Sole Graells

Sole Graells first came to my attention on a pre-move visit to Barcelona in 2009. A gift of the ‘A Day in the Life of El Bulli’ book and the realisation that making anything out of it would be impossible without some of the ‘Texturas’ ingredients developed by the Adriàs. Thus I was led to the shop after some online research. However, the creations of Catalonia’s most famous modern sons is not my focus for Sole Graells here. Rather, this is my second suggestion for sourcing the scarce baking ingredients in Barcelona.

Essentially for pastry chefs and the catering industry, although a godsend to the home baker as well, this is where the treasure trove of ingredients, colourings, essences, oils, spirits, moulds and industrial kitchen equipment can be unearthed.

Hidden behind its unassuming door are shelves of supplies for some of the best and influential restaurants in Barcelona and its environs such as El Bulli, 7 Portes, Celler Can Roca and Mugaritz as well as stocking products and ingredients developed by these restaurants’ chefs.

'Texturas' developed by Ferran and Albert Adrià

'Seeds', part of range of grains, special ingredients and aromatic mixtures developed by Andoni Luis Aduriz of Mugaritz

Also catching my eye were some interesting nectars and a broad selection of balsamic vinegars of every perceivable flavour combination, fig, apple, lychee, chocolate……Nestled amongst them was also a bottle of ‘garum’, that fermented anchovy sauce that the Romans used to cherish and was the ketchup of their day. Incidently, under the History of the City museum you will find Roman remains which include a garum factory.

However, it’s for those working with pastry and us home bakers where Sole Graells really comes into its own. The shop’s website offers a comprehensive list of everything they stock so I won’t laboriously go through them here, but I would go so far as to say that if Sole Graells doesn’t stock it then give up your search.

Moulds, tins, knives, industrial equipment for large quantity baking are all available, along with mixers, blenders, scales and fryers, which I haven’t captured on camera here.

Silicon baking moulds

Cake tins and rings

Industrial equipment

Equipment ready you need the ingredients to fill them. Flavourings, colourings (many of them natural), those elusive dark sugars we see everywhere at home, tinned and bottled fruits, super strength liqueurs for boozey desserts and tub upon tub of baking ingredients such as bicarbonate of soda, cream of tartar and pectin amongst many, many others. As I mentioned with Parami these are sold in large quantities but again by weight work out much cheaper than in supermarkets. Why not buy with a fellow baking friend and save yourselves a few euros?

Range of colourants

Syrups

Tinned fruits, liqueurs and sugars

Baking ingredients

Any brave soul willing to try their hand at tempering and moulding their own chocolates will find a range of moulds here, from individual bonbons, for decorations such as chocolate leaves and seasonal, festive ones.

Chocolate moulds

Easter chocolate moulds

Sole Graells is also the place to learn new skills, either through their selection of books or in their teaching kitchen which offers courses to professionals and amateurs alike. Recent classes for the general public have included Easter chocolate moudling, French pastry , canapes and quiches and Japanese cooking. At 30 euros for 3 hours these are very reasonable.

Book selection

Interesting books on macarroons, included many savoury recipes such as ones filled with anchovy paste.

Teaching kitchen

My time at Sole Graells left me aching to spend some time in a professional ktichen with a renowned pastry chef. It also left me wishing to thank the staff there, especially Esther Arumí who kindly gave up her time to show me round, explain the products and turn up the lights for photos. Wonderful hospitality.

Sole Graells, C/Princep Jordi 2, Plaça d’Espanya

Read Full Post »

Parami

For those of us who like whipping up an airy sponge cake, a comforting, rich tea loaf, gingery biscuits, an elaborate birthday gateaux,  gooey brownies or any number of other sweet baked treats, finding baking ingredients in this city can be somewhat of a chore. The variety of sugars, flours, syrups and decorations which are standard stock in even the smallest UK store take a little tracking down here. Home baking, experiencing a revival in Britain in recent years, may be more engrained in our culture and have been practised by many more people than we think. Here, with a patisserie on every block it seems creating something at home may be something of a rarity as these items are like trying to find gold dust.

With this in mind, Moonraker Morsels this week shines the spotlight on the first of two shops which are a godsend for those of us who prefer our goodies out of the oven rather than out of the packet. One of these is Parami, a wholesaler of a wide selection of ingredients to enliven many a cake or biscuit.

Perched on the corner of the car park at the rear of the Boquería market, their shelves are stacked high with bag after bag of nuts, dried fruit and quality chocolate pieces for cake covering.

Whilst you won’t find the self-raising flour (for this try Chinese supermarkets where I’ve found it at reasonable prices) or the soft, dark brown sugars you may seek here, they stock a range of flavoured sugars, syrups, gelatine and additivies such as xanthan gum. After taking these photographs I left with a small bag of cream of tartar which has eluded me up to now.

A selection of flavourings (both natural and artificial), essences, extracts, colours and crystallized fruit are also stocked along with a range of honeys, jams and spices.

As a wholesaler you won’t find any 100g bags here, however, the larger quantities (usually 500g or 1kg bags of nuts for example) work out at much better value than the smaller quantities found in the supermarket, especially if you bake a lot. Just make sure you seal the bags tightly and they’ll stay fresh. I can think of few recipes that couldn’t be achieved after a stop here.

Parami, C/Jerusalen 30 (Boqueria) and C/Diputació 202-204 (Universitat)

Read Full Post »

Las Arenas de Barcelona

Bullfighting may be banned in Catalonia from New Year’s Day 2012 but a toro hasn’t lost its life at Las Arenas de Barcelona bullring since I was a twinkle in my parents’ eyes in 1977. Between then and 25th March this year the bullring sat idle and in a growing state of disrepair until it was finally decided a few years ago to make use of it. Lo and behold what else could it possibly be turned into these days other than another temple to consumerism? Thus where crowds once cheered, bulls died and toreros pranced and taunted in their elaborate costumes and red capes there are now high street stores, chain restaurants and cafes, a multi-screen cinema and a rock and roll museum. By the way ‘Arenas’ does not mean ‘arena’  but rather ‘sands’, one of the many false friends to fool us between Spanish and English. The bullring’s façade, which is heavily moorish in style although it was designed by Catalan architect Domènech i Montaner, has been kept and elevated, but inside nothing aside from it’s circular shape remains to hint at its former usage.

It has always completely escaped me why anyone would choose to have a meal in a shopping centre cafe or restaurant, it escapes me even more why you’d want to do this in Barcelona given all the other amazing eating options available to you. However, it seems there are plenty people willing to do just this and as such there are a selection of chain fast food eateries and restaurants, although not the usual suspects of Burger King or McDonald’s. None of what follows are on my list to visit anytime soon.

I procrastinate about going shopping in the same way some people put off a visit to the dentist so I’m not really best placed to comment on the stores available, all I’ll say is nowhere particularly grabbed my attention and lured me in.

What I was most looking forward to was climbing up to the open-air, domed roof and catching a glimpse of the city below. From the side facing Plaça d’Espanya towards Montjuïc the view was every bit as good as I imagined and I spent a few minutes looking down trying to grasp how exactly everyone knows how to navigate the crazy roundabout in the plaça.

The following rooftop restaurant would have been a lovely setting for an outdoor meal had it looked onto the view above. Instead some genius must’ve decided a staircase and rooftop view was a bigger selling point. Thoughtless planning in my opinion.

I left Las Arenas feeling very disappointed. Its magnificent and historic gift wrapped façade, once torn away reveals a bland, uninspiring present to the visitor. I will stick to admiring its exterior on my daily commute and leave the rest for others to savour.

Arenas de Barcelona, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes 373-385

Read Full Post »

Baluard bakery

Sleep deprivation from a 3 month old baby combined with looking after a 4 year old did not stop Anna Bellsolà, owner of Barceloneta’s Baluard bakery, warmly welcoming me to her bustling shop with a beaming smile and enthusiastic conversation.

As we passed through the main baking area to her office, careful not to slip on the flour-dusted floor and inhaling the comforting smell of baking loaves , two male bakers were busy shaping dough and loading the wood fired oven that bakes all their bread.

The coastal barri of Barceloneta has been home to Baluard for close to four years, but breadmaking runs through Anna’s DNA. Her father, grandmother and great-grandfather were all bakers in their hometown of Girona, her father expanding the family business dramatically into the industrial sector before selling it a few years ago. Anna tried to make a break, studying other subjects and travelling in Germany, the USA, Italy and France, but always had one eye on bread production in these countries and admits that in the end “she always came back to flour”.

Her decision to open an artesan bakery in Barcelona involved a long search for suitable premises and eight months of renovations before the local was transformed into what we know as Baluard today. The petit street level shop deceptively hides the size of the premises and the 8am opening time masks the behind the scenes work, beginning at 1am with the first doughs being prepared by some of the shops seven bakers.

There is no rushing the process here, with the exception of a small few, doughs are prepared using a sourdough ‘starter’ which they’ve maintained for over three years (a starter in basic terms being a mixture of flour and water which naturally ferments from the airborne yeasts and is ‘fed’ at least daily with additional flour and water), the doughs are then left to ferment in a cold store for between 12-18 hours.

Baluard’s also give careful consideration to their flours, the majority of which are stoneground and sourced from a mill in Montpellier in the South of France.

When the combined ingredients have worked their magic they are rewarded by being lovingly baked in the wood fired oven which burns 1200kg of logs a week and is fired continuously.

Logs for wood fired oven

They are lifted from cloths, which retain the doughs’ moisture but also means the uncooked loaf sits directly on the stone base of the oven rather than on a tray, adding to the flavour and even cooking of the baked goods. Anna firmly believes the wood oven improves the bread’s crust and gives the products an initial injection of high heat to set the loaves. Tried and tested recipes from the family business, Baluard’s own creations, Anna’s travels and those shared by other bakers make up the enticing selection. Each day there will be one variety only sold on that specific day and Saturday will always feature a ‘bread of the day’.It is almost impossible to make up your mind at Baluard. Baskets of loaves, cooled and fresh from the oven, are then piled high in a tempting display. Baguettes, organic loaves, olive breads, a salt-free variety, sweet breads with butter and sugar or dried fruit to name a few and my personal favourite, the breads with seeds and cereals.

As you queue, which you invariably have to, the sweet delights will be vying for your attention in the glass cabinet. You can try to ignore them but I doubt you will succeed.

Going to Baluard has always meant making a special trip for me as I don’t live in the Barceloneta barri, however, it’s now possible to enjoy Baluard without having to go to the seafront as a recently opened ‘point of sale’ is located in the Woki Organic Market on Ronda Universitat with Plaça Catalunya. Fantastic news for me as this is much closer to home and their selection, though limited, is just as inviting and my brief wander round the organic market will draw me back for another look and a bite to eat sometime.

2010 saw some of the secrets of Baluard and Anna’s story revealed in a book co-written with Ana Garcia Navoa. ‘Pan en casa – del horno a corazon’ (Home made bread – from oven to heart) is the culmination of a year’s work and is a collection of writing about breads from around the world, recipes, tips on dough making and secrets from some of the best bakers, as well as detail of Anna’s journey from the family bakery to Baluard. Anna states firmly that she is a baker not a writer and the book’s conception was a result of a request from Barcelona publishers Oceano Ambar and assistance from the writer García Navoa. It is a fine piece of work, at present only available in Spanish, but breadmaking and language learning seems a good combination to me.Before I freed up Anna’s time to return to her work, I couldn’t resist asking her for her thoughts on the current state of industrial bread production. Expecting her to be scathing I was shocked by her measured and positive response. Her long career despite her youth, her father’s former business and global travelling to manufacturers, artesan or otherwise, have shown her all facets of the industry and she says she has seen good and bad methods used by all producers. She has witnessed fantastic industrial production lines in places such as Verona in Italy that are making wonderful bread by slow fermentation but efficient production and sees an industry that in many places is working more and more to improve the quality of their loaves. On the other hand, she has observed so called ‘artesan’ bakers using excessive yeasts to speed up the process rapidly and producing poor quality loaves. Frozen bread that’s then cooked in a store or bakery, she enlightened me, is also not always a bad thing if the original dough was good quality and it is not allowed to get freezer burnt from being stored for too long.

I bid Anna a grateful farewell and headed to Ronda Universitat for a loaf and some photos. I was still dusting flour off my clothes and boots as I landed home, a sliced pa de cereals pulled straight out of it’s thick paper bag and a dribble of olive oil on one of those lovely slices went straight in my mouth.  Chewy, full of flavour from the bread, the seeds and oats and the holey texture holding little puddles of the oil. Well, maybe I had just one more slice.

Baluard 38-40 bajos, Barceloneta

Baluard (point of sale), Woki Organic Market, Ronda Universitat 20, Plaça de Catalunya.

Read Full Post »

Books for Cooks

Heaven is a book shop. Any book shop. From the dusty, heaped to the rafters second-hand shops, the sections in charity shops (which I miss terribly here, the culture of charity shops just doesn’t exist in the same way as in the UK), through to Waterstones and smart, independent book stores with their coffee machines and comfortable armchairs, it’s hard to pass any of these without nipping in and having a quick browse.

Nirvana, however, is a cookbook shop.

And that state of nirvana can be reached just off Notting Hill’s Portobello Road at Books for Cooks.

Floor to ceiling shelves groan under the weight of cookbooks for every possible cuisine, with titles and chefs many of us are familiar with and many more we may never have heard of.

However, this is not just a store of recipe books, there are also a wealth of volumes covering topics such as food history, cooking for children, nutrition, biographies, fiction and that absorbing subject of cooking chemistry.

For those lucky enough to live locally the shop runs an extensive choice of workshops which take place in the kitchen at the rear of the store, this they also use to test-cook dishes from their book collection and feedback on the recipes.

I believe they have compiled a book of their own based on these trials. It’s good to see ‘Seasonal Secrets of Catalan Cooking’ feature in the autumn workshop list and I’d be tempted by ‘Meals in Heels’ if it meant learning to be stylish and seductive from the kitchen (in a non-Nigella way of course), unfortunately my furtive imagination was disappointed to read that the title just refers to having a dinner party prepared in time for you to get your lipstick and heels on. Boo.

For those of us living on foreign soils, Books for Cooks will send your order in the mail, although you’ll have to know what you’re looking for as they have over 8000 titles and no catalogue, but if you find yourself in London, make the pilgrimage and get one step closer to heaven.

Books for Cooks, 4 Blenheim Crescent, Notting Hill, London

Read Full Post »

Green Valley Grocer

It may be a long way from my current home but very close to my heart is the village of Slaithwaite in West Yorkshire where I grew up. I mention it briefly here as I am overjoyed to find out recently that the village greengrocers which closed in May 2009 was rescued and reopened by a cooperative of villagers. The Green Valley Grocer opened shortly after the previous owners gave up the business and appears, from my distant viewpoint, to be thriving. The shop is continuing as a greengrocer as well as stocking other locally sourced and produced goods such as breads, honeys and jams. Local people are even invited to provide stock if they have the relevant food hygiene and environmental health inspections.

I fondly remember going to the original greengrocers with my mum and sister in the 80s when the small shop was busy and served your loose and often dirty vegetables in brown paper bags before the arrival of the omnipresent plastic shrink wrapped varieties we see today. Sadly the twice weekly market we also used to be dragged round (or so it felt as a child) is long gone although the village has benefitted from the uncovering of the canal that runs through the village which once again allows barges to pass through alongside it’s high street.

With the continued and unrelenting growth of the supermarkets and in particular the ‘metro or express’ mini supermarkets which have crushed or made life very difficult for small local businesses in the UK it is refreshing and encouraging to see local people making a success of a more traditional and less environmentally impactive business.

Long may their success continue and I shall be paying them a visit when I am in the UK in the next couple of weeks.

Green Valley Grocer, 4 Carr Lane, Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire, UK.

http://www.slaithwaite.coop

Read Full Post »

Cooking – The Kitchen Company

Another slight let down this week (although not quite as miserable as the Ikea cooking department I passed through yesterday) was 20 minutes spent in ‘Cooking – The Kitchen Company’, an anticipated cook’s pleasure palace just off Passeig de Gracia.

I’d seen an advert for this store recently, after perusing their website I was eager to check it out and was expecting floor to ceiling utensils, cookware, books to pore over and an imaginary, mental, unaffordable shopping list to be created in my head for the new flat I am aquiring in two weeks time.

Unfortunately for me, but luckily for my pocket, the shopping list never got off the ground. Well, maybe for the Magimix or Kitchen Aid but these desires are ever present and they were stocked in the store along with other undoubtably high quality items such as knives from companies including ‘Zwilling”and ‘Wüsthof’ as well as wonderful pans and ceramics from suppliers such as ‘Staub’.  The problem was that ‘Cooking – the Kitchen Company’ just doesn’t sell enough of these kinds of goods and seems to concentrate on kitsch, novelty items such as the ‘Revol’ porcelain ramikin modelled to have the appearance of a crushed disposable plastic cup ( incidently one of which featured on the fish course of Tim Bilton in this week’s Great British Menu). These items have a place in a cookery store, but for me they should be in addition to the high quality staples needed in any kitchen, not tipping the balance over to the side of a novelty kitchen shop. Where was the wide selection of books I was expecting? Where was the choice of kitchen basics?

Sadly I left feeling rather disappointed, I’d given myself a good hour to spend enjoying their wares before meeting a friend but left after the aforementioned 20 minutes feeling rather uninspired. However, the store has an island kitchen at the back of the store and it appears they hold demonstrations and other events, having signed up for their newsletter I will try and attend one of these at some point and will hopefully find some inspiration there instead.

Cooking – The Kitchen Company, C/Provenza 249 http://www.cookingtkc.com

Read Full Post »