Spanish Ham (Jamon):
Ham in Spain makes picking a French Bordeaux look simple. There's an incredible range of prices, variations by district, shipper, time of year, handsliced versus machine sliced, and front legs versus rear legs (front is better). The only subtlety we haven't encountered is right leg versus left!
There's an industry providing specialized knives, cutting boards and serving ware....we've sampled a lot and flirted with the lore. Strange.....food nuts that we are it's not a product that particularly interests us. We thought it would.....but it could be fun!
Note the variations in price on the photos below - from approximately 50E/kilo to over 150E/kilo
Produce
Vegetables and fruit are wonderful. Most exciting is an item we never see - immature garlic plants. They look like large purple scallions. We're living on them - putting them in everything. Ice cream is next!
Another favourite are miniature Romaine Heads. We love Caesar salads - especially the crunchy parts - and they are all crunchy bits. We call them "personal Caesar Salads' - this will get to North America soon
We love leeks. You know - that long member of the onion family with 2 inches of edible white part at the base? Here the edible sections are 8 to 10 inches long. We've enjoyed them as bases for sauces, braised, sauteed and in a number of new recipes
There's an incredible range of produce from both booths in the markets and farmers' stalls in the courtyard
Notable are wild mushrooms - we've made wonderful pastas and risottos. We just can't figure out how to get all the grit out. We've tried rinsing, soaking, shaking, brushing, etc. Any suggestions? The flavour is great - the tooth abrasion is expensive though!. Do not the truffles at 89 Euros/100 grams - Liz marveled that they were sitting out at pocket level
There's also a wall of the most varieties of tomatoes we've seen outside of Italy
Candy
Based on the number of Candy Stores and Chocolatiers in our neighbourhood, Catalans have a very sweet tooth. The markets meet that demand with a chromatically splendid array of choices.
Lots more from the Markets in the next post - Markets #3
Comments