Your Pimentón Comes From My Quiet Corner of Spain
If two decades of living in Spanish paprika country have taught me anything, it’s that the spice has far more potential than most people think.
By Paul Richardson
You probably think saffron would be the most important spice in the Spanish kitchen—but you'd be wrong: it's pimentón, smoked Spanish paprika.
Pimentón is close to my heart. For 23 years, I've farmed my own organic homestead in the remote western region of Extremadura, a two-hour drive from La Vera, the area that produces the world’s most prized pimentón. Around here—and, indeed, across Spain—the little tins of Pimentón de La Vera come decorated with colorful traditional designs, and are as ubiquitous in local kitchens as their contents are permanently in use.
Maybe you have some in your cupboard right now—Spain’s luxurious russet-red paprika. Taste a little on a fingertip: there’s a warmth and resonance there, an undertow of savory-sweetness from its origin as a late-summer red pepper, plus a mysterious, haunting hint of smoke.
Yet until a couple decades ago, few outside Spain knew what pimentón was, let alone how best to cook with it. And even now, though major brands like La Chinata and Santo Domingo are increasingly sold at supermarkets (and online at retailers like Despaña and La Tienda), I’d argue the spice remains somewhat misunderstood by non-Spanish cooks.
The 2022 Gift Guide
For the bar, pantry, kitchen, and home— everything you need for expert gifting
By Lucy Simon
LA TIENDA GLASS PORRÓN
2015 F&W Best New Chef Jonathan Brooks suggests bringing a porrón as a gift for hosts. Traditionally used as a decanter for Spanish wines, the porrón aerates wine as it pours through its narrow spout. Decant wine with it, or channel the festive atmosphere of Spanish wine bars by pouring the wine directly into your mouth. ($29, tienda.com)
Your Ultimate Guide to Snack Boards, From Charcuterie to Vegan
Kathleen Squires
OF ALL THE pandemic food fads—from beans to bread baking—nothing laid bare our collective psyche quite like the charcuterie board. Social media was flooded with salami rivers snaking around hills of cheese and breadsticks strewn like fallen trees. We became obsessed with boards because we were, quite frankly, bored.
Now, as we ease back into in-person entertaining, the no-cook, interactive snack board is the best expression of how we eat now. But this story doesn’t begin with the pandemic (though logistics play a big part).
How gourmet snacking became an American obsession
Fancy snacking has mirrored American attitudes ever since the neighborhood market became the “specialty grocer,” after World War II. Returning G.I.s visited immigrant grocers for delicacies they’d enjoyed overseas. Households relied more on prepared foods. “That’s when home entertaining became more about assembly,” said food business consultant Clark Wolf. Buying cured salmon at an appetizing store like New York’s Russ & Daughters, for example, made more economic sense than hiring a caterer.
In the 1960s, as jet travel ascended, so did the number of Americans vacationing overseas, and they returned hungry for such items as European cheeses and olives. In 1966, Julia Child, co-author of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” and star of the pioneering public-television cooking show “The French Chef,” graced the cover of Time magazine. The cover story chronicled America’s “concern with good eating,” citing “rapidly expanding” gourmet counters in supermarkets as the “handsomest profit earners.”
Sourcing the very best
In the same article, a Washington, D.C., market manager warned, “[If] you don’t have at least 50 assorted, high-powered imported cheeses, you’re not in business.” To understand the snack board right down to its DNA, look to the purveyors and importers who made it possible.
In the early 1970s, Federal Express (later FedEx) began shipping, making once-rare foods more accessible across the country. Berkeley, Calif., earned the nickname “Gourmet Ghetto” with its proliferation of specialty markets. In New York City, Zabar’s had transformed from a humble appetizing store to one of the city’s largest groceries. And in 1977, Joel Dean and Giorgio DeLuca opened the gourmet shop Dean & DeLuca in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. “DeLuca set up his own import and distribution business, serving not only Dean & DeLuca but stores and restaurants throughout the country,” writes David Kamp in his book “The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation.” In waves of quality olive oil, balsamic vinegar and sun-dried tomatoes, the Dean & DeLuca effect rippled across the U.S.—from the West Point Market in Akron, Ohio, to Napa Valley’s Oakville Grocery.
In 1982 in Ann Arbor, Mich., Zingerman’s Deli opened, featuring classic Jewish foods along with prosciutto and an array of fine honeys. “It’s called specialty foods today, but in Ann Arbor what we did then was considered weird,” co-founder Ari Weinzweig said. Customers wanted weird, and small specialty stores exerted outsize influence. “As these businesses developed in the late ’70s and early ’80s, there was an adaptation of some of these trends into supermarkets,” said Rob Kaufelt, who learned the business in his family’s chain of Foodtown supermarkets and went on to build the Greenwich Village shop Murray’s Cheese into a gourmet destination.
In the 1990s, the internet offered a new way to shop, and Dean & DeLuca opened stores throughout the U.S. In the new millennium, “the American farmstead movement really took off, especially for cheese and charcuterie,” noted Mr. Kaufelt. But imports remained important. “With the products of Spain, for example, the explosion of [chef] Ferran Adrià and tapas caused more U.S. chefs to use products like chorizo, marcona almonds and piquillo peppers,” said Angelica Intriago of Despaña Brand Foods, which expanded from wholesaler to retailer in 2006. “Importers started bringing them in, and consumers started trying them, too.” Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Costco plied customers with samples, a move that helped some specialty product lines grow by as much as 2000%, Supermarket News reported in 2005.
In 2017, Kroger acquired Murray’s Cheese and Amazon purchased Whole Foods. Perhaps the accessibility—and competition—led Dean & DeLuca (now owned by a Thai corporation) to close most of its U.S. locations, including its SoHo flagship, in 2019. Yet specialty foods, now a $170 billion industry, continues to grow, according to the Specialty Food Association.
How to build a board now
While the pandemic put a pause on socializing, we kept on snacking, even amid rising food costs and supply-chain issues. Today, a new generation of gourmet pros is shaping the way we snack.
Cheese-plate influencer and food stylist Marissa Mullen, based in Brooklyn, N.Y., offers inspiration on Instagram at @thatcheeseplate and peddles shippable ready-to-eat cheese and charcuterie boards via the website of the same name. Ms. Mullen’s book “That Cheese Plate Will Change Your Life” guides readers through her Cheese by Numbers method for building a spread. Here, she lays out the basics:
1. Plot your architecture. “First, choose your board. You can use a cutting board, cookie sheet or platter. If you are using spreads, jams, olives or anything ‘drippy,’ arrange appropriately sized ramekins on the board. Then arrange your cheeses, meats and produce. Fill in the gaps with crunchy items; fill your ramekins and finish with garnishes.”
2. Pair amicably. ”Make sure everything makes sense together in terms of flavor. We’re meant to eat the board, it’s not just for a photo.
3. Venture beyond the obvious. “Tinned fish is trending and a great element to include. Remember, you don’t have to stick to pork salami.”
4. Harness pickle power. “With produce, instead of just keeping it to fresh fruits and vegetables, add depth with pickled red onions or quick-pickled cucumbers.”
Brooklyn caterer and cookbook author Jenn de la Vega specializes in “mashing up experiential with visual art and food,” according to her website, Randwiches (randwich.es). Building community is central to her work, and her eye-catching grazing boards draw guests in. She advises:
1. Think about a theme. “Are you presenting a particular cuisine? I’m seeing a trend toward international themes—a great way to expose yourself and others to new foods.”
2. Make it user-friendly. “Make sure everything is grabbable and easily handled. Don’t put on anything that requires further sawing with a knife or is work to eat. Anything that’s too drippy or spreadable needs to be in a ramekin with the appropriate serving implement. Part of the appeal of the snack board is its ease.”
3. Spread the love. “There are so many spreadable possibilities. I love including dippy things, like hummus, on snack boards.”
In Washington, D.C., Dee Foulks started out creating charcuterie boards for family and friends. Now, her business Grazy Delicious delivers grazing boxes (a great option to consider for picnics), boards and tables in Washington, Maryland and Virginia. Ms. Foulks recommends:
1. Keep it simple. “Remember there is a lot of prep work with cutting cheese and making salami roses and washing all the fruit. You don’t need 20 different ingredients. You’re going to have a lot left over if you do.”
2. Think about the bottom line. “Including a lot of ingredients can get surprisingly expensive.”
3. Add something unexpected. “Some of my favorite ingredients are: edible flowers, which always dress up a board; toasted chickpeas, which look nice on top of hummus and add texture; flavored goat cheese; pepper jelly; and infused honeys. These all take boards to another level.”
In Washington, D.C., Dee Foulks started out creating charcuterie boards for family and friends. Now, her business Grazy Delicious delivers grazing boxes (a great option to consider for picnics), boards and tables in Washington, Maryland and Virginia. Ms. Foulks recommends:
1. Keep it simple. “Remember there is a lot of prep work with cutting cheese and making salami roses and washing all the fruit. You don’t need 20 different ingredients. You’re going to have a lot left over if you do.”
2. Think about the bottom line. “Including a lot of ingredients can get surprisingly expensive.”
3. Add something unexpected. “Some of my favorite ingredients are: edible flowers, which always dress up a board; toasted chickpeas, which look nice on top of hummus and add texture; flavored goat cheese; pepper jelly; and infused honeys. These all take boards to another level.”
3. Map it logically. “Place the things that go together next to one another. Make it easy for your guests to eat.”
At their Santa Monica, Calif., shop Lady & Larder, sisters Sarah Simms Hendrix and Boo Simms offer American-made cheese and charcuterie as well as everything from caviar and craft beer to fresh bread and flowers. With their cheese, charcuterie and crudités boards, delivered across L.A. and nationwide through Williams Sonoma, they curate those elements into satisfying compositions following a few basic principles:
1. Seasons are a great inspiration. “Always use what’s in season near you. Tell the story of the season. October, for example, should look like October on the board.”
2. Serve at room temperature. “Pull your cheese and charcuterie out of the fridge an hour before you are going to enjoy them. You want to bring out all the flavor.”
3. Aim for equilibrium. “Include elements of soft, hard, crunchy, salty, sweet, acid. If all of those things come together, they form a beautiful balance.”
4. Waste not. “You don’t have to go to Costco and buy giant blocks of everything. A couple of ounces per person for each element is enough.”
Fancy snacking through the decades
The Specialty Food Association was founded by food makers, purveyors, importers, distributors and retailers in 1952. In 1954, the group gathered for the first Fancy Food Show, featuring 82 exhibitors, in New York City. That show is now a biannual event, drawing as many as 1,400 exhibitors per show.
1950s: From Neighborhood Market To Specialty Grocer
What We Ate: Crudités, relish trays, stuffed mushrooms, pigs in a blanket, stuffed cherry tomatoes, stuffed celery (aka ants on a log), salmon mousse, shrimp cocktail, pupu platters
1960s: A New Age of Home Entertaining
What We Ate: Pinwheel sandwiches, banana bread with cream cheese, Swedish meatballs, kiwis, French onion dip, deviled eggs, asparagus roll-up
1970s: A Food Revolution and the Era of Aspic
What We Ate: Pistachio-coated cheese logs, cheese balls, aspic molds, cream cheese dips, cheese-stuffed pretzels, mini quiches, cheese straws, mushroom toasts, meat toasts, smoked salmon, hummus, nachos, imported cheese
1980s: Decade of Decadence
What We Ate: Sun-dried tomatoes, caviar, guacamole, sushi, baked brie, artichoke dip, potato wedges, raw vegetables with ranch dip, chips and salsa
1990s: The Information Era
What We Ate: Salsa in every flavor, white-bean spread, Jack cheese, quesadillas, edamame, focaccia, artisan breads, prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, organic foods
2000s: Artisan Made
What We Ate: American farmstead cheese, hummus (again), marcona almonds, chorizo, manchego, piquillo peppers, beets and goat cheese, burrata
2010s: Rise of the Megamarket
What We Ate: Single-origin chocolate, everything-bagel chips, chocolate-covered bacon, kale chips with yogurt dip, wasabi peas, buffalo cauliflower
2020s: Age of Isolation
What We Are Eating: Bean salads, tinned fish, preserved vegetables, ancient-grain crackers, dates, kelp and fish-skin snacks, lamb charcuterie
Ibérico Ham With Texas Twang
Raised in Hill Country, the pork from Texas Iberico relies on southwest flavors, like hickory smoke and chile
Florence Fabricant
In 2014 a herd of black Spanish Ibérico pigs, the variety that forages on acorns, were brought to the United States with government approval. Some of them were sent to Trails End Ranch in Texas Hill Country. Now some of the pork can land on your table. Texas Iberico, a joint project of Ashly Martin, the owner of the ranch, and Tim Harris, the chief executive of La Tienda, the Williamsburg, Va., Spanish market and website founded by his family, is infusing its meats with the distinctive flavors of Texas, not Spain. In addition to dry aging, the hams are also being hickory smoked, giving them intriguing fragrance and flavor. The company also cures loins with prickly pear juice for a sweet aftertaste, seasons coppa with honey and chile, and makes cold-smoked chorizo that has more chile than pimentón in the flavor. The guanciale and bacon are excellent. Fresh meat, like baby back ribs, is also available and cooks to rich succulence.
New Charcuterie Marries Old World Tradition with Texas
Lorrie Baumann
When Tim Harris heard that a group of Spanish businessmen were planning to export a herd of Spanish-bred pigs to the United States, his first reaction was a little outrage that the prized genetics of the swine whose meat goes into jamon Iberico were being allowed to leave Spain. Then, a few years later, when he got a call from Texas rancher Ashly Martin, who said that the venture had gone bust, and he was looking for a buyer for those Spanish pigs, his first reaction was to be a little miffed that it had taken Martin so long to find his way to La Tienda, the online retailer through which Harris imports gourmet Spanish food products into the U.S. “If you Google ‘Iberico,’ I’m one of the first names that comes up,” he said.
Martin’s story was that he’d been a cattle rancher for the previous 14 years when he’d decided that he needed to find another line of work. “Cattle is a hard deal. I ran a lot on leased country. It’s kind of hard to make money on it. I was getting out of livestock altogether,” Martin had said.
He’d passed that word around to friends and neighbors while he was looking for an alternative way to feed his family, preferably something that would keep him a part of the agriculture industry, when a friend introduced him to a group of Spaniards who were looking for a partner for a plan involving Iberico pigs for which they were looking to find an American home. “I looked it up and started looking at the breed and what the hams bring,” he said. The plan sounded like it would allow him to stay in agriculture, and he’d be able to run them on his own land rather than trying to lease enough acreage to feed a herd big enough to benefit from the economies of scale necessary to making a profit on the operation. He decided to go into business with the Spaniards and they started flying pigs to him from Spain.
The swine settled in happily as American immigrants and started eating their way across Martin’s 1,500 acres in the Texas Hill Country. “Out here we have a lot of mesquite trees. There’s a lot of live oak, similar to the kind of acorns they have in Spain,” Martin said. “Pigs prefer the mesquite rather than the acorns. It’s like candy to them. They like to eat prickly pear – not just the fruit but also the thorny leaves. We’d burned off the pasture to rid it of the prickly pear thinking that I was doing the pigs a favor, but then it turned out that they like eating it.
“They clean up your pasture. That was a pleasant surprise. These pigs are cleaning up under the oaks. It’s hard, stony soil, so they don’t root much. They aerate the soil a little bit. It’s good for the pasture if you rotate them.”
Martin’s neighbors were snickering a little bit when they heard what Martin had going on, but he could live with that. Then the whole plan fell apart when the Spaniards backed out, leaving Martin with a 2,000 porker problem. “It turned from something exciting to something terrifying. We called everyone we knew to see what we could do with these pigs.” It took him about 40 calls to find a phone number for La Tienda, and Tim Harris answered the call.
“Ashly reached out that they had the herd of Iberico pigs: ‘I was wondering if you wanted to work together?’ Harris picks up the story. “He had all these pigs running around, and his first plan with the Spaniards didn’t work out. “I heard his story. He’s a former Marine. He’s been ranching cattle for 14 years and had been having a difficult time making ends meet with Angus,” Harris said. “His neighbors thought he was crazy. Pigs are just not central to Texas cuisine – it’s a beef state. The neighbors have to spend time keeping feral pigs off their property.”
At first, Harris struggled a bit with the idea that the pigs had been taken out of their native land, and he knew that some of his Spanish friends would disapprove. Then he started doing a little more research into the history of the Iberico breed, and he learned that Spaniards had been exporting pigs with those bloodlines out of their country and into the New World since the days of the Spanish Conquistadores, who’d boarded them onto ships as provisions for their voyages to the New World. The Spaniards had left breeding populations on the Canary Islands and on Bermuda and other uninhabited islands in the Caribbean so they’d be there to provision the ships on their next voyages.
One of those populations of pigs dropped off by the Spanish became the ancestors of the Ossabaw Island Hogs, a free-range breed found on Ossabaw Island, off the coast of Georgia. Now listed as critically endangered by The Livestock Conservancy, these pigs have genes that suggest that they came from the Canary Islands, where the pigs probably interbred at some point with Asian pigs. According to The Livestock Conservancy, more research is needed to sort out exactly how the pigs on the Canary Islands and on Ossabaw Island are related to Spanish Iberian pigs. Since 1978, Ossabaw Island has been owned by the state of Georgia and managed as a preserve by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, which has recommended that the feral swine be eradicated to protect other species resident on the island. Georgia currently licenses quota hunts for the swine on the island.
The same sort of porcine migration may account for the presence of pork bones found at the bottom of a well in Jamestown, Virginia, just a short distance from where Harris set up shop as La Tienda 25 years ago. Merry A. Outlaw is the Senior Curator for the Jamestown Rediscovery Project, which is currently conducting archaeological excavations at Fort James, established in 1607 on Jamestown Island as the first permanent English settlement in the New World. These studies have revealed that pigs were the most commonly consumed domestic animal by those first settlers, she said. “These animals may have come from England or locations en route to Jamestown, such as the Canary Islands, the West Indies, or Bermuda, where the Sea Venture wrecked on its way to Virginia in 1609,” she said. “To determine the origin of the earliest pigs eaten and discarded at Jamestown, Jamestown Rediscovery is currently steering DNA and isotopic research of pig bones.” Harris is so excited about this research that he’s helping support it.
This is a story that starts with the first settlers who arrived in Jamestown in 1607. Their route from England took them southwest off the Iberian coast, then along the African coast. The ships stopped in the Canary Islands before proceeding to the West Indies, where they stopped at a number of islands before eventually sailing up the American coastline to arrive at Jamestown Island. “The thought is that the pigs that came to Jamestown were picked up at one of these islands during the voyages,” Outlaw said. “But we don’t know.”
Those first colonists who arrived in Jamestown proved spectacularly inept at the skills required to establish a permanent colony. They realized almost from their arrival that the Virginia Company of London, which had recruited them to establish a colony intended to generate profits and return them to England, had exaggerated the ease of the endeavor. By October, half of those who’d arrived in April were dead, and few of those remaining survived the next winter. Resupply expeditions to the colony didn’t succeed in turning the situation around, since, inasmuch as they’d expected to find an uninhabited paradise with gold on the ground, the colonists didn’t come with much in the way of useful skills, and by the fall of 1608, it was obvious in London that the colony was failing. The company raised new capital and brought in a turnaround specialist in the person of Sir Thomas Gates, who recruited his own team of potential colonists with operational skills and in June 1609 set sail for the colony in a fleet of nine ships with the Sea Venture as the flagship for George Somers, named the admiral of the fleet, and carrying Gates, who was taking up his position as the colony’s governor.
The fleet followed the route taken by the earlier settlers until, within seven days of landfall, they ran into a hurricane off the coast of Bermuda. The Sea Venture was separated from the rest of the fleet and, badly damaged, limped to a landfall on the Bermuda island chain. Since the ship had been carrying some of Gates’ team of operations specialists who had actual skills and this was Bermuda rather than Gilligan’s Island, the Sea Venture’s passengers set to work building boats from the wreckage and trees they cut on the island, and within a year, they had two small ships, which they named the Patience and Deliverance, ready to sail up the coast to Jamestown. Meanwhile, the other hurricane-damaged ships in their fleet had arrived in Virginia in August 1609 after lightening their load by jettisoning most of the supplies they’d been bringing to resupply the colony. The arrival of more hungry mouths to feed rather than the supplies they were expecting was an unwelcome surprise to the colonists, who had just endured what’s still known among Virginia’s historians as the “Starving Time,” when most of them had died and the survivors had been reduced to eating the dead, which suggests that any pigs who’d come across on earlier voyages that had stopped in the Canary Islands were probably long gone.
The next spring, the castaways on Bermuda set sail for Virginia on Patience and Deliverance, possibly with a pen of captured pigs, and landed in Virginia in May 1610, where Gates took a look around at the colony and announced that their situation was untenable and the colonists should abandon their fort and sail up to Newfoundland, where they’d catch a ride from a fishing vessel headed back to England. The colonists boarded Patience and Deliverance and set sail up the James River, where, in a coincidence that wouldn’t have passed muster with even the director of one of Steven Seagal’s later films, but is nevertheless true, the flotilla met a new resupply fleet bearing another turnaround specialist recruited by the Virginia Company after they’d gotten the word in London that Gates and his team had been lost at sea.
This party was commanded by Sir Thomas West, Baron De La Warr, who’d been named the new governor of Jamestown. Since he had a year’s worth of supplies with him, he was able to convince the colonists to turn around and sail back to Jamestown, where one of the first things he did was to take a look around and suggest, probably in an English aristocrat version of the tone that Jon Taffer uses when he walks into a bar that he’s planning to rescue, that if the colonists were planning to survive in Jamestown, they might want to start by cleaning up the place.
That may have been, Outlaw said, when pig bones were unceremoniously dumped into an abandoned well and then sealed up until they were excavated by the Jamestown Rediscovery Project, which has noted that the earliest archaeological contexts of the pig bones also contain bones of the Bermuda petrel, a large sea bird known to inhabit only Bermuda. “We recovered several animal bones from Bermuda and shells from the West Indies and Bermuda from that well, and also from a second well that was filled with trash a year later,” Outlaw said. “We hope to find that the pig bones from the first two wells were Bermudian pigs or Iberico pigs…. We don’t know if they were coming from the West Indies, Bermuda, the Canaries, or the Azores. Or perhaps England. We just won’t know until the completion of DNA and isotopic research.”
“We know that hogs were in Jamestown in 1608 because John Smith documented them, noting that three pigs had produced 60 pigs within a very short time. They were kept on a nearby island in the James River named Hog Island. It still is Hog Island…. During the ‘Starving Time’ winter of 1609 and 1610, the hogs of Hog Island were eaten by the Indians, who were also suffering from food shortages.”
“An interesting fact about Jamestown is that it is where Pocahontas married John Rolfe, the colonist who first raised tobacco in Virginia, the crop that saved the colony. It was the number-one export from Virginia until the late 1990s or so,” Outlaw added. “Tobacco grew here naturally, but it was Indian tobacco, about two or three times stronger than the South American tobacco. It’s thought that John Rolfe, who was on the Sea Venture, got the tobacco seed from Bermuda, which was abundant in Bermuda, just like the hogs.”
Within a month after their first phone conversation, Martin and Harris had put together a company. They offered fresh Texas-raised Iberico pork for sale, but they couldn’t produce the pork fast enough to create a consistent supply of fresh meat, so Harris started shopping around for charcutiers who could cure the meat to make products that could even out supply with demand. He lives just down the road from Sam Edwards and Edwards Smokehouse, so he wandered over there to tell Sam about his Texas Iberico pork. “Our pigs will jump over an acorn to eat a mesquite bean. The climate in Texas is close to that in Spain, and our animals spend 100 percent of their lives outdoors. We’re certified humane by A Greener World, with no antibiotics ever. We raise them humanely, so they’re not confined. We don’t use nose rings. We don’t dock their tails. The mothers are never put in breeding crates. We think it’s the right thing to do to treat these animals well,” is part of how he pitches his pork. “Our animals are very calm. There’s very little anxiety. Our productivity is as high or higher than the Spanish herds. You can taste it in the product.”
Edwards agreed to buy hams that he now brands as his Edwards Smokehouse Surryano hams. Broadbent’s in Kuttawa, Kentucky, took some of the pork to make it into country hams and bacon. Loins went to Spotted Trotter in Atlanta, which produced the Sweet Prickly Pear Lomo that won a Good Food Award this year. “Kevin [Ouzts] makes all of our cured whole muscle products,” Harris said. “We’re not trying to copy Europe. This is a great breed that comes from Spain, but the product that we’re making is American, and not only that, it’s Texan.”
“Our hams are funky and salty and smoky. They’re nothing like you would produce in Spain – that was on purpose. We want to celebrate the amazing variety of American charcuterie,” he added. “So far, we’re succeeding, and that’s great. Ashly still has his ranch.”
Travel Without A Passport
One of the joys of travel has always been sampling foods from different cultures and trying new and unfamiliar ingredients, tastes, and sauces. For many, travel has included a culinary journey as part of the itinerary.
While the pandemic has temporarily suspended physical travel for most of us, we can still have a culinary adventure! With a little imagination and a lot of help from entrepreneurial online food marketplaces, we can travel without a passport. No airports, no security, no long lines, and plenty of delicious authenticity and hard-to-find international ingredients. Just click, and an entire meal, or the ingredients to make one, will appear at your door. So, today we welcome the foods of the world, and experience colors and scents from all across the globe.
Our world food tour begins in Spain whose chefs are world-renowned. La Tienda means store in Spanish, and tienda.com has an amazing selection of Spanish food products from all over the country. Craving Paella? They’ll send you a kit with the ingredients plus the Paella pan. Just add the fresh vegetables, chicken, or seafood. How about the famous Tortilla Española? Several varieties of this potato omelet come perfectly prepared and imported from Spain. Heat, serve, and you can almost hear the flamenco in the background.
Perhaps you want to sample the artisan cheeses from the Mancha, such as the real deal Manchego made from sheep’s milk. Or, try the San Simon, a smoked cow’s milk cheese, from Galicia in the north of Spain. Add some slices of Serrano or Iberico ham to go on the cheese plate and decorate with Spanish olives (stuffed with anchovies or peppers) and almonds. If you really feel like splurging, you can order a whole Iberico de Bellota ham, which is generally recognized as the finest cured ham in the world.
Imagine being at the famous seafood market in Santiago de Compostela. La Tienda can send you octopus, mussels, razor clams, cockles, sardines, and white belly tuna that come from Spain’s north Atlantic coast or the Cantabrian Sea.
And if you know and love Horchata, they have that too. Not the Mexican version made from rice that is sometimes found in the United States, but the Horchata drink from Spain that comes from the chufa nut grown in the fields near Valencia.
If you live near Williamsburg, Virginia, you can visit La Tienda’s restaurant and retail store. Otherwise, order online at tienda.com. They ship nationwide.
Dinner From a Can, No Apologies
Sick of cooking but craving something sensational? With these Spanish seafood conservas in the cupboard, you’re covered.
Benjamin Kemper
AN ORDINARY aperitivo hour at the no-frills tapas bar Fide in Madrid finds patrons clinking vermouths and snacking on some of the finest seafood money can buy: pearly-white razor clams, fat Galician mussels and sweet little cockles you could balance on a pinhead, all served straight from a can.
Fide’s regulars know that conservas de pescado (tinned seafood) can be downright spectacular, even better than the fresh stuff. Do you recall your first taste of a truly great wine—one that left you thinking, So this is what I’ve been missing? That’s what it’s like to discover meaty Cantabrian anchovies or buttery ventresca (albacore belly) in olive oil after a life of dollar sardines and waterlogged tuna....
TOP TINS -Incomparable Iberian Conservas
Conservas de Cambados Zamburiñas
The purple-shelled scallop thrives in the cool rías (estuaries) of Galicia in northwestern Spain. Its mild sweetness plays well with satiny local white wines like Godello and Ribeiro. These zamburiñas are braised in a heady tomato-wine sauce. Heat the tin’s contents and ladle over plain white rice for a zero-effort meal. $13 for 4 ounces, tienda.com
Conservas de Cambados Berberechos
Fresh cockles can be a pain: little meat and lots of sand. Not so Cambados’s berberechos al natural, which are hefty and blessedly free of grit. Enjoy straight from the fridge with only a squeeze of lemon, and be sure to save the brine: It makes killer dirty Martinis. $40 for 4 ounces, tienda.com
We tasted a bunch of holiday foods you can order online
We ordered items from national purveyors to see which would be best on your holiday table.
By Kathy Saunders
Tapas for Two Gift Box from La Tienda, tienda.com
Jeff Jensen, public information officer for the city of Treasure Island, reviewed this box from La Tienda, an online seller of traditional Spanish food and products based in Virginia. Tapas for Two was a good starter kit for enjoying some traditional Spanish fare, said Jensen. “You can arrange all these goodies in little bowls or plates or serve them on a cutting board and dress them up any way you like,” he said. The gift box arrived well-packed and “secure enough that even a bag of chips arrived unbroken,” Jensen said. The box included chorizo, which Jensen described as “excellent, chewy and spicy.” He also enjoyed the anchovy-stuffed olives, although, he said, “I drained off the brine and substituted some everyday California olive oil.” Almonds were included as well.
“As I removed some of the additional shredded packing material (a dead ringer for one of Cher’s wigs from her 1998 Farewell tour) I found a terra-cotta cazuela dish, cat’s eye-shaped bread sticks and the real star of the gift box: a package of six, individually wrapped, anise-flavored Tortas de Aceite crisps.” He described the biscuit crackers as sweet, flaky and aromatic. “They were just great, and a real treat if you have never had anise before or were just ‘anise-curious.’” Three chocolate-dipped figs “had just the right amount of sweetness overkill,” he added.
Jensen said he would buy this to enjoy with friends or as a gift for the holidays or any special occasion. “Add some fruit and cheese and you’ve got yourself a quick and eminently sophisticated serving of tapas,” he said.
First-Class Fromage? 8 Gourmet Cheese Collections You Can Have Delivered Right to Your Door
Megan Murphy
La Tienda, Connoisseur’s Cheese Collection. Founded in 1996, this Virginia-based retailer imports premium provisions from small and family-owned producers all across Spain. La Tienda’s Connoisseur’s Cheese Collection highlights artisan varieties from the most celebrated cheesemaking regions to delight die-hard dairy lovers. Boasting more than five pounds in total, the selection features some of owner Jonathan Harris’s favorites—from a deep, smoky cow’s milk wedge from Galicia to an aged, rosemary-infused sheep’s milk cheese from La Mancha, as well as several different ages of Manchego, Spain’s most famous cheese.
Holiday Gift Guide 2020
Larry Olmsted
Real, Awesome Extra Virgin Olive Oil: Extra Virgin Olive Oil is arguably the most important ingredient in the gourmet foodie’s pantry, healthy, delicious and the backbone of the Mediterranean diet. Yet it can be surprisingly hard to come by. As I documented in my New York Times bestseller, Real Food, Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating & What You Can Do About It (also a great holiday gift!), the world of olive oil has long been murky and fraudulent and there are many fakes out there. In addition, labeling requirements are very lax so you often can’t tell what kind of olives you are getting, where it is from or when it was made, so the real stuff is often old or past its prime even on the shelves of well-meaning gourmet stores. Finally, while all oil meeting the true legal standard for Extra Virgin should be very good, some are much better than others, to the point of being truly astonishing. I’m always surprised how many otherwise experienced and well-informed foodies have never had great olive oil. I’m obsessed with the stuff, use it almost daily and have two great sources...
Casa de Hualdo is an ultra-premium operation bent on making the best oils in the world, and uses state of the art agriculture and production techniques, even cooling the olives with liquid nitrogen to prevent the typically inevitable flavor loss that occurs when they a warm up during pressing. Their milling facility was award the title of Best in Spain, every bottle is filled with oil pressed no more than 6 hours after picking, which is very fast by industry standards, they pick early for maximum flavor, and as a result, the oils are magnificent. Finally, just like wine grapes, there are a lot of olive varietals, but no one knows them and most bottles don’t say what the use, while many are blends. Casa de Hualdo specializes in 100% single varietal oils, so when you get a gift pack of their four olives (Arbequina, Picual, Manzanilla, Cornicabra) you get four distinct flavors and three intensity profiles (mild, medium, robust). If you don’t want a subscription, just a gift, this is the can’t-miss way to go. Casa de Hualdo sells online, but you can sometimes find more gift assortment options from quality vendors like Spanish gourmet specialists La Tienda or Driana Foods.
11 Best Bacon Brands, Reviewed
There’s never been a more pressing time to indulge in comfort food. Now, we’re not here to judge, we promise. In fact, we’re here to in small ways encourage it. (We’re not saying give up on life and turn into Jabba the Hut, but indulging in things that you enjoy is important for mental health and we’re all for that.) One of the things we like to indulge in here at The Manual is one of the best meat products out there: Bacon.
That mixture of fat, salt, and crunch is downright addicting, especially if you’re biting into a piece of top-notch, quality meat. If you’re looking to buy the very best bacon, we rounded up 11 succulent brands for you to try. These porcine delights are at the top of their game, so you’re getting the very best when you fry up a strip.
Peregrino Ibérico de Bellota Bacon
This melt-in-your-mouth bacon is made from acorn-fed Spanish Ibérico pork that’s hand-rubbed with salt and slow-smoked over hickory in Kentucky. Ibérico pigs roam free in the Dehesa forests of southwest Spain where they get plenty of exercise and nutrients from an antioxidant-rich acorn diet. Nutty, smoky, savory, and sweet, the bacon from Peregrino Ibérico de Bellota Bacon from La Tienda is like an adventure for your palate.
Staying in Is a Lot Easier When Spain Does the Catering
New York Times Staff
When panicked shoppers began emptying supermarket shelves this spring, Brandon Schantz, a lawyer in Orange County, Calif., bypassed at least some of the lines. Instead, he went to The Spanish Table website and ordered a case of wine — whites mainly from Spain’s Catalonia and Basque regions, reds from Rioja and Castile and León — and a stockpile of conservas, artisanal canned seafood predominantly sourced from the country’s northern coast.
“Spain is producing some of the most exciting and vibrant wines these days,” says Mr. Schantz, who first became enamored by Spanish culture and cuisine while studying in Madrid during the mid-aughts. And as for those flavorful tins of fish, he says, “People flock to bars around Spain that make tapas or pintxos — small plates — solely based on the seafood that they’re taking out of these cans.”
According to Tanya Booth, who owns the Bay Area-based Spanish Table (there are three brick-and-mortar locations) with her husband, Andy, online sales at the beginning of the pandemic were three times what they usually see in their busiest month, December. What have been top sellers? Richly marbled jamón Ibérico cured from prized black-hoofed pigs that graze on acorns in the vast Dehesa agroforests. A broad range of intensely flavored extra virgin olive oils, such as the phenol-rich Picual and the delicate Arbequina varietals. Protected Designation of Origin Sherry vinegars. Manchego cheeses. Cookbooks. “And we sold a lot of canned seafood, stacks and stacks of it,” she says.
Other online purveyors of gourmet Spanish goods, in the United States and Canada, saw similar surges. In Williamsburg, Va., La Tienda, the oldest and largest of the e-commerce retailers, watched its numbers more than triple, with new customers making up 40 percent of sales.
The retailers curate their selections by seeking out artisanal Spanish producers making the most of the natural environs. “There is this little valley called Calasparra where the rice grows very slowly because the water is coming down from the mountain and it’s very cold. It absorbs several times more liquid than normal rice. So when you make paella, it’s got that much more flavor,” says La Tienda C.E.O. Tim Harris, whose family lived in Spain in the 1970s before starting the company in 1996. “The saffron we sell, it’s picked by one family from this one area of La Mancha, and all the cousins come in to harvest the crocus flowers that make saffron. We buy almost all of their production.”
“What I love about foods from Spain is they basically take the highest-quality raw materials — the best meat, the best fish — and it’s prepared very simply,” says David Nowland, who started ordering from La Tienda when it first opened, before moving to Madrid and other parts of the world. But when he returned to the United States, La Tienda was his go-to source for products he missed from Spain, including piquillo peppers, jamón Ibérico and Serrano, and Marcona almonds. “You can find the [almonds] that are made in California,” says Mr. Nowland, who now lives in Houston, “but they don’t ever taste the same.”
Now that many restaurants have reopened for takeout and outdoor dining, fans of food and wine from Spain can seek out the flavors in more elevated experiences. In August, Despaña Fine Foods & Tapas Café and Mercado Little Spain’s Spanish Diner and El Chiringuito reopened, providing open-air seating for customers craving classic dishes like tortilla de patatas and bocadillos paired with a glass of refreshing fino sherry, effervescent cava or a chilled Albariño. But Mr. Harris isn’t worried about his business. “There’s been a paradigm shift, and a lot of people who had never ordered food online before had a good experience,” he says. “Those folks are not going to go away.”
