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Pan con tomate – Catalan tomato bread

Pan con tomate
Pan con tomate

It’s a total mystery to me how Catalan cuisine, out of all the cuisines in the world, could have given birth to the ultra-complicated school of molecular gastronomy headed up by Ferran Adria. Catalan cooking, in its non-molecular state, is centred in simplicity and great ingredients; there’s a growing collection of super-simple tapas here on Gastronomy Domine, all of which are typical of the region.

My newly minted sister-in-law, Katie, has family in Barcelona and studied Catalan at university. She and my brother married just outside Barcelona, which afforded them the perfect opportunity for a wedding meal made up of course after course of delicious tiny nibbly tapas, alongside a whole leg of Iberico ham (complete with a knife-wielding dude to carve it), three enormous dishes of paella cooked over propane burners and enough fruit tart (standing in for wedding cake) to sink an armada.

Pan con tomate, as you’ll have guessed if you’ve ever visited Barcelona, was on the wedding table (alongside chorizo al vino, padron peppers, positive gallons of sangria, and some garlicky prawns, croquetas, boquerones and other bits and bobs I’ll blog recipes for later on). It might just be the recipe with the best ease-of-making to total-deliciousness rating ratio in the world. I’m not even going to list amounts below – it’d go against the whole nature of the thing.

Quality of ingredients is always important, whatever you’re cooking; but if you’re making something this simple it becomes absolutely paramount. You should look for a really dense bread (not wholemeal) with a decent chewiness to it. And the tomatoes – hoo boy. There is no point in making this recipe at any time of year when you can’t get a decent supply of juicy, fresh, large tomatoes. You’re best off by far with tomatoes from your own greenhouse, and the things that resemble red potatoes from the supermarket should be avoided at all costs. Reckon on using half a tomato on each slice of bread. Your garlic should be plump and unblemished, and your olive oil the very best you can get your hands on.

You’ll need:

Good sourdough bread
Garlic
Very ripe, large tomatoes
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt (I like Maldon salt here)

Grill the slices of bread until golden, and rub each slice with the garlic pieces, which will wear down to nubbins as you go. Cut a tomato in half and rub it on a garlicky slice of bread, pushing as you go to make sure the juices and seeds  are pressed into the piece of bread. Discard the pulp.

Pour a generous slug of olive oil over each slice of tomato bread, and sprinkle with a little salt.

These are fantastic just on their own, and can be made even better by laying a slice of raw Iberico ham on top before taking a bite.

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Gazpacho

GazpachoI’m looking out of the window as I type this, and I’ve come to the sad conclusion that it’s definitely not summer any more. This will be this 2010’s final recipe for the contents of your greenhouse. This year hasn’t been fantastic for tomatoes, but the cucumbers have been glorious (full disclosure here – I didn’t grow any myself, but my parents have enough to club a small army to death with), and peppers are at their best now. It goes without saying that this recipe is totally dependent on the quality of your ingredients.

Most think of gazpacho as a cold tomato soup. Tomatoes do make up the dominant ingredient by weight, but a good gazpacho should take much of its flavour from the cucumber (surprisingly aromatic) and peppers. Get the finest, ripest vegetables you can find, and if at all possible, try to get your hands on one of those lovely, spurred, English cucumbers  – they’ve a lot more flavour to them than one of the smooth-skinned supermarket variety. Use your best olive oil, and enjoy the last of the sunshine. If you’re preparing this as part of a special meal, you can jazz it up something spectacular by shredding some fresh, sweet white crab meat, and putting a couple of tablespoons of it in the bottom of each bowl before you pour the soup over.

Finally, a word of warning. Your guests might have a baked-in dislike of chilled soups. Check before you serve this up. I remember the look of utter misery on my Dad’s face when we visited a friend’s house once and were presented with a choice of Vichyssoise and gazpacho to open a meal with. Dad, you’re a heathen, but for you I’d warm this through on the hob.

To serve four as a starter, you’ll need:

1kg ripe tomatoes, as fresh as possible
4 banana shallots
3 cloves garlic
2 red peppers
1 green pepper
1 large cucumber
2 slices stale white bread, soaked in water and squeezed
1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
4 tablespoons olive oil
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
Salt and pepper

Peel the tomatoes by scoring them around the equator and dunking them in boiling water to loosen the skins. Cut them open and discard the seeds. Blacken the skin of the peppers under the grill, pop the steaming peppers in a plastic box with the lid on for a few minutes to loosen the skins, peel and seed. Peel the cucumber, chop the shallots into quarters and mince or otherwise squish the garlic.

Blitz the vegetables and bread to a smooth purée in batches with the other ingredients. Taste for seasoning; you may want to add a little more vinegar or paprika as well as salt. Chill thoroughly and serve cold, with a little more olive oil drizzled over.

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Chorizo al vino

Chorizo is fantastically savoury, and makes a great tapas dish just frizzled up in its own oil in a pan, with no adornment. But if you feel like doing something a bit special with it, your chorizo will be even better cooked and marinated in red wine, creating gorgeously boozy, smoky, spicy, porky juices to dibble lots of bread in.

It’s worth preparing a couple of cured chorizos at once, even if there aren’t that many of you eating – this recipe keeps well in the fridge, the flavours becoming deeper and richer, so you can bring the dinner table to Spain again in a couple of days’ time. Once again, I don’t recommend that you use your best wine for this. A Spanish vino tinto (bog-standard red wine) will be absolutely fine.

To serve four to six as a tapas dish, depending on how many other dishes you are serving, you’ll need:

2 cured chorizos (I prefer a spicy one, but if you don’t like chillies, choose a mild chorizo)
1 bottle red wine

Prick the whole chorizos all over with a fork, and put them in a saucepan with the whole bottle of wine. The pan should be small enough to allow both sausages to be covered with the wine. Bring the wine to a gentle boil and continue to simmer it for twenty minutes with the lid on.

Remove the wine and chorizo from the heat, and set it aside with the lid on overnight at room temperature for the flavours to marry.

When you are ready to eat, remove the chorizo from the pan, reserving the wine, and chop it slantwise into chunks about 1½ cm thick. Put the pieces of chorizo in a large frying pan with half the wine, and cook over a high heat, turning the chorizo frequently, until the wine has reduced to a few tablespoons and the chorizo is crisp from the heat and dark from the wine. Pour the chorizo, the wine reduction and the savoury oil released by the cooking into a dish and serve with plenty of bread to mop up the delicious juices.

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Sangria

I know plenty of books and Internet commentators will tell you strictly that you should only ever cook or mix cocktails with wines you would be happy to drink on their own. I thumb my (adorable button) nose at them. I’ve made this sangria twice in the last week with two different £3 bottles of Rioja, and I can assure you that using a more expensive bottle will simply be a waste of money – I cringe to imagine you stirring orange juice and sugar into a really good wine. On the other hand, it is worth buying a good lemonade for this drink (lemon soda like Sprite for Americans, not the fresh stuff). I like Schweppes.

You should make and drink your sangria in the same evening. If it hangs around for more than a few hours, the wine can oxidise and sour. The evening you make it, though, your sangria will be delicious: it’s a drink full of sunshine and goes very well with some salsa music and tapas.

To make 2 l of sangria, you’ll need:

1 bottle Rioja
3 large, juicy oranges
2 tablespoons caster sugar
1 lime
1 apple
1 small wineglass brandy
Lemonade
Ice

You’ll need a 2 l jug, preferably with a wide neck, to mix this in.

Dissolve the sugar in the juice of two of the oranges in the bottom of the jug. Slice the remaining orange, skin and all, into thick pieces with the lime and the cored apple, and drop them into the jug. Pour over the bottle of wine and the brandy, then add a large handful of ice and carefully fill the jug to the top with lemonade. Stir and serve immediately.

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Herby grilled sardines – gore warning!

Those Padron peppers have got me thinking about Spain, sunny weather and booze, so last night I made a selection of tapas and a big jug of sangria to eat in the garden.

It rained, so we ate indoors.

Some fat sardines, marinaded in olive oil, lemon, garlic and herbs, formed the core of the meal. (More recipes, including one for sangria, to come next week.) If you’re fortunate enough to be able to find some really fresh sardines, which are sweet and tender, this simple preparation really makes the most of them.

Sardines come with a built-in set of biological zips, and can easily be cleaned, gutted and filleted with your bare hands, without any need for a knife until you come to the end and chop the tails off. It’s all a lot less unpleasant than you might think; really fresh sardines don’t smell at all fishy, just sea-like and delicious, even when raw, and I think there’s a real satisfaction that comes from doing this kind of thing yourself.

You’ll need to start by removing the scales from the whole fish. This is very easy – just run a cold tap and gently rub the fish with your fingers under the running water. The scales will come away as you rub. They are quite large and might block the plughole in your sink – scoop them out every now and then and put them in a bowl or a bin bag at the side of the sink. You’ll need this bowl or bag to put the heads and guts in as you prepare the fish.

To gut and clean the sardine, hold the head in your dominant hand and the body in your other hand. Snap the head off downwards, towards the fish’s belly, and pull it away from the body. Most of the fish’s innards will come away easily with the head, as in the picture. You’ll find that some of the sardines are rather fuller than the others; these are the greedy or pregnant ones.


Stick a thumb into the cavity that has appeared where the guts were, and slide your thumb along the underside of the fish to open up the cavity. You’ll find the fish unzips easily up to the point about a quarter of the way from the tail where its digestive tract ends. Run the opened fish under the tap, pulling any remaining bits of gut out of the cavity, and rinse the cavity out until it is clean and no longer bloody.

Your emptied fish should look like this.


You can stop at this point, and go straight to the marinading stage if you don’t mind pulling the fish’s spine out on your plate with your knife and fork. I prefer to fillet and butterfly the fish before cooking – this means that it has the maximum surface area available to soak up the lovely marinade. Removing the backbone is, again, very easy (and probably the most zip-like bit of taking apart this strangely zip-like fish). To open the fish up, put your thumb in that cavity and push your thumb along the underside of the fish to the tail. The fish can then be laid flat on a board. Starting at the head end, pull the spine out of the fish, zip-style, and chop off the tail with a knife.


You’ll be left with some tiny, hair-thin bones in the flesh, but you can leave these alone; they are so fine that you can eat them, and they won’t prick your mouth. I like to trim the edges of the filleted pieces of fish for neatness, but you can leave them ragged if you like.

To make enough marinade for eight sardines (enough to serve two as a main course), you’ll need:

1 wineglass olive oil
Juice and zest of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons each finely chopped parsley, oregano and basil
1 teaspoon crushed dried chilli
2 cloves garlic, crushed
8 turns of the peppermill

Mix all the marinade ingredients in a large bowl and submerge the sardine fillets in the mixture, adding a little more olive oil if necessary to cover. Marinade for at least three hours.

Sprinkle the sardines with salt and cook for about three minutes per side over charcoal or under a conventional grill turned to high, starting with the fleshy side and doing the skin side last. Use a wide spatula to turn the fillets carefully – they will be quite fragile. Baste the fish with any remaining marinade as it cooks. The skin should turn crisp and golden, and start to blister slightly.

We ate this with Padron peppers, chorizo al vino (recipe to come next week), a hunk of good bread and a jug of sangria. Not quite as good as going on holiday, but close.

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Padron peppers – Spanish roulette

One of the things I love about tapas is that they’re often so easy to prepare. Slice a chorizo, pour over red wine, stick in pan, reduce, eat. Slice some manchego and quince cheese. Eat. Place olives in small bowl. Eat. Put prawns in dish with olive oil, garlic and chillies. Make hot. Eat. Procure a ham. Slice. Eat.

Given that tapas are there primarily as a salty accompaniment to your drink, these simple, clear flavours make a lot of sense. The quality of raw ingredients in preparations like this becomes all-important, and often the best of those raw ingredients are the seasonal ones. Enter the Padron pepper.

These little green jewels are a deliciously sweet, fresh-tasting pepper which comes ready in the summer. They are, for the most part, delightfully mild – but one in every ten or so has a strong chilli kick. There is nothing better than a dish that engages your sense of danger. The Spanish have a saying: Pimiento de Padrón, pequeño pero matón. Translated very approximately, this means: “Padron pepper – teensy-weensy thug”.

To serve two as a nibble with drinks or as a starter, you’ll need:

150-200g Padron peppers (see below for suppliers)
5 tablespoons olive oil
A generous sprinkling of sea salt

Heat the olive oil in a large pan to a medium temperature, and drop the peppers in. Stir the peppers in the oil for about four minutes, until their skins are blistering. Remove the peppers to bowls with a slotted spoon, sprinkle over plenty of salt, and serve piping hot. To eat, hold the peppers by the stem and bite off the whole fruit. Keep a glass of something cold to hand in case you get one of the very spicy ones.

It’s worth getting your hands on some Padron peppers at this time of year, when they are at their very best. I’ve seen them in Waitrose, but if you don’t have a local branch you can also order them online in the UK at Little Green Men, where they have some great chilli products.

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Moro

The Great She Elephant does not so much celebrate her birthdays as rue them. She suggested Moro (Exmouth Market, Farringdon, London, 020 7833 8336) as the venue for this year’s quiet lunchtime wake for lost youth. I’m always happy to oblige – GSE has fantastic taste in restaurants.

Moro is a restaurant specialising in southern Spanish food with a strong Moroccan influence, run by the Clarks, a married couple who, confusingly, are both called Sam. It’s been going strong for ten years now, and shows no sign of slowing or losing popularity. Tapas is available all day at the bar, while in the restaurant itself you’ll find a menu that changes weekly, showcasing seasonal produce. (The menu for the week is available at Moro’s excellent website, so if you’re like me and mildly obsessive about what you eat for lunch you can start to decide what you want to order days before you visit.)

The dining room is all stark wood and zinc, with a real feeling of bustle contributed to by the lightning-fast, extravagantly tattooed servers. Moro wins extra points for offering tap water alongside the bottled stuff, and for wordlessly topping up the jug when we’d finished (it was a hot, hot day). Although all these hard surfaces make for a noisy dining experience, especially when the restaurant is full, it’s a lovely atmosphere for lunch, especially if you can get a table near the window, overlooking the busy street, or one at the back where you can see into the kitchen. The wine list, mostly Spanish, is really interesting, and you’ll find a near-exhaustive list of sherries to sip as an aperitif. And somehow, despite the restaurant’s exotic menu and massive popularity, they manage to keep the prices sane.

I started with one of my favourite dishes in the world: sweetbreads. Moro’s were glorious little nuggets, dusted in a seasoned flour and fried to a rustling crispness outside, with nuttily soft middles. A cardamom and preserved lemon dressing tied them to chargrilled artichoke bottoms and left me feeling like I’d just eaten an angel. GSE’s cuttlefish was carefully braised over a long period with sherry, until it was soft and toothsome. A broad bean salad, made from beans so young and tender that they didn’t need removing from their skins, provided a great foil in texture and flavour.

If you see the words ‘charcoal grilled’ on the menu, order that dish. GSE’s lamb, which came with a pea and farika pilaf and pistachio sauce, was delicious; pink and sweet in the centre and charred on the outside. I asked for the vegetable mezze platter, which you can see at the top of the page. Hummus, an aubergine purée, a spoonful of a Syrian lentil dish, more of those baby broad beans, French beans in a yoghurt sauce and Imam Bayaldi (stuffed aubergine) were clustered around a remarkable perfumed, shredded beetroot dish which was flavoured with pistachio and fragrant rose water. I felt the Imam Bayaldi would have been tastier served at a cooler temperature (it and the French beans were hot, while all the other mezze were at room temperature), but this is getting into seriously picky territory. A flat bread, baked in the restaurant and filled with crushed nuts, was served alongside to dip into the mezze, along with some sweet and peppery radishes and other crudités, and a spicy pickled pepper.

These are enormous portions, and this rich, very positively flavoured food is deliciously, satisfyingly filling. We paused for a while and then opted to share a dessert (and I’m glad we did; it was very large and again, wonderfully rich). This yoghurt cake with pistachios and pomegranates was like a deconstructed, Moorish lemon-meringue pie. Moist sponge nestled against a frothy lemon sabayon, and more of those lovely perfumey flavours (this time from scented pistachio and heady pomegranate) underscored the whole thing.

Just walking into this room full of the smell of bread and charcoal is a treat. Eating there’s positive bliss.