Foodie Observations

We know food pics are a crowd pleaser. Hopefully these entice you to come visit and taste for yourselves! Something of interest to note- many of these eats center around just one or a few ingredients... versus many combined. This reminds us a bit of food culture in Japan. Street food isn't much of a thing here either. If you're looking for a quick and affordable bite while you are out and about, your best bet is a slice of tortilla or a bocadillo at a local bar.

We got menu for lunch on Matt's birthday, with some friends who were visiting us.

A typical lunch menu

The best way to eat out is lunch at a bar or restaurant with a daily lunch menu. This is a fixed-price meal (ranging anywhere from 7-30 euros, with 13 euros being an average price) where you typically choose from a small selection of starters, mains, and desserts, and includes a drink. These are often the most economical way to get a meal, and they are generally a generous amount of food, and pretty tasty. Dinners (and meals on weekends) are more expensive.

Tapas

In the US, a "tapas-style" restaurant typically allows you to order many small dishes to share. This is pedantic, but... that is not a tapa. A tapa is a free snack that comes with your drink. Those small-dish restaurants are more like pintxo bars. Pintxos are a Basque country phenomenon and can be delicious. But if you're paying for it, it's not a tapa.

One of our favorites restaurants in Madrid is a Basque pintxo bar

Ok, so how should you get the most out of your tapas? This s mostly a question of knowing where to go. We have identified a handful of bars that give tapas that are either notably large, or of especially high quality. A tapa that includes seafood is considered a pretty high-tier tapa. But generally speaking, you can look for two tells: First and foremost, an "Andalucia" style bar is likely to give larger tapas. The farther south you go in Spain, the stronger the tapas culture becomes. There is a bar near us called "La Pequeña Graná" (Little Granada). Granada is known for its large tapas, and so, unsurprisingly, is this bar. Second, there is a thriving new wave of tapas bar run by Chinese immigrants, and these all seem to serve very large tapas portions- and they often let you choose which tapas you would like.

This kind of tapa always makes Matt think that the kitchen is running out of ingredients- but it's actually considered a pretty elite tapa. Along with fish (in this case vinager-marinated sardines), mussels are often served on chips, too.

Tortilla Española

This is NOT the corn or flour tortilla used in Mexican cuisine, but rather a one-to-two inch thick potato omelette. Strong opinions abound about whether or not it's best with the addition of onion, or how runny it should be inside. We (obviously) prefer it with onion. When Matt studied abroad here in college, he had homework to learn to make tortilla española with his host mom. That didn't work out too well... she ended up making it for him. For better or worse, we haven't put in the effort to learn to make it this go around either. Supermarkets sell personal-pizza-sized tortillas for just two euros, so we've defaulted to stocking our fridge with that for an easy meal. This is much to the disappointment of our local foodie friend who believes that tortilla made fresh is the only way to go. At a bar you can get a slice of tortilla for 3-4 euros.

Maya was expecting something much flatter

Supposedly one of the best tortillas Madrid has to offer at Casa Dani... Karen thought it tasted like most other tortillas

Bocadillos

Bocadillos, or sandwiches, feature one star ingredient, period. They can be seasoned with a drizzle of olive oil, but that is about it. Choose between jamon, cheese, tomato, blood sausage, and the like. If you're feeling like a real splurge, you can pay extra to combine two ingredients. Calamari bocadillos are a local favorite in Madrid. Why? Madrid is landlocked and calamari held up well on the multi-day journey it took to transfer them to the city (and deep frying them doesn't hurt). And thus they became a popular alternative to meat during lent. These are served with aioli if you're lucky. 

Call us crazy, but we find bocadillos to be a little dry, plain, and boring. Spain has amazing produce, and we don't really understand why a multi-ingredient sandwich isn't popular here.

Boquerones

Boquerones are anchovies and can be served pan-fried, deep-fried and battered with crispy garbanzo flour, on skewers with olives, or even marinated in vinegar and olive oil. And, they are ubiquitous! We are fans. It's interesting to note that flavor varies detectably from batch to batch even when we go to the same restaurant. I guess some schools of anchovies are tastier than others.

In addition to fried anchovies, Spain also does grilled veggies very well.

Sardines

Not quite as common as anchovies, sardines are another specialty here. If you've only tried the canned sardines popular in the US, these are grilled, and totally different. Meaty, flavorful, and well-salted, sardines are best enjoyed with beer, a little bread, and blistered padron peppers. We often find ourselves craving them. There is a great sardine bar in the heart of the Rastro, Madrid's enormous Sunday flea market. On Sundays you have to fight your way through a wall-to-wall crowd to order, while on any other day of the week you are likely to be the only customer.

Sardines the way they are meant to be eaten

These images are from the google reviews of the sardine bar we like. Our hands are always too dirty to take our own photos when we go.

Olives and Olive Oil

We live near an old-school market called the Mercado de Santa Maria de la Cabeza. It is one of the last few markets in Madrid that operates with traditional fish, meat, cheese, olive, produce, and home goods stalls. Many others in the city have shut down since younger generations prefer the convenience of grocery stores. Other markets have been converted into gourmet food halls filled with posh restaurant stalls. The general consensus is that prices tend to be higher at the market, but so is quality. We've been making an effort to buy a good chunk of our groceries at the market, and supplement with grocery store items as needed. The heirloom produce that they carry is not bred for mass production, but it is beautiful and we occasionally get heirloom tomatoes and giant beans it as a treat.

A very beautiful tomato

One of our favorite stalls is the olive stall, featuring a few dozen varieties from different regions nationally. It's been fun to sample the range week after week. Some favorites include Aliña de la Abuela and Jaen. There's usually a line at the olive stall and Karen always watches what the elderly ladies in front of her order. They never buy Tutti Frutti, but the festive mix is a big hit in our household... Maybe it combines too many flavors for the austere Spanish palette. 

Another bit of specialty produce we've been enjoying are these large, white beans

When Matt did a homestay in Spain in high school, he lived with a family that runs an olive farm. They proudly proclaim they live in a "sea of olives," and after driving around the region, we agree. Olives dominate the rolling hills as far as the eye can see. Spain produces about 30% of the world's olives. (This number is according to the internet, but Matt would like to note that according to his host family, one third of the world's olive production comes from the region of Jaen alone.) We've discovered that Spaniards find it confusing that Americans associate olive oil with Italy and not with Spain. We're hoping to change that- keep an eye out for gifts of olive oil on trips home!

Whenever we visit Matt's host family, they send us home with a big container of their olive oil. We sent them this photo to to show that all 5 liters safely arrived to Matt's family in New Jersey. We haven't needed to buy olive oil yet thanks to another generous gift of authentic Torreperogil olive oil.

Peanut Butter

I (Matt) am just going to come out and say it: peanut butter in Spain is bad. The more interesting question, however, is this: why is it bad? I eat a lot of peanut butter. I have a dollop with my breakfast, and an apple with peanut butter is my favorite snack. There are several brands available in the US and I usually simply buy the least expensive. All of the brands use 100% peanuts, and there's not much difference between them.

In Spain, however, I have bought several different brands of peanut butter, and they are all varying degrees of strange and bad. The absolute weirdest peanut butter is the first brand I bought, which was marketed as a protein supplement and which was a very pale tan color. The ingredients: 100% peanuts.

I've since found other brands that are marketed as actual food. Again, these are ostensibly 100% peanuts. They are almost all paler than the peanut butter I am used to, and have either a strangely "off" consistency, or a flavor that just doesn't seem right. Why is there so much variety? Why are they so bad? Heirloom European peanuts?!

This has proven to be a nearly impossible question to answer on the internet, because googling "difference between Spanish and American peanut butter" returns thousands of results comparing the Spanish product (100% peanuts) to synthetic, sugary products like Jiff, and crowing about how superior the peanut butter is in Spain. Sure, it's better than Jiff, but it's still pretty bad.

This is an Asturian dish called cachopo that's like a turbo-charged schnitzel. It's thinly sliced veal, layered, with cheese, battered and fried. 

Another popular bar food: snails. In our opinion, the bigger, more expensive snails are not so great, but the small snails you find at some bars in southern spain are good for snacking.  They're often served in a minty broth, which Karen finds a bit discordant.

Some tasty fish with peppers

This is beef, fried and aged like Iberian jamon.  When prepared this way, it's called Cecina de Leon. It's very tasty, and the cheese it was served with was excellent.

Long Lunches

A Spanish lunch can easily stretch past the three hour mark. We begin to get uncomfortable sitting that long. Partway through lunch, Karen has gotten into the habit of excusing herself to "go to the bathroom," but actually just wants to walk around for a minute.  How do the Spanish do it? Have they developed a special musculature to enable maintaining a sitting position for hours and hours?  Maybe, but it turns out they're not completely immune to back soreness from prolonged sitting.  

One evening, while cleaning up at Repair Cafe, Karen heard a fellow repairer (about our age) groan in pain when he bent down to grab his backpack from under a table.  Karen asked if he was okay, and he clarified that he was fine; he had just had a particularly long lunch outing for work the day before and was still recovering from so much sitting.