Frit Mallorquin
Traditional Frit Mallorquin
On Monday at The Thatched the first course I will be serving is frit mallorquin won tons. Normally frit is served in a large dish like the photo above, but I thought it would be fun to serve it slightly differently.
Frit mallorquin is mostly widely dish of fried liver and offal. It comes from the times when peasants still killed their own pigs. For all peasants in all of Spain (and I imagine most places in the world) the annual pig slaughter was a massive party with neighbours and families getting together to help kill and butcher the pig and then preserve as much of the meat as possible for the coming year.
Frying liver and other offal with peppers, onions and other available vegetables was one of the mid morning dishes served to everyone working on the pig slaughter and if you eat frit mallorquin at a Mallorcan restaurant (and at Barrafina in London) this is what you will get.
However frit (as its name suggests) actually means fried anything.
To make a frit mallorquin you use a lot – a LOT of olive oil, so it has to be really good quality extra virgin stuff. You take whichever ingredients you want to make a frit with, cut them into pieces of the same size and then fry them in oil in batches. The herbs you use are typically bay leaf and fennel fronds, and if you want to a small chile or cayenne pepper. Fennel fronds are used a lot in Mallorcan cooking and hardly at all in mainland Spain. They are the leafy bit at the top of fennel bulbs that we normally cut off here in the UK. If you can’t find them (Natoora UK sell them) but want the aniseed taste then use chopped up fennel bulb, a teaspoon of roasted fennel seeds or a little bit of pernod or absinthe.
The below recipe is for fish frit mallorquin. Xesca sent it to me when I dared to say that there weren’t actually that many seafood recipes in Balearic food. As you can see it is a list of ingredients rather than actual amounts. Frit is much more of a ‘use what you have in the fridge’ dish than a ‘go out and buy the ingredients for’ one.
Ingredients:
potato
red pepper
green pepper
spring onions or scallion (green included)
courgettes
green peas
fennel fronds
mussels
peeled shrimp
monkfish
hake
sepia
squid
dice all the ingredients more or less the same size.
batch fry all ingredients with the fennel at the end, just to cooking it lightly through the oil
mix them up and put a pinch of salt
If you are using bayleaf and chile then keep them in the oil to cook with each batch
The Great Balearic Pop-Up at The Thatched
On Monday 13th May I am taking over the Thatched pub in Hammersmith to showcase the different traditional food that the Balearics has to offer.
Almost everyone has been to the Balearics once in their life. Whether it was the childhood holiday in the Pollensa Park hotel, your barely remembered clubbing holidays spent in Pacha in Ibiza, hardly any of you have never been.
What you might not have done is eaten much proper Balearic food. I often go to Mallorca as I have family that spends quite a lot of time there, and I am consistently shocked at the sheer awfulness of many of the restaurants my family take me to. Bad expensive industrially made croquetas, dried up old salmon with cream slapped on it is not the Balearic food that I know. Sometimes I can persuade my family to go somewhere that I choose or I wait to be rescued by my friend Xesca who takes me somewhere like the below bodega in Inca with a few tourists and a lot of old men with walking sticks. She then explains what we are eating and what herbs and spices Mallorcans use and why. I get to have fun watching her eyes pop out of her head by telling her what I have been eating on the island the previous few days and when I explain where I’ve been she comes out with the oft repeated phrase,”Oh there. Yes we never go to eat there. That’s for foreigners.”
So the Balearic pop-up is there to offer you a small selection of what’s on offer in the islands gastronomically speaking. Xesca helped me pick the menu and her family have been in Mallorca since the dawn of time. There may be some extremely small cage dancers in The Thatched, to remind you of that often better known aspect of the islands. Unfortunaly Oisin, the landlord of the Thatched refused to get inside a carboard cut out cage while dancing away in hot pants, so you won’t have that delight while you are munching away.
Below is the menu, vegetarian and other special dietry requirement options are available (just please contact me once you have booked so we can plan). I’ll put up longer explanations of each dish in some different blog posts over the next few days.
Menu
Frit mallorquin won ton with tomato and olive marmalade dips (frit mallorquin is liver fried with peppers and onions and anise)
Pa amb oli in a glass (bread, olive oil and tomato)
Coca de trempo (Mallorcan style flatbread with roast vegetables)
Arròs de la terra de Menorca (one of the oldest dishes in Menorca – búlgar wheat cooked in the oven with black pudding and pork ribs)
Escaldums de gall d’indi (turkey cooked in an almond sauce with plums trad Mallorcan dish which has Jewish origins)
Flao de Evissa (Ibizan goat cheesecake with spearmint) with
Cireres Pacha (a couple of cherries and the Pacha name)
Fideua Sunday lunch at Boqueria 28th April
Fresh hot doughnuts with chocolate
During the last couple of months I have done a few calçotades at Boqueria on Acre Lane. It was great fun watching the whites of the eyes of the chefs on the Saturday as I arrived with 600 calçots and they realised what we were going to do,
They were a lot happier when they got to play pyromaniac trying to light the BBQ (later renamed Rachel’s car as it has to be parked outside), but calçot season is over now until the winter, so the owners of Boqueria have let me loose to help create some Sunday lunch menus for them and order their kitchen staff about a couple of Sundays a month.
I love tapas but I do miss Spanish Sunday lunches where you turn up at a restaurant at 3pm and are still there at 6.30pm with your 5th coffee and sixth brandy/Patxraran/dodgy liquor made by the restaurant owner’s grandfather.
This Sunday the 28th April the menu is based on the lunches available in the fisherman’s quarter of Barceloneta with one of my favourite dishes. I love Fideua, it’s very thin noodles cooked like paella using a fish stock and squid. Everytime I go to Barcelona I eat my weight in fiduea at least twice. Fish, pasta, allioli, romesco, wine, fun. Fideua has everything you need in a dish. I have also got the chef to make fresh tiny Spanish doughnuts stuffed with chocolate cream. Fresh hot doughnuts. What more could you want on a Sunday?
Menu
Glass of cava
Stuffed aubergines
Fideua with allioli and romesco
Hot doughnuts with chocolate cream
Cost £25
Book at Boqueria
The normal tapas menu is also available, but NOTHING is better than fideua. Promise.
Paella and other rice class April 15th
Paella is really the most famous of all Spanish dishes. There are so many versions of it with vastly varying ingredients and styles, most of which make a Valencian paella fundamentalist shudder, and often scream.
There is also a wide variety of rice dishes throughout Spain, although the best ones are generally to be found on the Meditteranean coast and the Balearic Islands. As well as paella - one of my Valencian friend’s Mum’s recipes, you will learn how to make other types of rice.
We will make
Massitet’s Mum’s paella
‘Masqueta’ rice – a risotto like dish with clams, saffron and courgette from Tarrgona
Mallorcan ‘dirty’ rice – a meat based rice dish from Mallorca
Peas Catalan style – well you need a veg
Ron cremat – coffee and burning rum, a real fisherman’s favourite
The cost for the class is £75 and includes a glass of wine as well the recipes. This is a completely hands on class in a relaxed atmosphere where you will feel like you are learning in a friend’s kitchen rather than a formal setting. You will then be able to go home and replicate these recipes with confidence and ease for friends and family.
Buy your ticket here
If you have any questions, please e-mail me on info@catalancooking.co.uk
The cost for the class is £75 and includes a glass of wine as well the recipes. This is a completely hands on class in a relaxed atmosphere where you will feel like you are learning in a friend’s kitchen rather than a formal setting. You will then be able to go home and replicate these recipes with confidence and ease for friends and family.
Buy your ticket here
If you have any questions, please e-mail me on info@catalancooking.co.uk
Pig Day is Back!
Pig day is back! Yes the annual revelry consisting of taking large amounts of different cuts of pork and doing things with them is happening on Sunday April 14th.
Due to perfectly understandable Health and Safety issues, neither Bea nor the government will let me slaughter a pig on site in Arch 76, Druid St – which is probably just as well, so we shall have a plethora of cuts and bits to cook with them all day.
A few of the guest chefs have still to be confirmed, so the menu may be subject to change (especially if they are Spanish and decide that they just know better) but we should be making:
11 am – pork belly or bacon rolls and tea/coffee
Before lunch
Frit mallorquin
Various mini burgers
After lunch
Chorizo
Sobrasada
Morcilla (this may become Catalan black butifarra or bull Negre)
Pigs trotter paella
Pig’s cheeks in chocolate sauce
pork ribs in lard
Roasted pigs ears
Once we have made the chorizo, Sobrasada and morcilla we will smoke some of them as well.
This is a all hands on deck day designed to give you an experience of rural Spain without actually leaving central London.
Please come wearing non slip shoes and if you have long hair, please make sure that it is tied back.
The cost for the day is £110 and tickets are available here.
Slating mushrooms
At some point in 2008 there was a law of style passed that dictated that all spaces aspiring to share plates had to add panache to the restaurant experience and serve food on slates. Piles of large white plates were consigned to dustbins and small family plate factories went bankrupt, while slate mines experienced an increase in demand unknown in the UK since the 1880 law obliging all under 11s to go to school. Chefs, not known for their academic abilities, broke into cold sweats staring at black slate until it sunk in that the interior designer just wanted them to put food on it rather than actually write anything.
Not being a particularly design oriented individual I found this ‘slate with everything’ am unnecessary affectation and I have been tempted, on more than one occasion, to produce some chalk and write down marks out of ten for the dish it previously had on it. I have also always thought it extremely impractical; slates break far more easily than plates, they also make a dreadful noise when scraped, and having ones teeth set on edge with a mouthful of food is an experience best avoided.
Today, however, I was presented with a slate of wild mushrooms in Montblanc, as you can see below and it was the most sensible use of slates I have seen. The slate is heated in the oven to a really high temperature and then put on a straw tray in order to carry it to the table. The mushrooms had a mixture of olive oil, garlic and parsley poured over them and were sizzling and still cooking when they arrived.
My companions explained that this is increasingly popular in Montblanc as it means if you like very well cooked mushrooms you simply leave them for longer on the slate. It is also a common way of solving a sharing dish of meat where one person likes their meat more cooked than another.
I say G-E-N-I-U-S.
I was so impressed with this and the rest of the food I ate today that I offered my services to do a demonstration of Scottish Cranachan at their food festival in November.
You’ll be hearing more about Montblanc. It’s a lovely wee place. It does calçots, has a really impressive medieval centre and serves some excellent cava. The cava is in no way connected to my offer to attend the food festival. At all.
The photos below show the medieval city walls.
And here are photos of the cava. Both are worth the trip.
At the moment I am on a train from Tarragona to Barcelona, fantasising about quiet carriages and wondering why all Spaniards on a mobile phone need to repeat the same phrase 5 times.
My friend Ramon has just called and I said, “no, mañana mejor.” eight times and beat them at their own game.
Don’t forget that there is a demo class on Saturday 24th. More details here
A demonstration of the Christmas Menu at Boqueria
All the magazines and newspapers are about to start telling you how to be less stressed at Christmas, how to organise things in advance, how to make the stuffing that will change your life.
My suggestion? Don’t stuff.
Come to Boqueria on Saturday November 24th and see a demonstration of a selection from the Christmas menu there. Alongside head chef Jose Luis, I’ll be showing you how the Spanish do Christmas while you watch and relax with a glass of wine. Once the demonstration has finished you will have a chance to try all the dishes we have made and ask any Spanish food question you like.
The menu is:
Friday Social at the National Gallery
2nd November
In the age before the Internet I was a first year student of History of Art at Glasgow University. The department, in its infinite wisdom, decided to teach all the first year sudents the entire history of art from pre-historic times to the early 20th century, in between we managed to actually learn something and I studied Velazquez.
I was fascinated by the austerity of the Hasburg royal family and the portraits of other Spanish nobility, the women in mourning dressed as nuns, the stark colours, the severity of it all. I imagined them all unsmiling, constantly in prayer clutching to rosaries and supersitions.
In fact they were all subject to the usual vageries of lust, gluttony, deceit and lies. The whole display of severity and ultra-Catholicism was very often a smoke screen for having a Jewish or Moorish bloodline and a very strong desire to keep the Inquisition from investigating too much. Velaquez himself, seen above in a self-portrait as part of Las Meninas, far from being the great embodiment of the Order of Saint James, had several illegitimate children and at one point was under suspicion of murder.
On Friday 2nd November, as part of the National Gallery Friday Night Socials I will be taking all guests on a short tour of 17th Spain through its paintings and its food, showing you how the food itself, from convents to Royalty, exposed the untruths of the painting conventions.
The menu includes a welcome cocktail and costs £25. To book please call 020 7747 5942 or use the online booking form
Menu
Tio Pepe Martini
3 Cocidos (lentil stew, chickpea and cod stew and white bean and smoked morcilla stew)
Sopa Real (Royal soup – consumme with mini meatballs and aromatic herbs)
Escabeche de perdiz (partridge with a vinegar and vegetable sauce)
Panellets, huesos de santo, petos de monja (little breads, saints bones, nun’s farts) – please note these are names of sweets and not literally what you will be eating. .
Glass of Nectar, a Pedro Jimenez from Gonzalez Byass
For the love of Mallorca
The week will kick off with a twitter cook-a-long with me, where followers to @R_McCormack #LondonMallorcawk, will be able to learn to cook Tumbet (a Mallorcan version of Ratatouille) using 140 character instructions.
The Cookalong on Twitter
stand by your kitchen at 7pm with twitter access and follow @R_McCormack or #LondonMallorcaWk
have ready:
extra Virgin olive oil
2 potatoes
1 aubergine
1 courgette
2 green peppers
1 red pepper
3 tomatoes
2 cloves garlic
salt
pepper
wine (that’s for you to drink so any wine you want)
For those less technically minded, there will also be a conventional cooking class on Wednesday 24th October. We will make tumbet, Mallorcan rice, Mallorcan stuffed squid, and a traditional Mallorcan cake.
Gazpacho Andaluz
Gazpacho is the undisputed Queen of Andalucian food – a simple peasant’s dish made from easily available ingredients, almost every household in Spain has its own recipe.
Having a definitive gazpacho recipe is actually quite a task. Things are done by eye and to taste rather than in exact measurements – different types of vinegars give gazpacho very different results; if your tomatoes are pretty tasteless you can roast them first to get more flavour from them.
I’ve added piquillo peppers here as advised by Daniel Martin Perez it gives the gazpacho a hint of heat and also adds to the red colour. Another tip from Daniel is to cut up the vegetables and bread then leave them to soak in the vinegar and oil for a few hours in the fridge. If you have time it greatly improves the taste of your soup.
Ingredients
For 4 to 6 servings
4 ripe tomatoes
1/2 cucumber
1 green pepper
1 red pepper
1 large onion
2 cloves of garlic
2 piquillo peppers
1 slice of stale bread
50mls (approx) of Extra Virgin Olive oil
25ml of sherry vinegar
salt
cold water
ice-cubes
Directions
Peel the cucumber, chop and deseed the peppers, chop the rest of the ingredients. Put them in a bowl and then cover the chopped ingredients with the oil, vinegar and a few ice-cubes. Put in the fridge and leave for at least 2 hours – overnight if possible.
Blend in a food processor or hand blender or vegetable mill and then, if you wish strain through a sieve.
Serve in bowls. Sprinkle with toasted almonds or chopped basil or parsley.
