Rossejat de Fideus

Rossejat means "roasted" in Catalan, here referring to rice or noodles which have been browned in oil before cooking. We're using short noodles here: "fideus" in Catalan or "fideos" in Spanish. Taste Atlas describes it succinctly: 

Rossejat de fideos is a seafood dish consisting of thin noodles toasted in olive oil, cooked in fish broth with cuttlefish, prawns, or shrimp, and typically served straight from the pan with allioli. It belongs to the same family of seafood-and-pasta preparations as fideuà but has its own character and place at the table.

In turn, fideuà is basically a paella made with short pasta instead of rice. I've written about it it before, with varying degrees of fidelity: Ravalistan, all’Assassina, and Casual. 

This Rossejat is less complex, coming together quickly, especially with thin noodles. It's surprisingly tasty for such simple ingredients.

Note how the short noodles have stood up vertically

This recipe is based on one from Spain on a Fork which has a helpful video. I prefer the thin "angel hair" noodles to the spaghetti-thick fideus; my package indicates they take only 2-4 minutes to cook, rather than 6-12 for thicker ones. I've added some Choricero pepper to the base to enrich the flavor, and topped with sautéed Squid for our dinner. Use a flavorful fish stock; Irene made a richly flavored one I used here. I prepared this in a thin Paella on a portable gas burner, but you can use any pan you like, even non-stick.

This serves 2.

400 ml      Fish Stock
            Olive Oil, extra virgin
250 g       Squid, cleaned
125 g       Fideus, thin, "angel hair"
  3 cloves  Garlic, minced
  2 g       Pimenton Dulce (1 tsp)
  1         Choricero Chili, dry, seeded, hydrated, chopped fine
  1         Tomato, flesh grated, without skin
  4 g       Parsley, finely chopped (1 Tbs)

            Salt

            Pepper

Heat the Fish Stock in a pot to a bare simmer so it will cook the fideos quickly.

In a Paella or other flat pan, heat some Olive Oil, and then sauté the Squid until browned; remove and slice the tubes into rings.

Add more Olive Oil if needed and sauté the Fideos until toasted, a few minutes; stir frequently as they can burn quickly; reserve.

Add the Garlic (and Olive Oil if needed), and sauté until softened. Add the Pimenton and stir quickly and briefly so it doesn't scorch, then add the chopped Choricero and cook for a minute. Add the grated Tomato pulp and Parsley, and cook a few minutes to concentrate the flavor and thicken.

Add the browned Fideos and the Stock, and stir to distribute everything. Crank up the heat and simmer vigorously for a few minutes until the Fideos are barely cooked; don't let them get mushy.  Ideally, the Fideos will be al dente with just a little of the Stock left in the pan; if not, crank the heat or add more Stock as needed. Add Salt and Pepper to taste. Near the end, top with the Squid.  Turn off the heat and cover with a lid for a few minutes to let the Fideos absorb all the Stock.

If you're lucky, you'll notice that most of the strands of Fideos will have stood up vertically. I don't know why this happens but I've seen it in my better attempts, as well as in photos online. 

This should be topped with a zesty Aioli (Rapidísimo, Toum), and served with a strong red wine to stand up to the rich flavors.

2025-12-12 Not as tasty -- stock? choricero?

I made this again, same as before (except I added a bit of Perch I needed to use) and it lacked the rich taste it had before. It was a different batch of Irene's gelled Fish Stock, a I let the Choricero hydrate all day.  Perhaps the fish stock was not as tasty as before, and maybe I took too much flavor from the Choricero.

It looked good, and again the Fideus stood up

Next time, use Choricero pulp (easy to find in jars here), and taste the Stock to see what it's like.

Fideuà all’Assassina con Albondigas: crunchy culture clash

I first heard about spaghetti all’Assassina in Cooks Illustrated (pay wall, try a "reader view" plugin) and  New York Times and others describe it well. The pasta is cooked in the manner of risotto then is finished in a way that provides an interesting a crusty texture. We loved the intensity (no water to dilute the pasta flavor) and crunch.

I thought it would be fun to make a Catalan-oriented mutation. Fideuá is kinda like a paella but made with short pasta strands: I wanted to use these for my crunchy texture, so I added a step of browning the fideuà noodles in oil.  I used a simple tomato sauce to hydrate, and decided to add meatballs to make it really inauthentic -- in a fun Italian-American way; "albondigas" are Catalan meatballs, typically served as a tapa by themselves, not on pasta. :-)

This was easy to make, and kinda fun. Irene makes our meatballs and albondigas, but the first time we made this we used ones pork+beef ones our grocery store sells pre-madeeef ones, and they were fine. The measures are approximate, use onions and garlic in the sauce as you like. 

Serves 2 for dinner.

  2 cloves Garlic, minced

125 g Meatballs, small
xxx g Onion, diced
125 g Fideuà noodles (mine were quite thin)
500 g Tomatoes, canned, with their sauce
      Spicy Chili peppers
      Olive Oil

Saute the Onions and Garlic in some Olive Oil.

Whiz the canned Tomato and its Juice until smooth; add Chili peppers, Onions and Garlic, and whiz again.
Add to a pot and warm the sauce.

Add Oil to a skillet and brown the Meatballs on all sides, continue until cooked through; add to the sauce to keep them warm.

To crust the pasta, I strongly suggest a non-stick skillet, as the sauce's acidity can damage the patina of carbon steel and possible a well-seasoned cast iron pan.
Add some Olive Oil to a non-stick pan on medium, add the Fideuà, and stir occasionally to brown through a bit.

Add the sauce, a bit at a time -- like risotto -- until it's absorbed; continue until the pasta is mostly cooked through. Leave the meatballs in until serving time.

Now it gets interesting: Turn up the heat, and when you hear a sizzle, use a spatulu to flip over the pasta to the hot skillet to create a crust; don't be timid here, press it down a bit to get good contact. When it's developed the crunch, flip again. Continue until you've got lots of crusty bits -- it's the best part. 

Combine with cooked Meatballs and serve.

Daily Dinner #6 with Paella

We're extending our month of daily dinner postings, but petering out a bit as I've been working stupid long hours on a deadline here.  We did a couple Spanish things this week including another fideuà and a fishy paella.

2015-08-17 Chicken and Endive

We had left-over chicken breast from the bird we roasted. We were thinking of doing a cold salad, but I decided I preferred it warm.  Irene made chicken stock from the carcass and cooked bones, some onion and garlic. We had the rendered fat -- schmaltz (I wonder what they call it in Spain) -- so I sautéed some endive until softened, then warmed through the chicken, and moistened with some of the stock.  Irene crisped up the skin until is was shatter-y and we crumbled it on as a garnish, and used a large piece as a decorative "sail".  Really easy, and quite good. 

2015-08-20 Fideuà with Mussels

Bummer, no photos of this one. While I toiled away, Irene made a fideuà of mussels she got at the grocery store on her way home from Spanish class; they were some ridiculous price, like only €2 for a half kilo or so. Unlike the farmed American ones, these were sandy and fully bearded, so it took a while to clean and prep them. Quite  a few of them were broken; I do recall that's how mussels used to be, before farmed mussels became the norm in the U.S. 

She also got our first decent stick of bread at the grocery store.  We need to find a source of two essentials we're missing here -- good bread, and good coffee.

2015-08-21 Paella with Shellfish and Squid

We got proper "Bomba" rice from the store (very affordable here) and Irene hit up her favorite fish monger in the Mercat de Sant Antoni for some fish on her way home from Spanish class. After inquiring what Irene was making and for how many, she recommended four giant prawns, for giant crawfish-like beasts, and a squid. She cleaned and cut the squid for Irene; the entire batch of fresh fish cost under €8. 

After a grueling day working, I needed to relax with some cooking. Paella's just the thing; I'll step through the process here. Off camera I cut up some "xoriz fuet" (an intense sausage, sold naked and hanging loose in the store, unrefrigerated), and sweated some bulbing onion with a big red bell pepper and some garlic. We used more of Irene's chicken stock, enriched with some Ñora chilis and some saffron.

I then sauteed the rice in a bit of olive oil: 

Added the stock:

 Some flat beans, which we've found need a fair amount of cooking, so I started them early rather than waiting until the end as I usually do when cooking at home:

And here are our "bugs" and squid.  We don't have beasts like this in our stores in the States. We've got your basic shrimp (almost universally from far east farms run by slave labor -- look it up). Here we've got a range that we simply don't have names for.

 First the big ones, since they'll need a bit more time to cook:

Then the smaller ones:

And finally the squid, which is very thick in body, more like what I'd call cuttlefish at home:

 A dusting of charcoal salt flakes for flavor and contrast and we're done.

The rice came out beautifully, fully cooked with individual grains, not a gummy mess, the squid was tender, and the big shrimpy-things were cooked through. The crawfish-like things were, perhaps, a bit overcooked. Next time, we'd cut through the shell of the crawfish to make it easier to get in -- those shells are tough!

2015-08-22 Spanish Carbonara

Casting around in the cupboards, not much came to view. Frozen chicken breast, a couple eggs, one endive, a bit of red pepper, and some cheese.  Irene started out making a version of Mac'n'cheese but the lack of a suitable pan for browning the top (teflon's a no-no at high temperature) changed the end result. 

Boil some pasta, sauté some veggies, grate some cheese, beat up a couple eggs, and there you go -- carbonara, after a fashion.

Daily Dinner #5

We embarked on Shannon's challenge four weeks ago: post a month of daily dinners, not just the fancy stuff we do. We're still in Barcelona living in a flat that in its entirety is smaller than our kitchen at home; needless to say, cooking can be difficult. But we're up for it, and really like shopping at the markets frequently. We may not bother posting dinners we have out so there could be some gaps.

2015-08-09

After a weekend in London, we didn't have anything in the house so we headed out for something local, simple. We ended up on Paral·lel which has a ton of cafes, but many were too noisy to sit outside on a great night -- it's a main street. Just off, we found Cachitos which had an appealing menu.

First, I noticed the price of one of my favorite Spanish wines, a Muga Reserva at €24, which would be thrice that at a DC restaurant.

There was a starter that sounded odd, intriguing, so we got the Broken Potatoes Anna with foie gras. It didn't look like much, but imagine a pommes anna as grated potatoes fried together, topped with a soft-cooked eggs, then a sauce of foie gras.  Rich? You betcha.

Irene ordered goat (Espaldita de cabrito al horno hecho a fuego lento):

and I had a Spanish pork tenderloin that was delightfully flavorful.

2015-08-10 Fideuà

Everyone knows about Paella, the rice dish from Valencia, but we first had fideuà with local friends in Barcelona. It's similar, in that a starchy base is cooked in a tasty broth, with various vegetables and proteins added. But where paella uses short-grain rice, fideuà uses pasta, shaped like regular old straight spaghetti. The ones I've had used a fairly fine noodle, and they're always short, like an inch long. In paella, the the individual rice grains should be separate when cooked, not a creamy mush like risotto; fideuà is the same here.

At the grocery store, we found bags of three different thicknesses of the noodles, and we chose a fairly coarse one so we wouldn't accidentally over cook it.

We also had some dried cod roe from the Mercat that we'd been trying to use; it's intensely fishy, fairly salty, but had a somewhat wax-like texture. It seemed perfect to provide a big hit of flavor. We froze this to firm it up then grated it on a box grater. Ick, the color here's awful: picture a lime-green cutting board with dark rose colored shaved bits.

We cooked the fideuà in the last of the flagon of white wine we had, and a bit of liquid exuded from some tomatoes we cooked down. Then we added the grated roe once the noodles were al dente; below, it's turned a pale white color.  Fideuà is cooked in a low, wide paella pan, and broiled to finish to crunch up the top.  We only have a Teflon skillet and these can outgas toxic PTFE fumes when heated to very high temperatures, so no crust for us. :-(

 We served this sautéed Spanish peppers that act like Padróns but are long and slender.

2015-08-11 Butifarra and Mushrooms

Irene picked up some Butifarra (what a great name for a sausage!) that included mushrooms, and also some wild mushrooms. Sorry, no finished photos of the dish, but it was simple and very satisfying. 

2015-08-12 Monkfish and Leeks

Irene picked up some monkfish (here the name is "rape", pronounced RAH-pay) at the market on her way back from Spanish class.  This fish is exceptionally popular here, all the fish mongers and grocery stores carry it; it's usually displayed on ice without the head, because it's a bit ugly and fearsome.  It's got a good meaty texture and fine taste. Not the best photos here, the lights in our flat are pretty dim.

Irene sautéed onion then added the fish, then tossed in some leeks and their greens.

It was garnished with parsley the fishmonger gave Irene.

2015-08-13 Spinach, Raisins, Nuts

There's a simple classic Spanish dish made with spinach, raisins and pine nuts.  For some reason, only one of the vendors in market had it and it was pre-bagged; there were plenty of other fresh greens but we wanted something more tender than chard-like greens. We also bought some seriously huge raisins in hues from golden, through orange to russet. 

Instead of pine nuts, we picked up some Marcona almonds, a specialty of Spain to which we sometimes treat ourself at home. "Natural?" asked our fruit and nut vendor? "Si."  Oops, a mistake: "natural" meant undried and unsalted -- a yielding texture rather than a pleasing snap, and these really needed salt to make them interesting. I heated some water with salt to dissolve, then soaked the nuts in this for a few hours, then drove off the water in a skillet. Ah, much better: a crunch and a slight zing from salt.

We cooked the spinach simply, assembled the rest, and -- very untraditionally -- served it on some elbow pasta to give us a meal's-worth. The package seems confused: is it rooster (gallo) or shark (tiburón)??

A glug of good local olive oil and we're done. Not bad at all.

2015-08-14 Merluza, Green Beans, Potatoes

We hit the market on a Friday before a holiday here, and the place was packed with folks buying fish. We returned to the fishmonger from whom Irene had bough the monkfish earlier and asked her about a fish it seemed everyone was buying; she said it was merluza (hake), and gestured that it was line-caught. We asked her to filet and skin it which she did expertly with a scalpel-like knife the size of her head; it's a beautiful thing to watch.  We also got some deeply flavored black olives and chopped up some parsley.

We got a half kilo of attractive thin beans. Turns out a half kilo's a hell of a lot.  Our flat's tiny cooktop doesn't have enough room to cook the fish, the beans, and the potatoes we wanted, so we put them in a big glass dish and figured we could steam them in the microwave, covered with cling film with a couple vents.  Oops, the microwave's only big enough for a small pot pie.  We scrounged around the cabinets and found a smaller dish we could improvise.  Oddly, after steaming for about 15 minutes, the beans were still too crunchy; perhaps next time I'll finish them in a skillet.

 And the potatoes... simply sautéed in olive oil with salt and pepper.

I heated our good olive oil in the skillet, added capers and black olives for a briny flavor, then the merluza. I was able to get a slight crust on the fish despite the Teflon. Straight-forward prep, the fish was excellent.

2015-08-15 Chicken

We'd been seeing these beautiful, golden-skinned chickens in the market so we picked one up to roast on Saturday. It was supposed to rain all day so I figured we'd be trapped inside -- me working and Irene doing her Spanish homework. Surprise -- it turned out to be a beautiful day and we ended up walking a 10-mile circuit around the city, along the beaches, and by the waterfront. 

While I tried to focus on some nerd-work, Irene prepped and cooked the chicken.  We stole some rosemary from the plantings of a waterfront restaurant, and had a bunch of garlic that Irene stuffed the chicken with.

We found a skillet that we could remove the handle from and baked it in the oven. It turned out really well, a good flavor, a fine texture (not dried out and stringy), and a burnished skin. Sadly, the skin didn't stay crispy long and we missed the crunch it had when it first came out of the oven; professionals must have a technique to keep the crisp skin, probably involving unhealthy amounts of butter.