Catalonia · Sauce
Salvitxada de Calçotada
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, toasted, nutty warmth throughout, with a clean, bright snap.
Ingredients
- 4 nyora peppers, stems and seeds shaken out
- 250 g ripe tomatoes
- 1 whole head of garlic
- 50 g blanched almonds
- 50 g skinned hazelnuts
- 25 g country bread
- 200 ml olive oil
- 40 ml red wine vinegar
- 10 g flat parsley leaves
- 6 mint leaves
- 1 tsp flaky sea salt
Equipment
Mortar & pestle
The skills inside
Roasting in a hot ovenBlanching & shocking
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · nuts
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Cover the nyoras with warm water and leave them until the flesh is soft and slippery, then open each one flat and scrape the pulp off the skin with a teaspoon. Keep the pulp, bin the skin.
- Oil the tomatoes and the garlic head and roast at 200C (390F) until the tomato skins blister and split and a clove squeezed from the head comes out like paste.
- Fry the bread and the nuts in a little of the oil until deep gold and smelling toasted, then drain them on paper.
- Pound the nuts and bread to fine sand in the mortar, then work in the nyora pulp, the roast garlic, the peeled tomato flesh, the herbs and the salt.
- Beat in the rest of the oil in a slow thread, then the vinegar, until the sauce is orange-red and falls from the spoon like loose cream. Rest it an hour before serving.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Roasting in a hot oven 56 recipes
- The oven was fully up to heat before anything went in, given time beyond the indicator light rather than judged by it.
- Every piece has air around it. Nothing touches its neighbour and nothing is packed to the edge of the tray, because crowded food steams itself in its own moisture and never browns.
- Colour is even across the whole tray, the tray having been turned at least once: no pale row at the back and no dark row at the front.
- It came out BEFORE the target temperature, not at it. Carryover keeps driving the inside up by several degrees after it leaves the oven, and that rise is part of the cooking rather than an error in it.
- The temperature was read at the coldest part rather than the easiest one to reach, and read again after the rest.
Where it goes wrong The tray was crowded, or the oven was not truly up to heat. The food releases steam faster than a cool box can carry it away, so it sits pale and slack, and the extra minutes spent chasing colour take the inside well past where it should have stopped.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chianti Classico or Barbera d’Alba
- Also Right
- Vermentino for the lighter plates
- From the Taps
- Italian pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- San Pellegrino Sanbittèr
Tomato’s acid demands equal acid: Italian reds evolved beside the sauce, and the regional pairing is the safest law in wine.
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