"ESCALIVADA"
"Escalivada" is one of the most popular dishes of the Catalan cuisine (Catalonia is a region of Spain). The name comes from the catalan verb "escalivar" that in english means baking with embers, or ember of coal. It's a culinary technique by itself. "Escalivada" is to cook food as closest to the embers of a fire as possible, "caliu" in Catalan, and always seeking the absence of flames. Keeping them turning to as they are cooking to avoid burning the skin, until they are cooked in the embers shelter. The flavour will be influenced by the type of wood or coals with which the fire has been made previously. You can cook this dish as a main dish or to use as a accompaniment with fish, poultry, rice and pasta. It's a great "tapa" aswell!!
This is a very heatly, easy and extremely tasty dish to get ready for your Thanksgiving dinner. Cook it, serve it and amaze your guests!!!
THE RECIPE
Ingredients - For 4 servings:
The traditional dish includes:
- 4 Egplants
- 4 big red peppers
- 2 big onions
- Extra Virgin olive oil
- Salt
Other ingredients that you can include in it, even they are not part of the traditional ingredients:
- 2 boiled eggs
- Green olives ( You can use black olives aswell, but green olives are healthier!)
- 2 tomatoes
- Anchovies
- Garlic
Preparation:
1- Wash the vegetables and place them on the oven tray or BBQ. (In our day by day, it's not easy to get ready in our house ember of coal, but you can use one of the most common option, the BBQ or the oven)
It's a good tip to wrap the vegetable with tin foil, separately, to help peel more easily.
2- Preheat the oven to 200ºC and reduce to 180ºC before introducing the vegetables inside and leave them for 40-50 minutes aprox. An Let them sit for 20 minutes.
This is how the vegetables will look like after 40-50 minutes.
3- After those 20 minutes, peel and remove the sheeds from the vegetables with your fingers.
4- Once all the vegetables are peeled and the seed are removed, cut them into long strips and place them decora-tively in a platter.
5- It's not part of the "traditional, tradicional" recipe, but I love to add chopped garlic at the end.
6- The last step and no less important is sprinkling liberally over all with our pure spanish extra virgin olive oil, Cazorliva, and add salt lightly with one of our Casanovas Barcelona salts. It will taste fantastic with our salt with sundried tomatoes, smoke, 5 peppers or olives. Add your favourite!
* The extra virgin olive oil used in this recipe is very important, because you have to add quite a big quantity of it, and if you don't choose a good one, it will ruin this amazing dish.
7- It's a great dish aswell for a more casual dinner /lunch. It can be presented as a tapa for an appetizer, on the top of "Pa amb tomaquet" which it means spread tomato bread in catalan.
8- As I mentioned in the beginning, there are other ingredients that can be added to this great dish. Anchovies for examples (as you can see in the last photo), boiled egg and good olives.
We wish you an amazing Thanksgiving dinner with all your family and friends, and we are sure that they will love you more after tasting this delicious dish.
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Kris and Diana
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