Spanish Holiday Gift Box

How should the cheese be stored?

Hard cheeses have been carefully selected to withstand a longer transit time. Don’t worry if it arrives a bit warm or a bit cold – cheese is durable. Hard, aged cheeses stay good for a long time. Many days for sure. Sometimes weeks. Bigger hunks of cheese last longer. If it looks and smelled as expected, it’s likely still great.

Soft cheeses and cheese spreads (like pimento and liptauer) are best eaten within a week or two of receiving them.

We wrap hand-cut wedges of cheese in a cheese bag before shipment, and you can continue to keep the cheese in that cheese bag. The next best option would be parchment or wax paper. After you open the cheese for a nibble, any remainders can be put back into the bag and closed with a simple roll or fold. 

Store cheese in the fridge, ideally in the spot closest to 50 degrees. That will likely be the door of your refrigerator or in a drawer where the temperature is consistent but not too cold. Do not freeze your cheese! Cheese is a living thing. Freezing will stop the natural processes that keep cheese so tasty.

What if it’s got a little mold on it? A little mold is no problem. It’s a good sign, it means the cheese is alive. Scrape it off with a knife. But if there’s a lot of mold and it’s turning dark and funky it’s time to say goodbye.

What’s the best way to serve cheese?

Regardless of the kind of cheese, it’s best to take it out of the fridge about 20 to 30 minutes before serving it. Cheese tastes better at room temperature. It makes a world of difference: the aromas expand, becoming more complex; more of the fat spreads on your tongue, which makes the flavor more intense. When cheese is warm you’ll eat less of it and enjoy it more.

Short answer: they’re cured, so they’ll last a while!

Long answer: Curing is an ancient process that makes meat safe by keeping it inhospitable to the microbes that would otherwise cause rot. Curing is what differentiates a sausage (uncured) from a salami (cured).

Curing works its magic by eliminating bad bacteria from meat in two ways. First, by drying. Bacteria need moisture to grow and curing deprives them of it, usually with a combination of salt and some environmental measures, like dehumidified aging rooms. Second, by fermentation. Fermentation makes a salami acidic, which kills the bacteria. Not every cured meat is fermented – cured hams aren’t, for example – but they’re all dried. Once the process is complete, cured meat is safe from the bacteria that would spoil it. That means it can be stored at room temperature for a long time, until we’re ready to eat it.

Cured meats like salami, prosciutto, and ‘nduja will last for weeks or even months if stored correctly and unsliced. Slice salami as you eat it – keeping it whole will help prevent it from drying out.

What if it arrives warm?

We don’t necessarily ship cured meats with ice packs. Since it’s cured, it’s healthy and happy at warm temperatures. To prolong its life at home keep it refrigerated. But hours or even days at warmer temperatures won’t harm it a bit.

What’s up with mold on salami?

Downy white mold is as essential to salami flavor as blue mold is for blue cheese. Every good salami has mold on it at some point in its life. It’s a sign the salami is aging well; the mold protects the fat from going rancid. If you’re buying one without mold it was probably washed off at some point. It’s edible, but you can also wash it off with a bit of vinegar and water if you’d like. If a little mold returns in time it’s a good sign.

Take two tins of tuna: one from Ortiz, one typical of the supermarket. They came from the same animal living in the same ocean. One costs twice as much as the other. One smells like the sweet sea, peels off in thick blond chunks and tastes like a fancy dinner out. The other smells like harbor at low tide, spoons out in pulpy shreds and tastes like saltwater. What happened? Here’s the abbreviated tale in five acts.

1. Ortiz tuna is line-caught, not netted

Bonito tuna, a common species for tinning, are not big fish. Most are two feet long and weigh about ten pounds. They’re warm-blooded. Taken together that means any bruising or bleeding affects a large portion of each fish and muddies its flavor. That’s rare with Ortiz’s tuna since they are entirely line caught, classic fisherman style, one at a time on a rod. Bruising is much more common with netted fish—the most common way to catch tuna, where hundred-foot-long nets drag the tuna in a thrashing bundle up from the sea.

2. The fresh-caught tuna is stored in the boat’s hold on ice

A more conscientious captain will freight a lot of ice, enough to surround each fish so they don’t touch one another and cool down quickly. After all, no one knows how long they’ll be at sea or how much they’ll catch and the fish starts to deteriorate the moment it’s caught.

3. Ortiz tuna is cooled and chilled after cooking

Cooking canned tuna is more or less standardized: the fish is boiled in salted water for a couple hours. But what happens next is not at all the same from factory to factory. At Ortiz the just-cooked fish sits out to cool in the kitchen, then gets time to chill in cold storage. The two steps take hours and hog up space on the floor and in the refrigerators. Not all tuna makers choose to take them. Like most food makers who worry about price more than flavor, they cut time out of the equation. But what the extra time and care does is critical – it stops the fish from fermenting. Fermenting can be ruinous as a carbonation that makes the tins unsalable or it can be mild. Even mild fermentation has a flavor that, to my taste, is a sour tang that runs throughout most tins of cheap tuna and mars its sea-sweet origins.

4. Ortiz tuna is cleaned by hand

This is as labor-intensive as it sounds (if you’ve ever deboned and skinned cooked fish you know what I mean). It’s not at all standard practice in the tuna world. The women—and I can say from my experience visiting that 100% of the cleaners are women—work meticulously with paring knives, scraping and cleaning every bruise, every discoloration, every chance for the flavor to head south, leaving only pristine fish to find their way into the tin.

5. Only whole chunks of tuna and olive oil go into the Ortiz tin

That’s it. No flakes, no water. That’s the way you get great tinned tuna. Shredded smaller pieces deteriorate faster and that will show in the flavor. As for olive oil, well, the American tuna industry has pawned off water-packed tuna as healthier but what they failed to mention was that in losing 20% of the calories we lost 98% of the taste. Water leaches flavor from the fish. Ortiz only packs in olive oil, which amplifies the tuna’s flavor and gives it a silky, rich mouthfeel.

All these steps represent an added expense, in better ingredients, extra time, or additional effort. But the impact they make in the tuna’s appearance, aroma, flavor, and texture is unmissable. You really can taste the difference.

Some foods are so much a part of a place that you never think of one without the other. Belgium’s got their waffles. Champagne has their bubbly. Buffalo has its chicken wings; Nashville has its hot fried chicken. In the Spanish village of Almoharín, they’re all about their figs.

Welcome to Fig Town.

Population: 2,000. Three hours west of Madrid and an hour east of the Portuguese border, Almoharín is in the heart of Spain’s remote Extremadura region. More figs are grown in and around Almoharín than anywhere else in Spain. Maybe more than anywhere in the world. You’ll find dried figs, fig jams, fig breads, fig pies, figs in syrup, fig cakes. At dinner, your meat or stew will be garnished with figs. Visit during the harvest in September, you’ll be part of the annual Almoharín fig fair. (Yes, there will be DJs. And they will be eating figs.)

The figs grown in Almoharín are famous not just for their plentitude, but for their flavor. They grow a variety called Calabacita. Calabacitas are relatively small for figs, remarkably sweet, and have a thin, greenish-yellow skin. That thin skin is key: before harvesting, ripe Calabacitas are often left on the tree to dry for a few days to amp up their flavor. A dried fig with a thicker skin can end up tough and leathery. With their thin skins, dried Calabacitas have a chewy, toothsome texture, and massive amounts of figgy flavor.

What’s the most popular way to eat figs in Almoharín?

No contest: fig bonbons.

Everybody in town makes fig bonbons. Most use a similar technique, so the bonbons generally look alike. About an inch tall, each teardrop-shaped fig is coated in chocolate and stuffed until plump with a rich filling, like salted caramel ganache, or hazelnut cream, or chocolate ganache.

While they may look alike, flavor is another matter. For my money, the rabitos fig bonbons made by second-generation, family run La Higuera are the best I’ve ever tried. Using the original family recipe, they puncture the bottom of each tree-dried fig and fill it to bursting with a boozy chocolate ganache spiked with a heady dose of brandy. Then they enrobe the figs in a silky-smooth layer of chocolate.

As soon as you rip open the packaging, you’re immersed in the rich, punchy aroma of brandy.

One rabito is the size of a large chocolate truffle. You could eat it in two or three nibbles or devour it all in one bite. When you do, the chocolate cracks and snaps between your teeth before giving way to soft ganache. Rich, sweet chocolate coats your tongue first, followed by a sharp hit of the brandy, then the tangy, fruity acidity of the fig. The flavors marry, then linger for a long time after you’ve finished.

They lend themselves naturally to pair with all manner of drinks. With a good strong cup of black coffee or some milky tea. A dessert wine: a Sauternes or a port. (It’s counterintuitive but true that sweet wine and sweet figs are a great match.) A cognac or a brandy. Even a good cup of milk. If you’re feeling adventurous, try it with cheese. Rabitos are great with a tart cheese like a good fresh goat’s milk cheese, or a hard cheese that’s salty and fruity like Lincolnshire Poacher, or a creamy blue cheese like fudgy Bayley Hazen Blue.

In Spain, drinking chocolate is as common as drinking coffee. Just like we have coffee shops, Spain has chocolaterías serving drinking chocolate and churros to dunk in it. Some of them are open 24 hours a day, just in case of 4 AM chocolate emergencies. When you find good Spanish drinking chocolate it’s a far cry from the Swiss Miss many of us grew up on. It’s thick—sometimes so thick that instead of sipping, it’s easier to eat it with a spoon like pudding. It’s not overly sweet—you should still be able to taste the bitter, roasted notes of chocolate.

A thousand years before it caught on in Spain, drinking chocolate was all the rage in Mexico.

Cacao was first cultivated in the Yucatan peninsula by the Mayans around 500 AD. The beans were roasted, coarsely ground, and mixed with water, ground chiles, and toasted cornmeal (a thickener) to make a drink. One ingredient they did not include was any sort of sweetener. Instead of the hot chocolate we drink now, imagine a bitter, spicy, somewhat chunky drink, served at room temperature. Sounds good, huh? (Actually, it kind of does.) And it was popular. The Aztec royal court drank an estimated 2,000 pitchers of the stuff every day. And according to The Chocolate Connoisseur by Chloe Doutre-Roussel, when Aztec sacrifice victims were too glum to join in the dancing rituals before their death the solution to cheer them up was to give them a gourd of chocolate.

When Europeans first arrived in Central America, most of them weren’t too impressed with chocolate. Columbus brought the first cacao beans back to Spain, but mostly as a novelty. No one really knew what to do with them. It wasn’t until the middle of the 16th century that some total genius thought of adding cane sugar and serving the drink hot. Then chocolate really took off. But even then, both sugar and cacao were incredibly expensive so it was only a drink for the uber rich. Spanish nobles built their version of man caves in their villas: chocolate rooms where men of leisure spent hours conversing and drinking chocolate.

For a few decades, chocolate was a purely Spanish phenomenon. Then, in 1615, Anne of Austria, the daughter of the King of Spain, married King Louis XIII of France. She brought chocolate to Paris. It was a hit. In their very French way, the aristocracy didn’t build separate rooms just for their chocolate—they preferred to drink it in bed.

That lasciviousness made chocolate controversial. One French cleric called chocolate the “damnable agent of necromancers and sorcerers.” But it didn’t take too long for the church to come around. In 1662, a cardinal in Rome decreed drinking chocolate would not violate the fast for Lent. Amen.

Chocolate was only for drinking – not eating – until the 1800s.

That’s also about the time that the first machines were invented for grinding cacao beans. Before the industrial revolution, all ground chocolate was made with a mortar and pestle—and a whole lot of elbow grease. The new machines helped to make chocolate a luxury of the masses, not just the aristocracy.

Those new machines had another result, too: for the first time people were able to make solid chocolate. In 1847, the very first “eating” chocolate was made in England. Within a couple of years solid chocolates like bonbons and chocolate bars were taking off across Europe, but in Spain the chocolatería culture was already established and, thankfully, drinking chocolate was there to stay.