Hot answers tagged spanish-cuisine
9
It's not so much the taste as the texture. If they haven't been sauted first, the onions stay relatively crunchy during the rest of the cooking. The same is true of the garlic, but you'd usually have cut the garlic into much smaller pieces so it doesn't take as long to soften up, hence kicking the onion off first and adding the garlic a bit later.
9
Traditionally paella is a poor man's food, so what went in depended on what you had. If the only meat you had was snails, you made your paella with snails. So you'll find some people today insisting that to be truly authentic, paella valenciana should have snails.
The "anything goes" mentality still persists to some extent: it's not easy to find two ...
7
When I studied abroad in Spain, I lived for 3 months with an elderly Spanish woman, who originally lived in Cuba (so I had some amazing food). Along with teaching me how to make tortilla (Spanish tortilla), she said that saffron was the special ingredient that made the paella special. I should add that to get the best flavor, you need to get real saffron, ...
7
When you prepare the onions first you bring out the sugars of the onion by carefully caramelizing it. The same with the garlic, but it needs less heat (and therefore is added after the onions) If you put it in with the other vegetables the onion will be cooked. It will still be sweet, but not caramelized.
This method is not especially for Paella, it is used ...
7
I don't like the recipe much.
First of all, paella is a one pan dish, normally. That is, all ingredients are cooked in the same pan (paella) and in sequence. This means that all the flavors are stacked one on top of the other.
Second, if you are going to use saffron, the most expensive spice in the world, hold down on any other spices. In particular, most ...
6
Penelope Casas' The Foods and Wines of Spain explains that
Paella is a word that has come worldwide to mean a Spanish rice dish with a variety of seafood and usually some chicken. However, the word originally referred only to the pan in which the food was cooked--the paella or paellera, from the Latin word for pan, patella. Paellas actually come in ...
6
Gazpacho is possibly Spain's most famous chilled soup. The main difference aside form the temperature is that it's raw, meaning that the soup is not actually cooked it's just blended and chopped vegetables and occasionally bread. There is nothing inherently wrong with heating up gazpacho but it would lose its fresh texture and flavour which is why it's ...
5
You shouldn't use boiled potatoes as you have to fry them.
This is a good recipe, and no, tomatoes are not part of "authentic" Spanish omelette. In Spain we call it "Potato omelette" an the only ingredients are eggs, potatoes, olive oil, salt and sometimes onion.
5
Traditional Gazpacho doesn't have boiled mashed eggs in it
Salmorejo does, it is sort of Gazpacho with eggs and ham
Salmorejo is creamy and mostly blended, but the chopped or coarsely mashed eggs and their flavouring (garlic and salt), and the chopped ham are added last to give a chunky texture
People seem to use Gazpacho to refer to any cold soup?
5
Spanish Chorizo comes in two forms both of which to the best of my knowledge are fully cured (cooked): one which is more for eating on its own (like salami) and the other which tends to have a higher ratio of fat in it and is used primarily for cooking. The latter one being what the recipe is referring to as "cooking chorizo". Oftentimes the cooking ...
5
Briefly:
"pimentón" is Spanish for "paprika".
"ahumado" is Spanish for "smoked". There is non-smoked pimentón as well, so "pimentón ahumado" is just one of the varieties of pimentón. Others are "dulce" ("sweet", meaning not hot) and "picante" ("hot").
"de La Vera" means "from La Vera" which, as Ryan says, is a region in Spain where they make one of the ...
4
Per this paper, you want an extraction time of 15-60 mins at 113F / 45C. This patent uses temperatures below 131F / 55C. Both of those temperatures may be too low to make the cod actually taste good / cooked. 140F is a fairly typical temperature for sous vide fish. While 113F has some interesting results, it may or may not work for your dish as the result ...
4
"Cooking chorizo" probably refers to chorizo for cooking rather than eating raw. Cooking chorizos are usually smallish (8-16 cm), sometimes curved like a banana and tied together by a string in chains, whereas eating chorizos are usually straight, larger (30-50 cm), and you eat them raw in thin slices, like salami. In some places in Spain, they use the word ...
4
From the best I can tell, "de la vera" is a regional form of spanish smoked paprika, where ahumado is the more generic form. Sort of like how real cheddar cheese only comes from Cheddar, England or or a true Burgundy wine can only come from Burgundy, France - "de la vera" comes from around the Tietar River in La Vera, Spain.
Pimenton de la Vera has been ...
3
The classic Valencia Paella does NOT have onion, though many modern versions do have, especially in the seafood varieties
Classic paella does have a lonely tomato (diced or crushed, mainly for colour), paprika, saffron, green beans, chicken and rabbit, red wine, and a long siesta. Also common to have some Lima beans (garrofon), broad beans, and Artichokes
...
3
If you are able to buy actual styles of sherry, then fino is the driest, and is the one to go for in most savoury dishes. If you are using it in seafood or fish dishes, then I'd try to get manzanilla which is a kind of fino that is grown on the coast and has a salty tang to it.
For sweet dishes try the really raisiny Pedro Ximinéz (PX) or oloroso, which is ...
3
Cream sherry is very sweet - likely too sweet for most recipes that don't explicitly mention it.
If a recipe simply calls for "sherry", it usually means dry sherry, as that's the most common kind of available. In fact, I don't think I've ever even seen "very dry" around here. So I would definitely stick with the dry.
As for brand, I believe that sherry ...
3
Russian roulette peppers!
Not sure if there is a good substitute you can buy already grown?
If you live near a warm coast try growing your own. Good seed suppliers (Johnnyseeds, LocalHarvest etc - Peperone Padron in NZ from italianseedspronto) should be able to help, or check Ebay or Amazon
3
I agree with the others that 1 gram is way too much saffron. Unless you're making one of those huge outdoor pans of paella which feeds 20 people.
Exact quantities depend on how much paella you're making, and the freshness of the saffron involved. I tend to use a hefty pinch, which would be around 12-20 threads, for a paella for 6 (2-3 liters). I'll ...
3
A gram is an awful lot. Most recipes I'm familiar with call for a pinch or sometimes a specific (small) number of threads.
Crush the threads first; don't add them whole or you won't get as much out of them.
If your goal is the bright yellow color, soaking the crushed saffron threads in a little wine or vinegar for 10 minutes or so helps quite a bit. I ...
3
First of all is coca a Spanish dish with huge variety. A coca can just as well be made of thin yeast dough with savory topping (similar to an Italian pizza but not necessarily with cheese) as well as sponge-cake-like (leavened just with the beaten eggs or with baking soda) with sweet topping.
Foccacia also comes in many varieties, but typical foccacia is ...
2
Gelatin works by creating a very fine mesh of proteins, between which the (hidrophilic) liquid gets trapped.
A mixture of fat and water isn't a liquid. It can be either a rough two-phase mixture, with visible fat droplets swimming around in the water, or it can be an emulsion, with invisibly small fat droplets dispersed through the water. Emulsions appear ...
2
I add saffron sparingly, starting with a medium pinch of the threads as I'm cooking, and adding slowly as I go, with pauses for steeping of the flavor. Have occasionally used the powdered (really expensive) saffron and warn you to be extremely careful with that product - once ruined a beautiful seafood stew trying to 'tap' the powder out of the bottle.
...
2
Being grown in Spain I've eaten boiled potatoes Spanish omelette a few times: when my mother wasn't in aim for cleaning the splattered oil after cooking. She stopped making omelettes that way: it simply didn't have the taste it should have.
IMHO potatoes should be deep fried in olive oil as that will give them a crust/scratching outer part with an inside ...
2
Assuming the cod was the same quality as before and you de-salted the fish in the fridge for 24 to 48 hours, then I would also guess overcooking. Rendering the gelatin at 45°C (as suggested in the paper @yossarian uncovered) should prevent the fish from cooking and give enough time to get it into the oil. You can always cook the fish in a separate step ...
2
Salmon mi-cuit is cooked as low as 108F per Douglas Baldwin but this is a "fast" cooking technique that requires only 15-20 min cooking max which is not long enough to render gelatin.
You can render gelatin safely from skin and bones (or whole fish) sous vide for longer periods of time at any temperature at or above 131F.
I would consider rendering the ...
2
This information should be indicated on the label: sweet, sweet&sour, spicy, smoked...
Generic paprika is sweet and will probably not have much flavor (that is why paprika can be used in paella together with saffron - see this question)
2
Regarding your questions:
1) How can the bread be cut with the least amount of crumbles?
Traditionally migas de pastor (shepherd's migas) were the result of rubbing a piece or very dry bread with a couple of rough hands. If you don't rough hands, another way is rubbing 2 halves (lengthways) of a bread stick. This way the migas are all crumbs, but those ...
2
I think Ana's answer is great for dicing the bread and general bread advise.
I've seen a number of migas' cooks at work and here's the extract. Which method would you use?
The anti-migas. The best migas I've ever had were/are made by a friend of mine. His method is modern and that's why I call it anti-migas. He fries the chorizo, bacon, garlic, etc. and ...
2
The big difference is that gazpacho is not just eaten cold, it's never heated in the first place: it's basically just a puree of raw vegetables. Regular tomato soup is cooked.
The other differences are that tomato soup is mostly tomato, with maybe some onions but really no other vegetables. Gazpacho, on the other hand, involves at the very least cucumbers, ...
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