take you away from the “Disneyesque” Cava touring she describes. (more…)

In this lead-up to Easter Sunday, pastry chefs in Catalonia and Valencia are tempering chocolate like mad and sculpting it into eggs and other shapes to adorn the traditional Easter sweet, the mona de pascua. (more…)

Barcelona’s Boquería market is spectacular, but if the Boquería is the only market you see in this town, you’re missing out. (more…)

Two ways to sample Spain’s most venerated pig, jamón ibérico de bellota (a native breed of black-footed pig, reared in acorn-laden oak forests, and carefully salted and cured where the air is just so) here in the USA were plugged in today’s New York Times Dining pages. This is the cured meat people in the know here were buying futures in a couple of years ago.

In case you missed that whole story, The Wall Street Journal’s early account is still up on the Tienda website — tienda’s owners devised the “futures” scheme as they worked with suppliers to get a version of the ham approved for sale in the U.S. (more…)

If you read Bill Buford’s Heat, you know that Mario Batali’s first formative food epiphany came in Spain. Too bombed to recall the specifics, he later moved on, slightly more soberly, to Italy. Now PBS has him roving Spain in the company of Gwyneth Paltrow, filming their culinary road trip for TV. Mark Bittman is along too, presumably to eat for Gwyneth. Stalking along on Batali’s blog, I started to worry that Mario, GP and Bitty’s “discovery” of Vic’s beloved sausage, the llonganissa, might make it impossible to keep production at artisanal levels.

A purist’s salami, llonganissa is made from choice cuts of pork, (more…)

Torrones from Italy have made their way into American specialty food stores, but I don’t touch the stuff. (Well, not unless I’m at Tony’s Colonial in Providence, Rhode Island.) I wait instead for friends in Spain who know about this problem to send the more almond-y turrones. (more…)