At the beginning of the 16th century, spices were considered a product almost as valuable as gold. Hundreds of ships that left for the Americas from Spain and Portugal, or to the South Seas in the Pacific, did the impossible to get this gold in grain. In Europe they were highly valued for their flavor, since they managed to annihilate the bad taste of products such as meat or fish that, after several days of the animal’s death, began to give off an unbearable smell. Of course, taking into account that at that time there were no electrical appliances, the conservation of meats and fish was lim ..read more

In the article “My Restaurant is a Farm” we mentioned Damon Baehrel, a Chef who single-handedly offered a unique experience in the restaurant located in the basement of his house, where he did it all, serving, designing the menus, cooking, cleaning, growing the vegetables that his customers would later taste in their dishes, his own cheese and a host of other things. Here the menu is based on all that this land can give you and he continually researches what is edible and what is not. We are located in Earlton, 110 miles north of New York, in the state of the same name, south of Albany. Damon ..read more

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A few years ago I remember my father telling me: “If you are a Chef you will have the opportunity to travel all over the world and you will never be short of work, although you should know that being a Chef is a very hard job”. And yes, these forecasts have been fulfilled and I have had the opportunity to travel and live in other countries only thanks to my work but there are a few of us, only a few Chefs, who went beyond and threw themselves into a total adventure, lived the extreme, went to remote places where life is anything but comfortable but if a great adventure and experience, yes, the ..read more

In the Adventurous Chefs article we focused on discovering those remote places where some Chefs venture and mistakenly we discarded all those who work in restaurants or hotels since we don’t consider these places as remote places. But there are some around the world and I think we should be fair with them and include them in that club of adventurous Chefs even if they do it in a restaurant and that is why I have decided to create a new series of articles in honor of them. In this first one we will talk about KOKS, in the Faroe Islands. Perhaps Koks is one of those places that enchant and bewit ..read more

We all know the wonderful sweets and liqueurs that are still made in many monasteries in our country and even in Europe but the truth is that they are not only sweets and liqueurs but the origin of the recipes of Spanish gastronomy comes from these places of worship and seclusion, starting in the Middle Ages, creating a whole trade in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and then moving to homes during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The famous grandmother’s stew, the one of the people, …. well, all this comes from the same place or places that in this case a ..read more

Here’s a new way to travel. There are many ways to travel, from booking a vacation at a resort in some paradisiacal place on the planet to putting on your backpack and introducing yourself in a completely different culture to discover the culture of a country from the inside. I have always defended from my own experience, that the best way to get to know a country or a culture is to get into the depths of their customs and not just get to a hotel with a tour operator and dedicate yourself to take pictures and visit monuments and museums with a camera. My experience after having traveled to man ..read more

We travel now to the Isle of Man, between Ireland and Britain, in the Irish sea , and we will find a very peculiar restaurant, Versa restaurant, concerned about sustainability, run by the Chef Pippa Lovell. In this restaurant most of what you eat it is foraged by Pippa around the island and what it is not , it is from a local supplier. Sometimes we discover how many products nature has to offer us that we did not even know that they were edible. I find exciting to explore around the globe to find this kind of restaurants and we find more and more everytime. http://www.restaurantversa.im/ The ..read more

Unlike thirty years ago, when many chefs were trained by simply acquiring experience by working from a very young age in multiple kitchens, today it is logical to enter a culinary school to obtain training to then face the world of work and advance in the profession. But given that we live in an increasingly globalized world and that culinary trends increasingly go in the direction of merging different styles of cuisine both local and international, it is almost a necessity to continue studying even when we are already incorporated into the working world. In the same way that a doctor or a sci ..read more

In the southwest of India is the Kerala region, a beautiful territory bordered by tea and coffee plantations, national parks and palm tree beaches and it is there that locals have a custom to hold banquets where the “Sadhya” is served. It is a banana leaf of large dimensions that serves as a tablecloth and on it very diverse and appetizing culinary delicacies of this region are distributed as a snack where diners sit on the floor bordering the leaf and enjoy this gastronomic feast . There are no specific recipes to include in the Sadhya, nor an exact rule of how many there should be, therefor ..read more