CONILL AL ROMESCO (ROMESCO RABBIT)

This recipe from Food Barcelona sounds delicious, so I decided to share it with you all. Food Barcelona is an excellent site for recipes and for Barcelona restaurant reviews.

Rabbit’s not what it used to be. The miserable, mass-produced specimens that line the chiller cabinets of Catalan supermarkets don’t have much to recommend them in terms of either flavour or farming ethics. I’ve talked about this before. You can shoot your own, of course, but there aren’t many bunnies to blast in the middle of Barcelona. Fortunately, you can now get local, organic rabbit sent to your door from companies like Ecoviand de Brugarolas.

I did and I was very happy with the service. I was contacted immediately to inform me of availability and the expected delivery date, and the rabbits (and duck) that arrived were of the highest quality. 9/10 – it would have been 10 but the rabbit’s liver was missing; a gastronomic supply crime in my book.

I encourage you to seek out a good rabbit, either wild or organic (or at least free-frange) and give the following recipe a try. It’s a Catalan-style braised rabbit (not with a separate romesco sauce but featuring the main ingredients and flavours) that will leave you licking your fingers and persuade even those who are squeamish about eating rabbit (Brits and Americans, mainly, in my experience) that it’s a superb meat.

Ingredients:

• 1 rabbit

• Pancetta, cubed

• Chicken stock or dry white wine

• Plain flour

• 2-3 onions

• 6-7 ripe tomatoes

• 6 tablespoons olive oil (not pictured)

• Sherry vinegar

• Salt & pepper

• Rosemary, thyme, bay leaf (plus parsley if you want)

• Saffron

• Dried nyora peppers

• Smoked paprika

• Hazelnuts (50g-80g)

• 3 cloves garlic

A food snob note on ingredients:

Buy the best you can find. Ibérico pig pancetta can be found in Spanish and Catalan supermarkets and is perfect here. Good bacon’s fine too but don’t tip in a plastic pouch of chemically cured bacon cubes and expect the dish to taste OK. Tomatoes should be ripe and taste of tomatoes; no imported, flavourless rubbish please. Tinned tomatoes are better than those. Nyora peppers are widely available in Catalonia; if you can’t find them near where you live, Google Is Your Friend.

Method:

First, make the base for the braise. Catalan cooking purists will say that the following doesn’t have enough onions to be a propersofregit, or too many tomatoes. That’s as may be. Feel free to add more of one and less of the other. Both ways work here.

Regardless, heat the oil in a pan and add the finely-diced onion. On a low, low heat, allow to slowwwwly soften and caramelize. This will take a while. Split your tomatoes in two around their equators and rub them against a box grater above a bowl to get the flesh off the skins, Catalan-style.

Add a clove of minced garlic to the almost-soft onion then the tomatoes. Season and allow to reduce until there’s very little liquid left. Pour off any obvious excess oil.

Put the nyora peppers into some warm water to soak. They’ll keep floating up to the top and drive you insane so scuttle them with a knife and weigh them down with one too if necessary.

If your rabbit didn’t come ready-jointed, it’s time for you to practice your butchery skills. Remove the liver and heart and set aside. Chop off the head and divide the rest into 6 pieces with a cleaver, chef’s knife or kitchen scissors depending on your level of dexterity. You can discard the head; I’m not that hardcore. Put 100-200g of flour in 2 large ziploc freezer bags and season with salt and pepper. Put the rabbit pieces in the bags, seal them and give them a shake. Fun eh?

Brown half the diced pancetta in a heavy-based pan (ideally one you can put a lid on and put in the oven but a saute pan is fine; you’ll deglaze it later anyway). Add half the now-seasoned rabbit pieces a couple at a time, making sure you don’t crowd the pan. Remove to a plate and repeat the procedure with the rest of the pancetta and rabbit.

Deglaze the pan with a couple of glasses of dry white wine or 400ml-ish of chicken stock.

Add the rabbit, the herbs (tied in muslin and/or with kitchen string into a bouquet garni) the onion and tomato reduction, a fistful of chopped parsley, a mere pinch of paprika and a teaspoon of sherry vinegar.

Pop a lid on and simmer on a low heat for about 30-40 mins. If it dish looks dry, filter some of the pepper-soaking liquid through a sieve and add that. While it’s xup-xup-ing gently, make your picada. Toast the hazelnuts in a dry frying pan then pound them in a pestle and mortar. Mince and pound a clove of garlic, a couple of strands of saffron and the liver and heart from before. Or, if you’re lazy like me, put them all through a hand blender mini chopper first, then pound them. You’ll have time for an extra glass of wine that way. You’ll need it to be patient enough to gently scrape the flesh from the inside of the skin of the soaked nyora peppers. Throw the seeds away. It’s a fiddly job but nyoras are a key ingredient. Sorry.

Now pound it all together with the pestle and add it to the rabbit when the 30-40 minutes are up.

If you own one, stick a food thermometer in the rabbit’s leg and set the alarm for about 66ºC. It’ll take about 10-20 more minutes of cooking.

Let it rest for ten minutes then serve on warm plates. Garnish with the parsley if you like. Catalans would probably have chips (fried potatoes) with the rabbit because, hey, any excuse, right? But just some good bread and a side salad would do. Skip the bread and spuds and it’s a slow-carb/low-carb treat.

Prepare to get your fingers dirty as you pick up the rabbit portions and nibble at the exquisite, tender meat.

Sherry Cocktails

While in New York City recently I made it a point to try some of the sherry cocktail offerings found on many of the bar and restaurant cocktail lists. My favorite was the Bamboo, which has amontillado sherry, dry vermouth, orange bitters, Angostura bitters and a twist of lemon. A perfect aperitif.

Wine Enthusiast offers a brief description of the different kinds of sherry as well as select sherry cocktail recipes. What I'm trying next: the Adonis which is a riff on the Bamboo, with fino sherry in place of amontillado and sweet instead of dry vermouth.

Recipes

Bamboo (from Saveur)

1½ oz. dry amontillado sherry
1½ oz. Noilly Prat dry vermouth
2 dashes orange bitters
1 dash Angostura bitters
Twist of lemon

In a mixing glass, combine sherry, vermouth, bitters, and cracked ice. Stir ingredients for 20–30 seconds until well chilled and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Add a twist of lemon to serve.

Adonis (from Wine Enthusiast Magazine)

1½ ounces La Ina Fino Sherry
1½ ounces Perruchi sweet vermouth
2 dashes orange bitters
Lemon twist, for garnish

Stir all ingredients (except garnish) with ice and strain into a coupe glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

See our Jerez Sherry Tour in Spain.

Jamón y Música

I love this photo taken at an event in Madrid in November where Arturo Sánchez® presented their 2010 hams. Vintage 2010. 2010 is reputed to be among the best years in recent memory for their hams. And the ham was presented and cut with musical accompaniment. How often do you see that?

Chefs Paco Pérez and Mario Sandoval were there as well, preparing tapas featuring jamón ibérico. Given my intense love of Spanish ham, I wish I had been there.

Michelin Stars in Spain & Portugal

Here is the full list of the 2014 Michelin stars in Spain and Portugal. In Spain the total stars are now as follows: 8 restaurants with 3 stars, 19 restaurants with 2 stars, and 144 restaurants with 1 star.

The newest 3 star restaurant is DiverXO, which is David Muñoz's restaurant in Madrid. 20 restaurants got their first star this year, and 2 received a second star. The new 2 star restaurants are El Portal de Ecahurren in Ezcaray, La Rioja and M.B. in Tenerife.

Mediterranean Diet

The Mediterranean diet was formally accepted in November by Unesco and is now on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The definition of the Mediterranean diet from Unesco emphasizes not only the food that is prepared but also the raising, harvesting, processing and conserving of the food products. And importantly, the definition includes the crucial aspect in Mediterranean cultures: that of "eating together".

Eating together is the foundation of the cultural identity and continuity of communities throughout the Mediterranean basin. It is a moment of social exchange and communication, an affirmation and renewal of family, group or community identity. The Mediterranean diet emphasizes values of hospitality, neighbourliness, intercultural dialogue and creativity, and a way of life guided by respect for diversity.

That a key feature of the Mediterranean diet is the social component of food and food-related traditions affirms the importance of people in this intangible cultural heritage. This does not mean that the diet cannot be adopted by people from Hong Kong to New York, as a set of eating principles. With the availability of Mediterranean products across the globe and the awareness of the Mediterranean diet, eaters and chefs can prepare dishes fairly true to the food's origins. What cannot be easily replicated is the lifestyle aspect of the Mediterranean diet. The communal eating, the market or small producer shopping, the proximity to the products, the traditional knowledge of when, how and why you use certain products or prepare certain recipes, the home preparation and conservation of products from anchovies to olive oil to liqueurs, and the food-centered festivals. That doesn't make the diet any less valuable as an appealing and healthy way of eating, but I would hope that the lifestyle aspects–the stories of the makers and of the places of origin, of the traditions surrounding the food–could be transmitted hand in hand with the products and the recipes.

From Unesco:

The Mediterranean diet constitutes a set of skills, knowledge, practices and traditions ranging from the landscape to the table, including the crops, harvesting, fishing, conservation, processing, preparation and, particularly, consumption of food. The Mediterranean diet is characterized by a nutritional model that has remained constant over time and space, consisting mainly of olive oil, cereals, fresh or dried fruit and vegetables, a moderate amount of fish, dairy and meat, and many condiments and spices, all accompanied by wine or infusions, always respecting beliefs of each community. However, the Mediterranean diet (from the Greek diaita, or way of life) encompasses more than just food. It promotes social interaction, since communal meals are the cornerstone of social customs and festive events. It has given rise to a considerable body of knowledge, songs, maxims, tales and legends. The system is rooted in respect for the territory and biodiversity, and ensures the conservation and development of traditional activities and crafts linked to fishing and farming in the Mediterranean communities which Soria in Spain, Koroni in Greece, Cilento in Italy and Chefchaouen in Morocco are examples. Women play a particularly vital role in the transmission of expertise, as well as knowledge of rituals, traditional gestures and celebrations, and the safeguarding of techniques.

The Sobremesa

Restaurante Coque in Humanes, Madrid, today was awarded the Mejor Sobremesa (Best Sobremesa) prize by Salsa de Chiles. An intriguing award, and a fascinating concept.

How to translate sobremesa… It is a concept that barely exists in the English-speaking world. The Manuel Seco Diccionario del español actual defines it as the "tiempo inmediatamente siguiente a una comida, durante el cual los comensales permanecen reunidos y conversando." The time immediately following a meal during which the guests remain at the table and talk. It is the post-meal time marked by shared conversation. It is the time when coffee and perhaps brandy or a liquor are savored. It is institutionalized in Spain especially when meals are shared in restaurants or with invited guests at home. It means that eating and running is fine for quick lunches during the work week, but not an option when friends or family gather to eat. So revered is it in Spain that they have a prize for it!

Having recently eaten at Restaurante Coque, I heartily agree with their receiving the Best Sobremesa award. The experience at Coque is marked by the guests starting in the bodega and then moving to the kitchen, then to the dining room and finally to the Lounge for the Sobremesa. In the Lounge you are presented with dessert and the Box of Minerals. Literally a box containing 13 different small truffles and sweets with flavors ranging from Passion Fruit to Cinnamon to Candied Orange. Most notable in the Lounge is that all of the diners who earlier inhabited separate spaces in the dining room all seem to be friends in the Lounge, talking openly across tables and across the room. Barriers have come down, and no one seems in a hurry to get somewhere else, despite the fact that the meal is into its third hour. But isn't a leisurely Michelin-starred lunch in Madrid, masterfully prepared and served by Mario Sandoval and team, a pleasure to seek out, and reason enough to travel to Spain?

Ribera del Duero, Toro and Cigales Wine Trips

Well known and loved by wine enthusiasts, the wines from Spain's Ribera del Duero region in Castilla-León include such legendary names as Vega Sicilia, Pingus, and Mauro. Beyond and in addition to the prestigious bodegas, Ribera del Duero boasts numerous enchanting wineries to visit. We have collected our favorite wineries, restaurants and wine experts into unique custom trips available for 2 to 30 people.

We recently spent a week in the region on a trip of discovery, finding wonderful wines and wineries in the regions of Toro and Cigales as well as in Ribera del Duero. The three wine regions are all within a short distance of one another, making our favorite hotel in the region an ideal hub for a three or five day wine trip.

Beyond wine, the area is home to amazingly well preserved castles–the best I have seen in Spain–; sublime charcuterie from nearby Guijelo; rich lechazo (roast baby lamb) and cochinillo (roast suckling pig); some of the best sheep's milk cheese in Spain; luxurious five-star hotels; a new Michelin-star restaurant. We are partnering with food and wine experts, as we always do, to bring you our signature perfectly orchestrated and expert led trips.

The 10 Most Expensive Wines in Spain

I love this list of the 10 most expensive wines in Spain, mainly because the included wines are all amazing, and because we visit most of the wineries on the list. That said, we don't normally taste the wines on this list at the visits–given the price tags you will understand why. It is enchanting to visit a winery where you know they have bottles of wine worth hundreds, even if you don't get to taste it.