Chestnuts used to be a staple food in the Mediterranean basin where chestnut trees grow well.

In the Catalan Countries it is traditional to celebrate the Castanyada on All Saints Day, the 1st of November, which consists of eating roasted chestnuts, some delicious sweets called panellets and moscatell sweet wine. Portuguese celebrate St. Martin’s Day with roasted chestnuts and some Italian regions, namely the Toscana, also roast chestnuts to celebrate St Simon’s Day.

For this roasted chestnut recipe you need to buy the European species, the sweet chestnut, also known in the USA as Spanish chestnuts. And because some people ask how you say chestnut in Spanish, here it is, chestnut in Spanish is castaña and the plural is castañas.

Ingredient

• Sweet Chestnuts

How To Roast Chestnuts

1. Preheat the oven for about 10 minutes
2. Take a cutting board and a knife, and make a cut on the round side of every chestnut. If you are afraid of cutting yourself, use a serrated knife with a short blade. I myself prefer them. There are special chestnut knives, but it is not absolutely necessary that you buy one. A solid serrated knife works fine.
3. Scatter the chestnuts on a baking dish with the flat side down. Drizzle drops of water over the chestnuts with your fingers, that is, you put your fingers in a cup full of water and drizzle the water drops over the chestnuts. This step is very important for roasting chestnuts properly.
4. Put the baking dish with the chestnuts in the oven at about 400ºF or 200ºC. Place the baking dish as low as possible, that is, as near to the heat source as possible, but not touching it directly.
5. Roast the chestnuts for 15 minutes on one side and turn them over. Unless you are roasting chestnuts for a huge crowd, the best way to ensure that they are all evenly roasted is to turn them over one by one.
6. Roast them for 12 to 15 more minutes depending on the size and they are ready to be eaten. Unless they are huge don’t let them much longer in the oven or they’ll get very dry and hard.
7. Serve them hot with skin. peeling them at the table is part of the fun. When you get them right, peeling chestnuts is very easy. Properly roasted chestnuts are soft inside and have a hull that cracks under finger pressure. Traditionally, you use your fingers to peel the roasted chestnuts.

Considerations on the Roasted Chestnuts Recipe

Traditionally we serve them with the skin and each guest peels them themselves, even kids learn how to remove the skin of a chestnut fast. However, if you are cooking a Mediterranean diet dish like rice with chestnuts, remove the skins as soon as they are ready and use them as soon as possible.

If you don’t eat them immediately, wrap them in a woolen cloth. In wool, chestnuts can keep warm for up to one hour. After this time, they begin to get cold, even in a woolen cloth, and lose most of their natural flavors. Remember that peeling cold roasted chestnuts is quite difficult or in some cases near impossible.

As it happens with food every so often, there is a passionate controversy about making the cuts on the rounded or the flattened side of the chestnut. We always make the cut on the rounded side with good results, but if you want to experiment and make it in the flattened side, go for it!

Around twenty-two to twenty-five minutes is the average time for medium-sized oven-roasted chestnuts, but feel free to increase the time if your chestnuts are very big. But as we pointed out above, we don’t recommend roasting chestnuts longer than thirty minutes though, because then the chestnuts become very hard.

If you are roasting chestnuts for a huge crowd, stir them after 10 minutes, and then two more times, every 5 minutes. Whatever the case, don’t put more than one single layer of chestnuts in the baking dish.

At clarified butter recipe you will find a clarified butter recipe in text form with some visuals

We have also published essential tips for making ghee and some more visuals.

Nature is very generous during the spring months and provides us with refreshing and healthy seasonal vegetables to prepare the most delicious Mediterranean recipes. We encourage you to eat and cook with spring vegetables now that they are so fresh and abundant, we certainly do!

Do you know of a veggie that is not listed here? Do you eat other vegetables used in the whole Mediterranean or in your region or town? Let us know in the comments below and we may add it to the list

We recommend sweating eggplants, particularly before frying or grilling them over the kitchen stove, for a samfaina or ratatouille and similar. If the eggplants are not totally fresh it’s also a good idea to sweat them as the older they are the bitterer they become.

You don’t need to sweat or drain an eggplant if you are going to boil them or add them to a rice stew.

If you don’t sweat an eggplant before frying, it absorbs much too much olive oil or whatever frying oil you use, the water mixes with the frying oil and it’s very difficult to fry them properly, they tend to become mushy or burn easily.

Granted, there are eggplant varieties that absorb more olive oil than others. Therefore, it’s important to get familiar with the eggplants you have available or use in your kitchen. Likewise, there are some that are bitterer than others and the same principle applies here.

Some people like controversy even around such innocent topics and there are heated discussions about whether to sweat or not to sweat your eggplant before cooking it. To us, many recipes need sweating an eggplant for the dish to become exquisite.

We have given you some guidelines above and how we go about sweating eggplant slices below and at the end of the day it’s your cooking experience that will reveal to you if you need to sweat an eggplant for a particular Mediterranean recipe.

How to sweat an eggplant

1. Cut the eggplants lengthwise in half or in quarters, in slices lengthwise or in round slices according to the recipe you are going to prepare.
2. Take a colander and place it over a bowl or the sink to collect the drained eggplant water.
3. Put the eggplant slices in the colander in layers, in alternate directions.
4. Sprinkle coarse salt or regular salt over each eggplant layer and let it rest for a minimum of half an hour. An hour is best.
5. If you do it the Italian way, cover with a plate upside down and place a weight on it. According to our experience, it accelerates the draining process.
6. Once the salted eggplants have drained the excess water, rinse the aubergines under tap water, press them gently with your hands and dry them with a cloth or paper towel.
7. If you are dealing with thin eggplant slices, you can skip the slight pressing we mentioned above. Just rinse and dry them.

As in many instances when you are cooking, you can drain an eggplant while you are doing other things in the kitchen or around the house. Besides, sprinkling salt over the slices and putting them in a colander takes less than five minutes.

As an example, a recipe that definitely improves enormously with sweating eggplant slices is pasta alla Norma

You only need three ingredients — tomatoes, olive oil, and salt— and a little bit of time, 45 minutes, I won’t try to deceive you, but you can do other things in the meantime. You can get away with half an hour, but those fifteen minutes allow the time for the tomatoes to reduce any acidity as much as possible and become sweet.

If you prefer the texture of your fresh tomato sauce completely homogeneous with a more liquid consistency, use a blender or a food processor at the end of the cooking process. We don’t, but it’s perfectly legitimate to blend the final result.

As we always use heirloom, organic, or the best natural tomatoes we can find we stopped seeding them for our homemade tomato sauce recipe long ago. When the tomatoes taste like in the old days seeds aren’t an unwelcome element of the sauce, on the contrary, they form a harmonic whole we don’t want to miss by removing a part of it. After all, we are not cooking for a three-starred restaurant, our needs and goals are different: We are home cooks and proud of it!

Granted, on the rare occasions when tomatoes are too acidic, we seed them, but only then, because as we mentioned above we have seen that seeding isn’t necessary for making the best tomato sauce recipe or any variation of Catalan sofregit that you can add to or use in so many pasta and rice dishes and other recipes.

Regardless, it’s up to you. If you don’t like finding tomato seeds when you are eating, go ahead and seed the tomatoes. Like blending, seeding is perfectly legitimate, it’s a matter of personal preference.

As an example, with the ingredients we give below you would have enough fresh tomato sauce for four people eating pasta alla norma. It’s easy to double or halve the ingredients according to your family and guest needs.

Regarding the kitchen tools you can use a skillet, a small Dutch oven, or an earthenware casserole. We have used them all on different occasions and all of them give good results.

Ingredients for fresh tomato sauce recipe

• 450 g or 1 pound ripe tomatoes — peeled and diced
• 3 tablespoons olive oil, extra-virgin if possible
• Salt

How to make tomato sauce

1. Peel the tomatoes by putting them in a bowl and covering them with boiling water. Set them aside for 5 minutes or more and peel them. Click here for detailed instructions. (Opens in a new window.)
2. Seed the tomatoes — this is an optional step.
3. Add the olive oil to a skillet and when it’s hot add the diced tomatoes.
4. Turn the heat to medium-low and cook uncovered for forty-five (the bare minimum is half an hour if you are in a hurry) or until the sauce looks caramelized or has a confiture-like consistency. Stir from time to time during the cooking.
5. When some of the liquid has evaporated and the color of the tomatoes begins to change turn the heat to low to prevent sticking.
6. Add a pinch of salt to taste towards the end of the cooking and stir.
7. Optionally, you can blend the fresh tomato sauce.

Simple tomato sauce recipe: tips and variations

• You can start by adding a sprig of rosemary to the olive oil and cook over low heat for 5 to 10 minutes before adding the tomatoes. This will give a delicious flavor to the olive oil and the fresh tomato sauce.
• You can add mince garlic to the olive oil and cook over very low heat for a few minutes.
• You can flavor this easy tomato sauce with fresh herbs like oregano, marjoram or basil leaves towards the end of the cooking process.
• Basil is the perfect match for tomatoes, but keep in mind that you must add the basil leaves, about ten or so, when the sauce is almost done, as too much heat kills that refreshing flavor so typical of fresh basil and eliminates its properties and taste.
• If your tomatoes are too acidic, add half to one teaspoon of sugar, brown sugar is fine, better actually.
• Another way of reducing the acidity of tomatoes is to add a grated or finely chopped carrot to the tomatoes half way into the cooking.

Do you know of a variation of this fresh tomato sauce recipe that you usually cook? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

When they are in season and they are fresh, natural, organic, or heirloom, peeling tomatoes is a very easy cooking technique. Winter tomatoes or tomatoes with a hard, thick skin are more difficult to peel.

How to peel tomatoes

1. Place the tomatoes in any heat-resistant bowl or deep container. It should be large enough for the tomatoes you want to peel. You can draw a shallow cross with a pointed knife on each tomato if you like, but we generally don’t find it necessary to peel them easily.
2. Bring water to a boil. 1 quarter or 1 liter should be enough for 4 medium-sized tomatoes. That said, the quantity of water depends on the number of tomatoes you are peeling, and the size of your container. Increase the amount of water accordingly.
3. When the water is hot, pour it in the bowl containing the tomatoes. The hot water must cover the tomatoes completely.
4. Leave the tomatoes in the hot water for 2 to 5 minutes. If you are busy preparing some other foods, there is no problem with leaving them longer in the hot water, but not so long that the water becomes too cool.
5. Remove the tomatoes from the water. Remember to use a spoon if the water is still too hot.
6. Now peel the skin off with a pointed knife or use your hands. This is a matter of preference. The tomato skin will come off effortlessly.

Finally, this method works for any red tomato, big or small, round or bulgy.

When I was a child, you could buy cooked pulses in small shops that made them in huge pots every morning. They were exactly as if you had cooked them at home and my mother used to buy some for the whole family once a week: lentils, garbanzo beans, beans… We were allowed to choose.

Although you can still find cooked beans in some traditional neighborhoods or markets, those shops are becoming rare so I cook them myself, and the older I get the more I like eating and cooking garbanzo beans and other pulses.

I have been cooking dried garbanzo beans for years now and there’s one thing that makes or breaks it when you are cooking dried beans: quality. It may sound obvious (a truism) and even a little bit silly to you because you could say it about every food, but this is truly the big secret for getting your beans tender every time without effort: the dried beans you use must be top quality: either heirloom, whole, natural or organic.

I hear people recommending mineral water and rainwater to cook the beans, and it’s true, both help to get your dried beans tender —I myself have used rainwater when I had some— but it may become too cumbersome and not work every time either.

Something else I have tested is that the small varieties, which are usually heirlooms, tend to be easier to cook and get tender than the larger varieties. Whatever you do, don’t buy the cheapest industrial dried beans from the supermarket, it’s not worth it and anyway, dried beans are already cheap enough even if they are from the health food store.

Once you get hold of some first-quality dried beans, follow our instructions for cooking chickpeas and you should be all right.

How to cook garbanzo beans and some tips

Traditional Method

• Add the dried chickpeas to a deep bowl and a handful of salt —about 1 oz or 20-25 g salt per 1 pound or 1/2 kg garbanzo beans. If you have coarse salt at hand, it’s even better.
  Some cooks like to add half a teaspoon of baking soda, but we much prefer the salt method.
• Add water and soak the dry chickpeas overnight for about 12 hours.
• Next morning, drain and rinse the chickpeas.
• Add the chickpeas to a pot and cover them well with water.
• Bring the water to a boil.
• When it begins to boil, turn down the heat to medium-low and cook them covered for one and a half to two hours depending on the chickpea variety. Generally speaking, the smaller they are the less cooking time they’ll need.
• Try to start with enough water, but if you have to add more, use boiling water.
• It is essential that the chickpeas boil steadily during the cooking.
• Try not to uncover the pot during the cooking, particularly the first hour
• Add the salt towards the end.
• When the garbanzo beans are tender, remove the chickpeas from the heat and drain them.

Pressure cooker method

Drain the soaked chickpeas, rinse them, and place them in a pressure cooker with water to cover and salt. Usually, chickpeas will be tender in about thirty minutes, but you need some experience to know the exact cooking time.

For a while, in some circles chickpeas and other pulses were associated with poverty and it was as if nobody wanted to eat them anymore, but now they are back again. Chickpeas are a healthy energy food and we should all eat some sort of dried beans once a week and if you are vegetarian more than once.

I have mixed feelings about three-starred chefs, perhaps because we stubbornly love traditional Mediterranean cuisine. However, there’s one thing you can’t ignore. By incorporating humble beans in their select restaurant menus with care and creativity, those chefs have dignified the consumption of dried beans and boosted the growing and marketing of ingredients like legumes by local farmers, particularly the heirloom varieties that sometimes were about to disappear.

So if you ever thought garbanzo beans were insipid, let’s hope you’ll change your mind. Here are some ideas for eating and combining chickpeas:

The Arabic Mediterranean countries use them in popular foods like hummus, falafel and couscous. Catalan cuisine uses this nutritious legume in winter soups, with shrimps, and in the Lent with salt cod and spinach.

You can combine chickpeas with mushrooms, allioli, potatoes, sofregit and so many more Mediterranean foods.

From the humble origins of paella when it was made with water voles that most of us wouldn’t touch now to today’s amazing baroque and appalling extravagancies in regions far away from its birthplace that Valencians look with disbelief, paella has become a very famous rice dish throughout the world.

It’s mainly for that reason that the term Paella Valenciana has finally obtained a designation of origin and restaurants must follow the standard recipe if they want to sell is as paella Valenciana.

What is paella?

First, let’s define paella: Paella is a stew of rice, meat, and vegetables cooked in a specialized paella pan with two handles that is wide, shallow, and flat-bottomed.

Paella is the national dish of the Valencian Country and it’s very much alive and authentic as you realize when you see Valencian, women and men alike, cooking the most delicious paella over an open fire of orange wood with no apparent effort.

It’s worth pointing out that paella is always and above all a rice dish, not a seafood dish or a meat dish. Regardless of the amount of paella ingredients you may throw in it besides rice, they are all secondary.

The cooked rice is the key, the measure that indicates if your paella was a success or a failure, and the most difficult to get right, to be honest. But don’t get discouraged, cooking a paella is neither very difficult nor expensive.

Often, well-meaning home cooks who are unfamiliar with paella and learned to cook it from books have the tendency to add too much seafood or meat to the paella as though they were afraid it wouldn’t be tasty without them.

To some extent, this might be due to the fact that rice cooked as we do in the Catalan Countries is completely different from the Asian techniques and our thousand and one ways to cook rice were quite unknown until not so many years ago outside our natural regions. In any case, rice is the master of paella and the rest of the ingredients are subordinate to rice.

It’s no secret that the best paella, the authentic paella, is the one you make in the open air over an open fire with orange or carob tree wood, we do know it, but most people don’t have those ideal conditions so each one of us will simply adapt and cook a delicious paella all the same.

Paella history

The first mentions of paella are from the mid-18th century but always as paraphrases like Rice cooked with a paella, Rice a la paella, Go paella eating, etc. The Llibreria Episcopal of Barcelona has a recipe manuscript from the 18th century that doesn’t use the term paella yet, but explains for the first time the technique for cooking paella.

Some authors place the birth of paella in the 16th century while others in the 18th century or even the 19th century when the iron paella you need to cook a paella recipe became a popular cooking utensil.

In any case, paella as we know it today was born among inland country people in the mid-19th century in the Albufera, a saltwater lagoon, south of Valencia, on the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula.

The origins of paella are humble. At first, it was a simple farmers’ rice dish that used the ingredients on hand: at first water vole and eel, then a little bit of rabbit, chicken, or duck in some regions. As vegetables: butter beans, green beans, tomato and saffron and of course olive oil, salt, and water.

Where does the term paella come from?

Paella is a Catalan word that derives from the Latin word patella for pan. In the Catalan language spoken in Valencia, Catalonia, Balearic Islands, and Andorra, paella is the word used for any frying pan or skillet as well as for the paella pan.

As we were saying, apart from the rice stew, the word paella also refers to a paella pan, that is, the cooking tool used to make paella. Some people call the paella pan, paellera, although originally paellera means a woman who cooks very good paella, who likes to eat paella very much, or also the place where you store your paella pans.

Tips for finishing a paella properly

Elsewhere we give you specific paella recipes, but the finishing touches of a paella are the more important and difficult and the following tips can be helpful for you when cooking virtually every paella recipe.

Nowadays, many if not most restaurants finish the paella in the oven. We generally don’t find it necessary and are satisfied with the old paper method as shown in the next paragraph. After all, we are only cooking one paella at home, not hundreds!

However, finishing the paella in the oven can be a good option,

• if you have a too small stove or
• are a newbie and find it hard to know exactly when the rice is correctly done.

In this case, put the paella in the preheated oven for 5 to 10 minutes before cooking time at 190ºC or 374 ºF. But first, you need to make sure that your paella pan is oven-safe and that your oven is large enough for your paella pan or you could have a huge disappointment.

This is what we recommend to finish a paella you cook at home: Whether you make a paella in your kitchen, traditionally over an open fire with orange wood, or on a paella burner, regardless of the paella recipe, once it is done, remove the paella pan from heat and cover it completely with two or three newspaper pages, Manila paper or similar. Leave it to settle for about five minutes but no longer or you’ll ruin it.

With this technique, the rice absorbs any remaining liquid and the rice grains will be grenyal, which means that every grain of rice is loose and whole and the rice is as dry as we want it but not too dry.

Another sign of a delicious paella is the socarrat or torradet, which is a dark brown crust of toasted rice at the bottom of the paella pan.

In fact, socarrat means toasted or burned and it should develop on its own, naturally, when you make the paella. A good paella cooked over an open fire always has a layer of the disputed socarrat at the bottom but if you make it on the stove it’s a little more difficult to obtain it. With some experience, you will soon get the socarrat delicacy.

How to eat paella according to tradition

Paella is a rice dish for Sundays and special occasions. It’s a celebration of Mediterranean joie de vivre that you share with your family, friends, your loved ones.

To begin with, the right way to eat paella is with a wooden or metal spoon, never a fork, and straight from the paella pan.

The whole family and friends sit around the paella and guests eat from the outside to the inner part of the paella, scratching the socarrat and taking the pieces of veggies and meat that you find on your way to the center of the paella. This is called eating paella Valenciana al tall, meaning that you eat what comes your way and don’t choose.

Picada —pronounced something like pee-CAH-duh— can be explained as both a culinary technique and a special flavoring mix you add towards the end of the cooking process. A Catalan picada is the finishing touch and its main function is to bind the cooking juices together in a subtle way.

Picada is one of the main pillars of Catalan cuisine and unique to it. It contains different ingredients and combinations that vary depending on the dish you are cooking. It’s not an independent sauce like romesco, pesto or allioli but you add the blend during the cooking of a dish, mostly toward the end as we mentioned above.

Catalan picada has been around since the thirteenth century and it’s well documented in the Libre del Coch (Book of the Cook) by Robert de Nola published in the fifteenth century. Its use, versatility, and range has been kept alive in every Catalan kitchen until today and Catalan cuisine is unthinkable without it.

The ingredients

A picada can contain healthy Mediterranean foods like toasted almonds, hazelnuts, garlic, bread crust, cookies, parsley, olive oil, herbs, salt, saffron, white wine, stock, cooking juice, pine nuts, chocolate, and so on. The combinations can go from just three ingredients to six or more.

It has been called a sauce although it’s not a sauce but a mixture of spices, herbs, and other ingredients. Its nearest cousin is pesto alla Genovese, but pesto is clearly a sauce. Surprisingly, it has been called the Catalan roux although it doesn’t contain any flour or butter! So let’s call it Catalan picada or just picada.

The technique

Picada derives from the verb picar which means to crush, pound, grind. The name of this flavoring blend describes the action as to make a picada you crush the selected ingredients together with mortar and pestle starting with the hardest one. Granted, nowadays some cooks already use a food processor, but we personally continue using a mortar and pestle. It takes just a few minutes!

Picada is much lighter and healthier than cream and it brings your dishes to new texture levels. You can combine it with all sorts of Catalan Mediterranean dishes: vegetable recipes, meat, poultry, soups and seafood dishes.

Ingredients for a basic picada

• 2 garlic cloves
• 2 sprigs parsley
• 4 toasted almonds
• 4 toasted hazelnuts
• 12 pine nuts
• A small piece of white bread crust

The equipment

• Mortar and pestle
• Alternatively, a food processor

How to make a typical picada

1. Add 2 peeled cloves of garlic to a mortar and pound them well with the pestle until they become a paste.
2. Add the toasted almonds, hazelnuts and pine nuts and pound them.
3. Add the parsley leaves, and continue grinding.
4. Add a small piece of bread crust and continue pounding with the pestle.
5. Finally, you dilute the blend with two tablespoons of the juice of the same dish you are preparing. Mix and stir thoroughly with the pestle.

The picada is now ready. About 5 to 10 minutes before the end of the cooking process, spread the picada paste all over the surface of the dish you are cooking. If needed, take the pan by the handles and shake it to distribute it evenly on all the cooking surface.

This picada is very common and could be added to a rice or pasta dish or a poultry recipe, but every Catalan recipe that calls for a picada specifies the exact ingredients of the particular blend.

After all, cooking white rice only takes about 14 to 18 minutes at the most. Brown rice takes longer but on this page we concentrate on white rice.

A quick rice will help or even save your meal on many occasions as it makes an excellent accompaniment and side dish for a vast array of different foods. From lentils to fish to chicken, rice combines with almost any food and easily absorbs the aromas.

As we mentioned above, this rice cooking technique is for white rice. It works with long and short grain rice, Indian basmati and even sticky rice.

Basmati rice is our favorite. It’s one of the best types of rice for eating plain: It’s delicious even by itself, healthy and easy to digest.

Tips on how to make white rice

1. For 1 1/2 cups of rice the best cooking utensil is a saucepan or casserole with lid of about 7 to 8 inches (20 cm) in diameter.
2. A not-too-thin saucepan bottom also makes cooking rice easier.
3. Finally, the ratio of rice to water is generally 1 measure of rice to 2 measures of water.

Ingredients

Serves 4 to 6

• 1 1/2 cups (12 ounces or 350 g) rice
• 3 cups (0.75 cl) hot water
• 1 level teaspoon salt or to taste

How to cook white rice

Preparation time: 4 minutes.
Cooking time: 14 to 18 minutes.

1. First wash the rice: Add it to a strainer and put it under running water for a few minutes. Keep stirring the rice with your hand or a wooden spoon to rinse it better. Drain it.
2. Add the water to a saucepan and bring to a boil. Add the salt and stir briefly. Add the rice and stir briefly. Bring to a boil again and cook uncovered for 5 minutes over medium-high heat.

   HIGHLIGHT: The 5 minutes can be extended to 7 minutes if you feel it’s necessary. When you see that there’s no excess of water on the surface and the rice begins to build small craters, it’s time to put the lid and turn the heat down. This usually happens after 5 to 7 minutes of cooking the rice uncovered.

3. Turn the heat to low and cover. Continue cooking for 9 more minutes without stirring. The rice should absorb all the water.
4. 14 minutes into the total cooking time, taste a few grains of rice to see if you have to cook it a few more minutes or it’s already done.

   HIGHLIGHT: For sticky rice, when you turn the heat to low, leave the lid slightly ajar.

5. When it’s done, remove from heat and allow it to rest covered for 3 to 5 minutes.

We hope our instructions on how to cook rice give you the confidence to learn this cooking technique even if you aren’t from a country with a tradition or cooking rice.