Olive Me

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.

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.

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.”

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…)

Those formerly Galician, formerly mid-summer-only, thumb-size pimientos de padrón have become, in a slightly skinnier incarnation, a year-round item at every tapas bar in Barcelona. Now they’re everywhere in New York, too. Even though they weren’t quite in season yet, I couldn’t help ordering them on my first trip to Boquería where Suba chef Seamus Mullen turns out these and other tapas that taste real enough to soothe a longing for Spain. (more…)

Murray’s Cheese on Bleecker Street in New York City has found a new Manchego source and wants us stinky cheese lovers to give this cheese another chance. (more…)

It’s hard to keep up with the slew of Spanish restaurants in New York City, all vying to replace those tired “paella and sangría” menus with clever tapas and high-end ingredients like jamón ibérico. But the new formula doesn’t guarantee a good dinner. If you’ve been wondering what the fuss is about, Islero isn’t the place to find out (or at least not yet). (more…)

Yesterday’s “One Pot” column in the New York Times featured cocido, Madrid’s classic stew of garbanzos simmered in a rich, hammy broth. The recipe is from Tía Pol, the Spanish restaurant in Chelsea which will reportedly have cocido on the menu through March. (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…)