INTRODUCTION

I come from a family that loves home cooking. Growing up in Santurtzi (Santurce) on the coast near Bilbao, an area famous for its sardines, we would occasionally go out to bars at the weekends, but pintxos (what we call tapas in Basque) are expensive and you don’t feel as satisfied or full as when you sit down to eat a proper home-cooked meal. Coming home from school or work for lunch, we’d sit down at the table and start to talk about what we were going to have for dinner. When we sat down to dinner, we’d start to talk about what we were going to eat tomorrow for lunch. It was always all about food, food, food.

My mum loved running her house and a big part of that was making sure that her family all ate well. Of course, it’s fairly normal for your mum (or maybe your dad) to make lunch and dinner, but for my mother it was about getting the best ingredients and products. They didn’t have to be expensive, it was just about selecting them with care. That’s what I do in my cooking now: it’s all about ingredients and products and finding the very best, whether it’s a leek or a tomato. Selecting your ingredients with care is a very Spanish thing. As a child, when I went shopping with my mum on Saturday mornings, she would always say things like, ‘Can I have this peach? No, not that one, that one’s a little bit bruised, can I have that one?’ Or, if we were at the fishmonger’s, choosing red mullet, she would look at the fishes’ eyes and see the one that wasn’t so fresh and say, ‘No, don’t give me that one!’ She taught me to be very picky.

When I came home from school, my mum would start to make the dinner and make up a game to keep me entertained. I’d see her preparing things, and she’d say, ‘Let’s do this,’ so I’d pick the parsley, or pod the peas or broad beans – fun jobs that weren’t dangerous. Every time my mum tasted what she was cooking, she would give me some too. That’s probably why I’ve never been scared to try anything, because that’s what my mum taught me. In our house it was normal to eat livers, brains and sweetbreads.

My family – my mum, dad, brother and grandma – ate proper meals for lunch and dinner. That didn’t mean they were really luxurious or cost a lot; my father was a builder and he would come home starving, so my mum always made sure that he was well fed. It wasn’t just a case of having one plate of food and that was it. The table would be set with plates, with bowls placed on top. The first thing we ate was always in a bowl, with a spoon – maybe it was soup, or lentils or a stew: something to warm you up. The second course would be fish or meat: something to fill you up. We might have two of my favourites, flat green bean, tomato and potato stew (see here), and then braised rabbit (see here). Plus salad and maybe a little jamón, and always bread. No one would really speak during the first course – except to say, ‘Pass me the bread’ – because we were all hungry. But by the second course we would start talking and asking about each other’s days – and, of course, my mum would ask everyone what they wanted to do for lunch tomorrow …

Even when I was in my late teens and going out at the weekends, I was always thinking about eating well. I loved going to a particular restaurant where they served Galician-style octopus on potatoes: it was tapas, and you were eating standing up, but it was a great way to start the evening. I didn’t want to eat half a sandwich or a burger – that was for the end of the night. I spent all my money on food and restaurants. I still do.

I never thought I was going to be a chef. My mum used to say that she loved cooking but being a chef was different. Now, of course, it’s fashionable: you just have to turn on the TV to see the dozens of cooking shows.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do: I volunteered in the Red Cross because I liked caring for people, but I loved drawing and cooking too. I hadn’t enjoyed training to become a nurse and, when I studied architectural draughtsmanship, I found that every day was the same. So, halfway through my course, I decided to travel for six months, learn a different language and see if I enjoyed working in a kitchen. I came to London, and I fell in love.

One of my friends from home had a boyfriend who worked in a French restaurant called Simply Nico. When I went there to speak with the chef, he said, you don’t speak any English, you need to start as a KP. I was ready. I may have been unable to talk, but I showed my enthusiasm and ambition in other ways. If I had to peel the potatoes, I was the fastest at peeling the potatoes. If I had to peel the onions, I was the fastest at peeling the onions. I worked really long hours but everything was new to me and I was happy. After about four weeks, they said, OK, we’ll put you on salads. Then I moved to hots … and I started to speak English in the kitchen. The only way to really understand how to run a kitchen is to start from the bottom and work your way up, and it was at Nico that I realized that being a head chef isn’t just about cooking – in fact, that’s almost the easiest part.

Being the only Spanish woman in a French kitchen wasn’t always easy. It’s a different world now, but at the time I really had to stand my ground. After a period working at Gaudí, a Spanish restaurant (now closed) in Clerkenwell in London – a really happy time in which I made some of my best friends – I moved to Fino, a small restaurant in Fitzrovia that Sam and Eddie Hart opened in 2003. Fino was probably the first proper Spanish restaurant in London and it was there, almost five years after I started working in restaurant kitchens, that I started to cook what I really wanted to: lots of small dishes and little bites packed with flavour, instead of traditional starters and mains. This way of eating has a different vibe: it’s less formal, more fun, and there’s more opportunity for playing around with ingredients. Working at Fino gave me the confidence to be myself, and I began to cook Spanish recipes with ingredients from the UK at the same time as building relationships with suppliers that enabled me to get amazing Spanish ingredients like goose barnacles (a crustacean that is a delicacy in northern Spain).

Four years after opening Fino, Sam and Eddie opened another restaurant, the first Barrafina on Frith Street in Soho. Again, I planned the menu – it was similar to Fino, but with more of a Basque influence, and more tapas. It was stressful because more dishes equals more ingredients and more to do. On top of this, there were no reservations, meaning we didn’t know how many people would show up. I’d always worked in kitchens that were tucked away from sight, and for the first time I was going to have people watching how we were doing everything. The day we opened there was one guy waiting outside, but slowly people started to look through the window and come in. After an hour or so, we were full – although you only needed twenty-three people to fill the restaurant! As soon as I began to cook, I forgot about everyone watching. Over the years the reaction of the customers at Barrafina has taught me so much; I can immediately see when people like something (or don’t), and this has helped me to make my recipes better. When the second Barrafina opened on Adelaide Street in Covent Garden in 2014, I wrote a completely new menu. I didn’t want to serve the same dishes, because we’re not a chain, and that’s not my style of cooking. I like when people talk about having a favourite out of the three restaurants (Drury Lane opened in 2015), as they all have their own identity, though they share the same atmosphere and brilliant service. In 2014, Barrafina was awarded a Michelin star. When the founder of Barrafina, Sam Hart, called to tell me, at 7 a.m. or so, I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I didn’t think I’d ever have a Michelin star because that’s not my style of cooking, and Barrafina isn’t a ‘Michelin type’ of restaurant – although the service is exemplary. It’s good that the way people think about these things is changing, though: eating fantastic food doesn’t have to be so formal. For me, the point of going out is to have a great time. Barrafina has retained its star for three years now, and the team work so hard and really deserve it.

Sabor means ‘flavour’ in Spanish, and, above everything, flavour is what defines the food I make. I’m from the Basque country and I love Basque cuisine but I also love travelling around Spain. My food, and by extension the recipes in this book, is inspired by growing up in Santurtzi, but also by my experiences travelling and working in London for more than eighteen years. The combination of ingredients and flavours that I use is the way I try to express these experiences. It’s not fusion, but I might mix a traditional Basque recipe with flavours from Galicia and Catalonia – and it works. Conversely, it was moving to another country that made me want to go back to my roots, to really travel around my country and learn more about it, and to be able to transmit its richness and diversity to the people who eat and cook my food. I’ll never know, but if I’d stayed in Bilbao I might only be cooking Basque food.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not precious about tradition. The more you travel and the more you taste, the more you discover all the different possibilities there are to cooking. There’s never only one way to make something, and no one method is better than another. It might sound obvious, but if I could give one piece of advice about cooking, it would be to be flexible and to cook with what you want to eat. If this means leaving out an ingredient or adding another one, that’s fine. People are familiar with classics like tortilla or ham croquetas, but I make chorizo tortilla and prawn croquetas. For me, it’s all about taking one base thing, whether that’s béchamel or alioli, and expanding it and making it exciting by adding something new.

This might also involve using new ingredients like root vegetables (until recently, you wouldn’t see Jerusalem artichokes on Spanish menus, but I love to use them), or it might be about thinking of how to bring Spanish flavours to things that are not traditionally Spanish, like cockles, or skate. My attitude is that as long as what you make is delicious you can have fun finding your own way there. This is at the heart of my food: classic Spanish recipes with fresh flavours.

Most of the recipes in this book are for 4–6 people. That’s partly because they work well for these quantities, but it’s also because the kind of food I love to cook is sociable. Rather than being individually plated, it works best served on platters, so that everybody can get stuck in and help themselves. For me, it’s a happy, interactive way of eating, people saying, ‘Pass me this’ or ‘Pass me that’ – you have to get involved. Of course, cooking for 4–6 might not be practical for everyone, and if you want to make a recipe for two you can just halve the quantities in most cases (two exceptions are the romesco here and the alioli here, where you need to make enough for the food processor to work).

Cooking is so strange: what I’m cooking today and what I cooked yesterday can turn out so differently. The first thing I ever cooked was a roast chicken (see here): it was crisp-skinned and juicy and perfect: my dad couldn’t believe it. The next time I made it, a few weeks later, it didn’t turn out right. That was a valuable lesson. Cooking isn’t a mechanical process: it’s about instinct and confidence and learning what something should smell, feel and taste like. Recipe writing is imprecise and difficult to communicate. When you’re cooking there can be so many variables. Your ingredients are one: whether it’s the size of your red pepper, the thickness of your fillet of fish or the fattiness of your piece of meat. Your tools are another: how hot your oven is (which will affect how long you cook things for), or the size of your pan (which will affect how much oil you need to use, or how long something takes to simmer). Time is another variable: whether you cook your diced onions and vegetables for 10 or 12 minutes is less important than whether you cook them to the stage where they are soft and almost collapsing – this is what will give an extra sweetness and depth of flavour to your stew that will make it really special. Admittedly, desserts are different, as they do generally require precision, and 200ml of double cream is always 200ml of double cream. All I can say is that, as with my roast chicken, the best way to learn is through your mistakes – they are what will teach you to become a better cook.

Spanish cooking – and my cooking – isn’t just about learning new techniques but it is all about ingredients and products and making the very best of everything that you use. It’s about not covering flavours, but letting them speak for themselves.