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Is Rafa that good? It's certainly came to my mind, though. BTW, is this its address: Sant Sebastià, 56. Tfno: 972 25 40 03 I wouldn't like to end in the wrong place.

Fast? Tried to buy some sandwiches at Fast Good a couple of Sundays ago around 11pm (amazing how sad an empty fridge can look like) and the length of the queue made me went elsewhere. Not a Fast moving queue, btw. His other joint, El Bulli, wasn't totally bad on Tuesday .

francesco, I would suggest you to search for some of this restaurants in the site. You'd find a different level and depth of information about many of them. Probably after that, you'll have a better understanding of what restaurant is more likely to serve your taste and narrow down your question to focus on a "short list". Let me, however, make a very rough clasification in two categories of the restaurants named by Gerry: Author cooking: El Amparo Viridiana Europa Cuenllas Castellana 179 (author wannabe, I'd say) El Chaflán Pedro Larumbe Chantarella Product / regional cooking: Asador Fronton Manduca de Azagra Casa Botin Julian de Tolosa The ones that don't appear in any of the two categories is simply because I'm not familiar with them and even though I can imagine where they belong to, I would be taking guesses. Please, note that this is a very rough clasification, but let me excuse myself behind my limited bandwith and connection time for that .

Thanks, Gerry. I was thinking more on traditional cooking than creative one. Just a quick comments about your list: a) I'm actually staying at Sa Punta (this is my third year). b) Can Pipes and Mas de Torrent were a disappointment last year. Slight in the first, quite unimpressive cooking in the second. c) Mas Pau, which I loved in my first visit some years ago, has been qualified with a "I wouldn't eat there right now" by a local whom I trust. Maybe nimzo, who's been there recently, can give us his point of view. Sorry for not making that clear in my first post, but what I'm really after are not starred restaurant which appear in the guides. I've more or less covered those, since this area has become my favourite to spend my summer holidays. The question right now, just a few hours from dining at El Bulli, is whether to make the trip to Sant Pau and visit Carme Ruscalleda. Laziness, that blessed summer attitude...

I'm going to be for two weeks in the area, with my base of operations in Pals. So, if you'd like to share some suggestions, those would certainly be appreciated. In the two days that I've spent here, I've already visited Can Bech and La Xicra. And I will return to both, I believe. More to come when I get hold of a better connection. BTW, Can Bech's owner passed me some recs which I intend to explore.

I have always believed that ñora is a dry choricero red pepper. Are you sure about it?

Some Spaniards terms: Café solo: Black coffee. Café con leche: White coffee, latte. Ask for it in the morning, and you'll get it in a large cup. Escaping to my understanding, ask for it after lunch and you'll get it in the same cup size as you'd get your solo or your cortado. So after lunch, if you want your usual dose, be sure to specify it. To make things more complicated, the bigger size of cup in Madrid is named mediana. If you ask for a mediana in Catalonia, that will buy you 1/3 lt of beer. Cortado: Black coffee with a splash of milk Con hielo: Iced black coffee Lágrima: Black coffee with a drop of milk Carajillo: Black coffee, 3-4 grains of coffee, lemon peel, and a shot of liquor (usually brandy). Some would add cinnamon to the mix. Some background: we almost everytime have espresso coffee, not that thing you guys in the States refer to as coffee, which barely would qualify as dirty water in here . The only exception I know of this, would be café de puchero, which literally means pot's coffee. As the name indicates, it's ground coffee put on a china pot previously warmed with hot water, where you pour boiling water in two times (1/3 the first time, the rest on the second). Let it rest for some minutes, and use a strainer to get the final infusion.

Let's agree with some simplification. But just for the sake of the game. And yes, add turrón, please. It reflects one of the main influences of Spanish cooking, the Muslim one.

Rogelio, thanks for volunteering to report our last dinner at Aldaba . Indeed a terrific one. Also known as ñoras. I was fooled by the red pepper / olives vinaigrette of the first dish, thinking that it was a sauce based on ñoras. But from how the vinaigrette worked with the prawns, I'd say that it wouldn't be a bad combination to have seafood like shrimps and prawns with a ñoras based sauce. Any of you know of any dish where ñoras and crutaceans are used?

The old Boyle's law still applies here: Pressure x Volume = n x R x Temperature In a rigid container, the volume is constant. I mean, since it can't contract or expand itself, the volume can't change. Therefore, given that the volume can't change, if you increase the temperature, the pressure will increase proportionally. As we all remember from high school, Boyle's law is only applicable for gases.

Spain reduced to paella and sherry . Many people have argued about the non-existence of a national Spanish cooking as such, being a sum of very different regional cookings. I won't refuse or adhere to this argument, but to my mind comes many dishes that well could fight to represent Spain in the world: gazpacho, ajoblanco, roasted suckling pork or milk fed lamb, fabada, pil-pil cod fish, pisto, arroz caldoso, escudella i carn d'olla, menestra, tripes Madrid style, morteruelo, migas con chorizo, gachas, ...

endless autumn, keep in mind that Sant Pau is really close to the beach, so what could be better than going to the beach in the morning and lunch at Sant Pau? Another literally next to the beach restaurant a few miles closer to BCN is Hispania, the cathedral of traditional Catalonian cooking. Let's see if one of our friends in BCN can give you any options in the city.

Here goes the translation of La Cocina al Vacío table of contents: Preface IntroductionLow temperature cooking, mastering an ancient technique, by Hervé This Joan, Salvador and El Celler [*]Chapter 1: The Vacuum Definition and applications Preservation, cooking and cuisine How to apply vacuum techniques to food Techniques and materialsContainers. Types of containers Gases Packaging tools The process of vacuum packaging [*]Chapter 2: Vacuum and food preservation Introduction: How many days vacuum packaged food last? Altering food factors: Temperature and vacuum preservationColdness Coldness tools Heat [*]Complementary processes to vacuum [*]The Packaging in Protecting Atmosphere technique [*]Vacuum as a complement of other traditional cooking methods [*]Chapter 3: Vacuum cooking Introduction Advantages Types of vacuum cookingIndirect cooking Immediate cooking [*]Double cooking Complementing vacuum cooking with other cooking techniques [*]Indirect cooking Master Recipe Milk fed shoulder lamb with sheep milk (paletilla de cordero lechal con leche de oveja) [*]Immediate cooking Master Recipe Warm cod with spinaches, Idiazábal cheese, pine nuts and Pedro Ximénez reduction [*]Double cooking Master Recipe Foie gras with honey, citrus and vanilla and saffron infused milk Vacuum cooking and food Chemical alterations Physiological alterations Other alterations [*]Technical fundamentals Zero Oxygen atmosphere Hermetic containers and pressure effect Time/temperature relationship Determining factors of the time/temperature values to apply Cooking temperatures of different ingredients [*]Cooking tools and thermometers [*]Chapter 4: Vacuum cuisine Introduction Working systemStages of the process [*]The step-by-step of vacuum cooking Fish Meat Vegetables [*]Danger analysis plan and critic control points [*]Organizational advantages and complementary applications of vacuum techniques [*]Recipes Fishes Meats Special cooking and vacuum without cooking Desserts [*]Indexes Analitical Tables Graphics Flow diagrams Highlighted charts [*]Basic bibliography [*]Acknowledgements Looks like a quite comprehensive book, if you ask me.

I believe your right, it's his son who's pushing the insects thing. Too far away right now from any cooking tradition here in Spain to catch on, neither there's a well represented offer of restaurants form other parts of the world were there's some serious cooking done with these ingredients. That would be another option to make us familiar with them. I'm thinking, for instance, that not that many years ago I refused to have monkfish liver, and it was the first time that I saw it on a restaurant. Now it's not uncommon to find it in several restaurants. Not to talk about the nowadays ubiquous red tuna tataki... Albeit, right now I don't think it's a great idea.

This thread almost completely escapes from my radar. I'm afraid that the most comprehensive work on sous-vide cooking at the moment is only available in Spanish. It comes from one of the most interesting chefs in the country, Joan Roca from El Celler de Can Roca (two Michelin stars) and his friend, Salvador Brugués, teacher and researcher in cooking. The book La Cocina al Vacío has been described to me as a handbook of sous-vide cooking. Really, if you download the pdf which appears at the bottom of the page I linked to, you could get a sense of the depth and scope covered. It has a detailed master recipe (receta madre, literally mother recipe) for every tipe of vacuum cooking: indirect cooking, immediate cooking and double cooking (how to complement vacuum cooking with other traditional cooking techniques). If someone is interested in a translation of the table of contents, let me know and I'll post it here. This is a book that I will eventually buy, so more to come. After the summer, I guess.

I'm afraid that this restaurant will always be linked to eG in my memory. Not only that, but I believe that everytime that I order "pure" seafood from now on I won't be able to avoid remembering some of the debates held here by Miguel Cardoso, vmilor and vserna. We went last Sunday for a lunch to Gaztelupe. Closed. So, giving a try to Combarro at the Reina Mercedes location, just a couple of blocks away, seem the right thing to do. Completely crowded at 15:30 (it's Sunday, after all), we were given the last table available at one of the rooms upstairs. We began with some almejas a la marinera, which are clams cooked in a thick sauce of saffron, red pepper, onion and such. That was our only mistake ordering: much better have them by themselves, without any interferences from other ingredients. And while we're dealing with the subject of almejas a la marinera, I have to confess that I prefer having them in a much lighter sauce: some oil, fresh parsley, garlic and white wine. Though the version that Betelu presents in a thick sauce... Soon we recover from our mistake. A couple of gigantic grilled cigalas (Dublin bay prawn, Nephrops norvegicus) reached our table. It's amazing how many different flavors can a single cigala develop. The sweet taste of the tail with a slight iodized touch at the end, the deep and mineral flavors of the head, the saltiness and iodized meat you get when you work your way to the flesh of the claws, ... Of course, you could really know that you were having an exceptional piece when you compare this latter flesh, tender and firm, with the dryness that is so common when you have cigalas in other places. Dorada a la sal (gilt-head sea bream, Sparus aurata cooked in a bed of sea salt completely covering it) with all-i-oli, plus a rodaballo (turbot, psetta maxima) cooked in the oven on a fish stock with some sauce of tomato and onion, which puzzled me at the beginning but worked very well in the end, were our entrées. Excellent, but the memories of the cigalas were hard to remove from our minds. A Ribeiro wine, Viña Meín 02, was a fair companion throughtout the meal. When we left, the restaurant was virtually empty but for the table next to us. A regular customer was complaining to the captain about a theoretical decline in the service. His complaint, was that the dishes came emplatados from the kitchen, that is, none or little preparation in front of the customer was done. He could have a point, but as the captain told him, the product is still the same. An unknown to me restaurant in Claudio Coello was named by them as a place which was attracting some former Combarro regulars.

That also would be an interesting conclusion to reach .

Of course I will, MobyP. Thanks for your tips about Bray. I was planning to go, lunch, and return. Now I'll reconsider the former plan and probably will spend the morning there.

... and if you substitute the almonds for pistachios you'll have Abraham García's ajoverde. According to his first book, he also adds an egg white to the ajoblanco. He writes about another version, whose recipe comes from a Málaga housewife. It's a cheaper one because instead of using almonds it uses grass pea flour. Since using only the grass pea flour the slightly bitter touch from the almonds will be missed, the recipe includes the use of apricot or peach pits.

If you're going to cook some ajoblanco, there's a little trick to be used: add some bitter almonds. It enhaces the overall taste of the dish. Be careful of not adding too many, or it would quickly turn too bitter. I'd suggest to add one or two at the beginning, taste it and reassess if more bitter almonds are needed or not.

Good to read you, Stephanie! I'm not totally sure if Can Fabes would fit with what stardust is looking for: Santi, as Simon wrote in the last thread on Can Fabes, is in the path of less interference / transformation / morphing of ingredients. It would fit with the originality request, nonetheless.

I got a table at The Fat Duck in August. It'll be interesting to go to the FD sixteen days after visiting El Bulli. After those visits, I'll need a desintoxicating treatment of traditional cooking. Look for me in Asturias.

Your recommendations have all been written down. I have to say that I started tasting chenin through Joly wines, specifically Coulée de Serrant 87. After that bottle, qualified by many of our tasting group as an alien wine, I've sampled some 89 and a more recent vintage which I can't remember (98?). Impressive wines, not easy to drink in the beginning, but which can cause a serious addiction as an eGulleter colleague wrote in a spanish wine forum.

Since I'm relatively new to this grape variety, I would appreciate your recommendations of wines produces with it. I've very much enjoyed the handful of chenin wines that I've tasted, so I'm determined to taste some more and see what happens. Thanks in advance, guys.

Craig, the wine was brought over from France by a sommelier I know as a consequence of a talk about Loire wines. A search with "Thierry Chaput" Montlouis gives some results, yielding a not working web site: www.montlouischaput.com PS: It was a dry wine.