Simple Spanish Food

Candied Citrus Peel for Decorating Your Roscón

Roscones de Reyes, the traditional, wreath-shaped sweet breads sold in Spanish bakeries for King's Day (and increasingly throughout the holiday season) are usually decorated with chopped nuts, powdered sugar, candied fruits, and sometimes a glaze.  These decorations not only make the roscones look festive, they add a lot of flavor.  

An easy way to decorate your roscón at home is to make some candied citrus peel and arrange them, along with chopped nuts, onto a freshly glazed bread. Here's one we did last year:

Candying citrus peel is easy.  Just peel some strips of orange zest (or other citrus of your choice) with a vegetable peeler. Cut them into match sticks or other shapes if you like, or just leave them "abstract" (that's what I do).    Put them in a pot of cold water. Bring them to a boil. Drain them. Repeat.

Make a simple syrup:  Put one cup of sugar and one cup of water in a saucepan. Bring it to a boil. Add the citrus peels. Let them simmer in the syrup an hour or so. Remove them from the syrup and roll them in  sugar. 

These keep for weeks so you can make them ahead of time.

When you've finished baking your roscón  (see my easy recipe for roscón de Reyes to learn how), coat it with a simple glaze (again see my easy recipe for roscón de Reyes for the glaze recipe). While the glaze is still wet, arrange the candied citrus peels and chopped nuts of your choice on top.

The glaze serves as "glue" to hold the decorations in place.

¡Feliz día de Reyes a todos!

How Are Your Guindas?

Back in July when cherries were in  season I put away some guindas al licor, cherries in aguardiente or brandy.  

Here's what they looked like then:

Now after five months maceration, they look like this:

The aguardiente (a type of pomace brandy similar to grappa) has taken on a rich cherry flavor and color, and the cherries are now spicy with aguardiente.  These make a great dessert and digestif just as they are, but you can also use them in some traditional Spanish sweets--hopefully the subject of a near future post.

See my post on guindas al licór, cherries in aguardiente or brandy for more information.

 

Dried Fruits and Nuts Shops (tiendas de frutos secos y variantes)

 

All over Spain, in nearly every neighborhood of every city,  there are little shops that specialize in dried fruits, toasted nuts, seeds, and other traditional Spanish snacks. These places are called tiendas de frutos secos or sometimes tiendas de chuches (especially when they have a big selection of caramelitos, sugar candies), or fábrica de patatas fritas, because these stores also often make the best potato chips you've ever eaten--freshly crisp-fried in olive oil. 

If you've ever had a tapa of fantastic potato chips in a Spanish bar, chances are they came from the fábrica de patas fritas around the corner.

The dried fruits and toasted nuts are also of the highest quality.

Dried fruits and toasted nuts are  the oldest kind of Spanish road food, the sort of thing Don Quixote and Sancho Panza would have nibbled while wandering across La Mancha. These snacks are still perfect for traveling today.  When we take the bus to Granada or Córdoba or wherever, we always bring along a few bags of dried fruits and toasted nuts to munch on. They also make great instant tapas.

There is way too much variety in the typical tienda de frutos secos to list everything they carry, but here are some of our favorites.

Marcona almonds (they come toasted, fried, salted and not, caramelized, you name it, all delicious).

Habas fritas, fried bean chips. They're a little like fried green plantains.

Dátiles en rama, creamy sweet dates, still on the twig they  grew on.

Various sorts of toasted and fried garbanzos.

And, one of my favorites, toasted corn, maiz tostado o kikos. 

These shops also often carry chufas (tigernuts) for making horchata (see my post on horchata de chufa) and castañas pilongas, dried chestnuts, a truly ancient snack.

Andrés, my father in law, always used to set aside a few fresh chestnuts and let them dry, which makes  them slightly sweeter,  spicier (sometimes with faint cheese notes), but also harder.  The castañas pilongas at most tiendas de frutos secos  are quite hard and best for cooking (though I admit I will sometimes pop one in my mouth and eat it as I would a jawbreaker, carefully, taking my time). 

I could go on and on listing--toasted pumpkin seeds (pepitas), dried apricots and other fruits, big plump raisins with the seeds still in. . .

Some of these snacks you can make at home. See my post on toasted nuts for some examples.   In the future I will post on toasting garbanzos, corn, and other things. 

You may also like to check out La Tienda's almond and frutos secos page.

 

 

A Simple Recipe for Pestiños, a Traditional Spanish Olive Oil Pastry

There are many varieties of pestiños.  Some include sesame seeds or ground nuts and various spices. (These types overlap with another traditional fried pastry, borrachuelos.) For this post I'll focus on a simple pestiño of the sort I wrote about in a recent post. It contains nothing but flour, spiced olive oil, wine, honey, and a little sugar. 

One of the great things about pestiños is that they keep beautifully. They will taste even better the second day and will last several days if kept in  a tin at room temperature.

Here's how to do it.

Ingredients:

1/4 cup of olive oil spiced with orange zest and cloves (see my post on aceite desahumado)

1/4 cup white wine

1 cup of flour

Olive oil for frying

for the glaze

1/3 cup of honey

2 tablespoons of water

granulated sugar

Put the wine and  spiced olive oil  in a large bowl. Add the flour. Stir until it forms a dough. Knead the dough a minute or two. Shape it into a ball. Let the dough rest half an hour.

Roll the dough out until it's about as thick as a quarter. Cut the dough into rectangles, 2 inches wide and five inches long.

Fry the pestiños in batches, a few of the time, in hot olive oil. The oil should be at least 1 inch deep.

Fry them a minute per side, or less. They will puff up as they cook. When they turn golden, remove them from the oil. 

 

To make a traditional honey glaze, just boil a 1/3 of a cup of honey with 2 tablespoons of water.  Drizzle this mixture over the pestiños.  Then sprinkle them with sugar.

If you prefer you can skip the glaze and dust them with powdered sugar. (Either method is traditional).

Spiced Olive Oil (aceite desahumado): a Secret Ingredient to Traditional Spanish Pastries, Cakes, and Desserts

This is an old Spanish technique of spicing olive oil for use in fried pastries (such as pestiños), sweet breads (such as roscón de Reyes), cakes, and other traditional sweets. 

You just quick-fry a bit of citrus zest and  spices in the oil and let the mixture  cool.  This not only removes the flavor of the olive oil (which is unwanted in most desserts) but replaces it with a perfume of lemon and anise, or orange and cloves or cinnamon--whatever best compliments the dessert you're making.

Here's how to do it:

For this post I used orange peel and cloves. Lemon peel and anise is probably more traditional. In the past I have also used cinnamon sticks, cardamon, and even lime zest--not very traditional at all.  Experiment, but keep in mind that whatever you use is going to both perfume and flavor the dessert.

Ingredients:

One half cup of olive oil (any basic olive oil will do)

a few strips of orange zest

two cloves

Heat the oil in a small pan. Add the orange peel. Let it fry for a few seconds.

Remove the pan from the heat. Add two cloves to the oil and let it cool.

When the oil is cool, remove the orange zest and cloves, and it's  ready to use.

Ten Spanish Ways to Enjoy the Holidays #9: Turrones & Other Christmas Candies

Turrones, tortas, bombones, and other traditional sweets are enjoyed throughout the holidays in Spain.  In most Spanish homes a variety of these candies, along with many different types of Spanish Christmas cookies, will be served together on platters after the comida (the main meal)  or after the cena (late-evening meal) or for the merienda (afternoon snack). Everyone can choose his favorites.

Candy stores like Casa Mira, pictured above, make huge blocks of turrón and sell them by the kilo. Spaniards also buy lots of mass produced turrón, sold in boxes.

Some turrones, such as turrón de guirlache, are quite easy to make at home. See my post on turrón de guirlache for the recipe.

Other turrones, such as turrón de Alicante, a hard almond nougat, are quite difficult to make and, I feel, are best left to the experts. See my post on turrón de Alicante for more information.  Turrón de Alicante and other turrones are available from La Tienda.

Some turrón-like candies are disk shaped. They're called tortas. The torta imperial de almendras is the most common.  Again see my post on turrón de Alicante, which it closely resembles.

I make guirlache in the form of a torta:

The traditional shape of a guirlache is rectangular, cut into bars:

Turrones and tortas are only the beginning when it comes to Spanish holiday candies. There are chocolate covered nuts:

You can make a version of these very easily at home. See my post on easy Spanish bon bons.

The small disk shape is just as authentic as the round. We see these tortitas de choclate for sale in Madrid candy shops.

There are many other sorts of confections. Esperanza, my mother-in-law, buys these chocolate covered coconut balls, bolitas de coco:

Don't let the retro packaging fool you. These things are really good.  Lots of old-fashioned Spanish candies and cookies  have packaging that looks, to my American eyes, like cheap drug store candy, when in fact it's of the highest quality. In Spain it often seems that the more "vintage" the packaging looks, the better the product is.

Spanish chocolate pralines--pralinés de chocolate--are easy to make at home and delicious too.  See my post on pralinés de chocolate for the recipe.

See La Tienda's dessert page for a wide selection of Christmas sweets.

 

 

 

 

 

Spanish Hard Almond Nougat, Turrón Duro, Turrón de Alicante

Many Spanish sweets, such as turrón de guirlache or Spanish bonbons, are truly easy to make, but  others, unfortunately, are not.  Spanish hard almond nougat, alas,  falls into the latter category.    While a turrón de guirlache is so easy to make that I wouldn't bother buying it unless I just happened to be in Madrid walking by Casa Mira, the various types of hard almond nougat (turrón de Alicante, torta imperial de almendras, turrón duro) are best left to the professionals.

Making hard almond nougat involves whipping egg whites to soft peaks, boiling honey and sugar to a hard-crack stage, carefully blending the two together over very low heat and whipping them for a long, long time. Make one mistake and you won't have hard almond nougat but a soft, plasticky paste.  If I ever find an easy recipe for turrón duro, I promise I will post it. Until then, I'm buying it. 

The best place I know of to buy turrón duro, as well as any other type of turrón, is the Madrid candy shop, Casa Mira.

Here in the U.S. the Spanish on-line food store La Tienda has a good selection of turrones, including hard, crunchy turrones de Alicante.  Note that the turrón de Jijona, also available at La Tienda, is soft and a very different sort of candy.

These packaged turrones duros are relatively thin, from half an inch to and inch or so thick. As a result, they're easy to eat. You just break off a piece and munch. 

Just so you know:  the thin paper on the outside of many turrones duros  is wafer paper. You're supposed to eat it with the turrón, not peel it off.

The true old-style turrón de Alicante was made in a thick wheel about the size and shape of a whole manchego cheese. Look at the 6-inch slabs on the top shelf (to the right) in Casa Mira's display window:

Thick wheels of turrón de Alicante are delicious, but they can be a bit difficult to eat. This candy is quite hard and very crunchy.  Andrés, my father-in-law, used to chisel it apart with a sturdy table knife and a tiny hammer!

Though it's tricky to make, turrón duro is as simple as candy gets: it should contain nothing but toasted almonds, good honey, some sugar, and egg whites--and nothing else. The flavor and texture is similar to an almond brittle but distinct. And the various types of turrón duro, as well as the products of different stores and brands, are subtly different from each other too.

Turrón duro is tradionally enjoyed during the Christmas holidays and Kings' Day, Día de Reyes, and it is still most popular at that time of year.  Esperanza, my mother-in-law, buys an assortment of turrones and we enjoy them through the whole holiday season. 

 

 

An Easy Recipe for Spanish Almond Brittle, turrón de guirlache o torta de guirlache

Guirlache--a dark almond brittle--is an old-fashioned Spanish candy traditionally enjoyed around Christmas and Día de Reyes, King's Day, along with many other holiday sweets and cookies,  such as bombones de chocolate o divinos, chocolate pralines (pralinés de chocolate), and cookies such as mantecados and polvorones .  See La Tienda's dessert page for a large selection of Spanish Holiday sweets.  

Andrés, my father-in-law, loved guirlache, and I do too. It's one of my all-time favorite candies. What makes guirlache so special is that the sugar and nuts are toasted deep brown until they take on  spicy, almost piquant flavors. 

If you are in Madrid, a great place to buy artisanal guirlache is the famous old candy and pastry shop, Casa Mira.

Also, mass-produced guirlaches are now available in supermarkets all over the country. These are good, though they lack the super-high quality of artisanal guirlache.

Here in the U.S.  the Spanish on-line food store La Tienda carries a good brand of turrón de guirlache.

A turrón de guirlache is one of the easiest Spanish candies to make at home. Nothing could be simpler.  It's just almonds and sugar.   The key is all in the timing. You want to deeply toast  the sugar and almonds without burning them.  This can be done by eye. No candy thermometer necessary.   

You can also experiment with different types of sugar for flavor variations.  For this post I used a demerara type natural brown sugar.

Here's the recipe

Ingredients

1 cup of sugar

1 cup of raw almonds

First, peel the almonds. This is easy. Just bring a pot of water to a boil. Throw in the almonds. Let them boil 30 seconds. Drain them and rinse them off until they're cool enough to handle. Now they will be easy to peel.

Now cook the sugar over medium heat in a heavy bottom pot.

When it melts, stir in the almonds.

Cook the almonds and sugar until deeply toasted. The color of most guirlaches is between amber brown and chocolate brown.

Place a piece of lightly oil parchment on a cutting board, a baking sheet, a piece of marble, or anything else flat that can take heat. Pour the almonds and sugar onto the parchement. With wooden spoons or spatulas, give it the shape you like. Circles (tortas) and rectangles (turrón) are typical.

The candy will begin to harden. Before it becomes completely hard, cut it into pieces with a knife.

Let the guirlache cool completely, and there you have it.