Catalan Cuisine – Local Specialties From Barcelona
Spain is a country famous for its food, so much so in fact, that Ferran Adria’s “El Bulli” restaurant in northern Spain, in Catalonia, has been voted the best restaurant in the world for the previous 3 years. While Adria’s kitchen is highly experimental and at the cutting edge of modern food, the Catalan chef also sources and uses many home grown ingredients. Olive oil, fresh fruit and vegetables, fresh fish, pulses, cakes and of course wine and cavas are the cornerstone of the Catalan diet. Here’s an introduction to some of the best dishes.
Almost every restaurant will have an “Ensalada Catalana” on their menu, which is a green salad, topped with various “embutidos” or pork variants of cold sausages such as chorizos, lomos, fuet, and is a fantastic introduction to the Catalan palate. Another favourite is grilled peppers and aubergines marinated in olive oil and served cold, known as “Escalivada”.
“Esqueixada” follows the Catalan love of salted cod, which is again marinated in Olive oil and vinegar and accompanied by onion, red pepper and tomato. Another favourite is Bacalao “a la llauna” which is the same salted cod, this time baked in tomato, wine, parsley, garlic and paprika. Read the rest of this entry »
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Beef Stew Recipes With Mouth Watering Flavors
Talk about beef and most of meat lovers are already salivating. Imagine the appetizing aroma that will come out from your kitchen when you start cooking this stew. Several tested beef stew recipes will send your mouth watering. It is always wise to do research on what is available and put it to test. By the time, you exhaust all the recipes present; you would become a professional chef ready to contest for the hell’s kitchen, even without going through any training. In case you are wondering what in the world what this is all about, it only means that it is almost impossible to do all the recipes available as they keep on adding new ones.
Here are a few recipes that one can use to prepare right in your kitchen. They include the roasted garlic beef stew, the old fashion with winter vegetables, the ginger and tomato beef short rib and the Irish stew among others. What one should note is that these stews have different ingredients that constitute them in order to be what they are but the main component is obviously beef. Since it would not be possible to exhaust explaining how people make all of them, the only recipe analyzed is the Irish beef stew.
The ingredients include, 3tablespoon olive oil, 2tablespoon parsley, 10cloves of crushed garlic, 425ml red wine, 1tbspoon thyme, 18 whole mushrooms, 12 onions small sizes, salt and black pepper, 175g bacon cut in strips, 11/2kg beef chopped into cubes, 3carrots cut quarterly, alternately 12 small size carrots washed and left uncut, 425ml beef or chicken stock 50g butter and 50gflour. With these constituents ready, you may be ready to put one of the most the aromatic beef stew recipes into action. Read the rest of this entry »
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Why Barcelona Visitors Adore Catalan Cuisine
Catalan cuisine is regarded as being up there with the best in the world, and Barcelona is at the center of Catalan cooking. The city is well known for the diversity of its culture, but it also offers equally diverse culinary skills, exemplified by the restaurant Abac, awarded 2 Michelin stars in 2009 under Chef Xavier Pellicer, or the Roca Brothers’ one-starred Moo with Chef Felipe Llufria located in the Hotel Omm.
There are many more quoted restaurants, but also a large number of tapas and cafes that offer a fabulous range of Catalan delicacies that you shouldn’t miss by focusing too much on the grander restaurants.
Barcelona visitors who have savoured the delights of our national dishes just adore Catalan cuisine, and a large number come back to Barcelona just for the food. There is something about the way that Catalans approach cooking and eating that is almost reverent, and woe betide anybody that tries to hurry a Catalan to finish a meal.
The Catalan diet is Mediterranean in nature, olive oil being used for frying, and a lot of milk and vegetables used, such as eggplant (aubergine), tomatoes, garlic and red pepper. It also uses bread and pasta, a wide variety of fish such as cod, anchovy and sardines, beans and chickpeas, and also a variety of meats, particularly pork, poultry and veal. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: catalonia cuisine, catalonia culinary