Spain Food Guide
Recipes
Spanish home cooking — the canonical recipes, written the way they’re actually cooked.
Spanish home cooking is technique-light and ingredient-heavy. A great paella is mostly about the right rice and the right stock; a great tortilla is about patience and good potatoes; a great gazpacho is about ripe tomatoes and good olive oil. There’s almost no fancy equipment, almost no obscure technique, and almost no point cooking it at all if your ingredients aren’t honest.
Every recipe in this section is written the way it’s cooked at home in Spain — the canonical version, with notes on the swaps that work and the ones that don’t. We start each recipe with a short story of where it comes from, then give you exactly what you need to make it well.
The Canon
Every recipe we’ve published
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Tortilla Española (jugosa)
The Madrid bar-counter classic — soft, golden, barely-set centre. With onion. Always with onion.
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Andalusian Gazpacho
The Sevillian summer staple — ripe tomato, bread, sherry vinegar. Cold, bright, and better than anything in a carton.
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Paella Valenciana — the canonical recipe
Rabbit, chicken, green beans, garrofón, saffron. No chorizo. Ever. The real paella, cooked until the socarrat forms.
How we write recipes
Every recipe we publish has been cooked the way it’s described — usually many times. We weight grams as well as cups, list a Spanish source for hard-to-find ingredients, and tell you when a substitute will work and when it won’t. If a recipe says arroz bomba, it’s because arroz arborio won’t behave the same way; if it says aceite de oliva virgen extra, it’s because the oil is half the dish.
More recipes are added every week. Coming soon: salmorejo cordobés, fideuà, pisto manchego, fabada, escalivada, and a proper rabo de toro.
More on Spanish cooking
Our cultural and travel features dig into the dishes you’ll see on these pages — where they come from, how they’re served, and the regional arguments behind them.