Entertain Like a Chef: Spanish Edition

The smell of almond blossoms is thick in the air, mingling with the aroma rising off a freshly delivered plate of morcilla de cebolla, the earthy, intense blood sausage that is a local specialty here in Andalusia.

I’m sitting on a patio in the village of Melegis about 30 minutes outside of Granada overlooking a valley filled with orange trees, all of them heavily ornamented with bright fruit, and I’m having one of the great meals of my life. Vibrant padron peppers, slick with oil and crunchy with salt are taken between bites of grilled tuna dressed with a ham studded tomato compote.

The smoky, fat marbled pork chop, from the same black Iberian pigs that make the world’s great Iberico ham, fresh off the plancha, could give a well aged ribeye a run for its money.

It has become so ubiquitous and is interpreted in so many different ways that it’s sometimes easy to forget that Spanish cuisine might be the single biggest influence on the way we eat today.

Every time we order something from the portion of the menu that lists “small plates,” “dishes for sharing,” or “snacks”–to say nothing of the prevalence of restaurants serving traditional tapas–we are paying homage to the Spanish approach to dining.

Spanish cuisine might be the single biggest influence on the way we eat today

For all of its significance, though, it still sometimes seems that our understanding of Spanish food doesn’t extend much beyond tapas, paella and gazpacho. On my first visit to Spain it was the intense, buttery and herbaceous olive oils, the soft, vinegary anchovies and the cheeses: Manchego, Cabrales and Garrotxa that blew me away. A follow up visit the next year opened my eyes to the seafood both fresh and, believe it or not, from the can. The Spanish have raised canned seafood to an art form.

In the company of two of Canada’s best chefs, Grant Van Gameren from Toronto and Derek Dammann of Montreal, I toured some of the finest boutique producers of Jamon Iberico in the whole country and developed a deep appreciation for the intense, umami richness of Spanish charcuterie.

I’m back in Spain again, digging deep into the markets and learning how to get the most of the incredible Spanish ingredients. Most of all, on this trip I’ve come to appreciate Spain’s approach to the parrilliada, what we’d call barbecue.

In particular I’m inspired by the way the Spanish treat fish and seafood, especially shellfish on the grill and the annual calcotada where the season’s harvest of calcots, like a green onion on steroids, are grilled in huge quantities over roaring fires is a tradition that should be exported around the world.

Check out the rest of Sharp’s Entertain Like A Chef: Spanish Edition series.