Spain’s cuisine more popular than ever
MIAMI — On the American dinner plate, Spain is a side dish no longer.
After years in the shadows of the cuisines of France and Italy, Spanish foods - as well as the men and women who craft them - are demanding and deserving main course treatment.
“Our gastronomy has never been as popular as it is now,” Ferran Adria, the famed avant-garde chef of el Bulli restaurant in Roses, Spain, said in an e-mail interview translated from Spanish.
In cookbooks and on television, Spain’s cuisine has become a must-have. Traditional ingredients once limited to specialty shops - manchego cheese, pata negra ham and iberico ham, chorizo iberico, sardines and anchovies - are now commonplace.
And some of the nation’s hottest menus are headlined by Spanish chefs, including Jose Andres, whose restaurants include Jaleo in Washington, an eatery credited with putting tapas - Spanish bar food - on the American food chain.
Even this year’s Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival - typically a celeb-fest tribute to the American food scene - was kicked off with an ode to Spanish cooking, complete with a dinner for Spain’s King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia.
“People no longer think Spanish cooking is paella,” says John Willoughby, executive editor of Gourmet magazine. “People are now starting to be more familiar with the ingredients. Traditional Spanish cuisine is pretty straightforward. It’s not that hard.”
Despite that, Spanish cuisine had a slow start in the United States, partly for lack of a large immigrant population, says Andres, who was born in Mieres, Spain and trained with Adria. Americans’ constant quest for new tastes pushed the turnaround.
“This is not something that happened overnight,” he says. “Everything has been gradual. Fifteen years ago Spain didn’t even have a category in liquor stores in America. Now every one does.”
Spain only recently found its culinary voice. During Francisco Franco’s rule the cuisine was rustic and simple because of poverty and poor quality of ingredients, says Anya von Bremzen, author of “The New Spanish Table” cookbook.
“After the death of Franco (in 1975) there was new awakening. They modernized very quickly,” she says. “If you start from scratch you might as well go for the sexy stuff.”
Spanish ham = iberico ham- iberian ham
Today, Spanish cooking is known for an unusual blend of ultra-avant-garde creations - so-called molecular gastronomy, in which liquid nitrogen has become a standard cooking tool - and more rustic fare, such as fabada, a pork and bean stew.
Dani Garcia, chef at Restaurante Calima in Marbella, Spain, calls Spanish cooking an art, one that has pushed and blurred the boundaries of food and science. Garcia, for example, uses liquid nitrogen to make “popcorn” from olive oil, sherry and tomato water. That innovative spirit has grabbed attention and respect. And it was enough to team Mario Batali - a reigning voice of Italian cooking in the U.S. - with actress Gwyneth Paltrow and food writer Mark Bittman in “Spain: On the Road Again,” a travelogue-style television show chronicling great eats across Spain. And it brought Andres to American viewers in public television’s “Made in Spain.”
Though clearly happy to push Spanish cuisine, Batali doesn’t see it diminishing Americans’ love affair with Italian food.
“I don’t think it will take over. It will certainly have a place,” he said.
Grant Achatz, whose Alinea restaurant in Chicago is a leader of the molecular gastronomy movement, agrees that Spanish food itself is unlikely to topple other cuisines from the top of the American food chain, but the techniques Spain’s chefs have pioneered will linger.
“They have a lot to do with this new way of looking at professional cooking… It’s more the philosophy,” says Achatz. “It was in progress as they became popular. It was a natural evolution, they just sped up the process.”
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