Exploring Barcelona's culinary gems: A secret food tour experience

Cheers. Food is my true passion. I'm Gemma Stafford, a professional chef and host of Bigger Bolder Baking. So that means great food is a huge part of my everyday life. You've seen me boldly bake over the top recipes. Now travel with me on my culinary adventures around the world. In this episode of Gemma Eats, I'm back in Barcelona, Spain, exploring the city on a secret food tour to enjoy more amazing Spanish treats. And you're coming along with me for the ride. All right now, on Gemma Eats. Hi from sunny Barcelona. Myself and Kevin are here on vacation and we are about to embark on a culinary adventure. We are part of a secret food tour here in Barcelona where we get to experience some of the real hidden gems of this city. I really can't wait and I'm going to take you along for the ride. So let's go. Barcelona is a city built from passion and there's no better example than the famous architect Gaudi. As a brilliant creator, he infused his love of nature with architecture to create such distinctive designs. What I was about to experience was how passion is the secret ingredient that transforms even the simplest Spanish dish. This is our secret food tour guide Miguel. He's originally from Salamanca, Spain but he knows Barcelona so well and he definitely knows Always great foods. I hope you feel like another member of our group as we explore this amazing city together. We started our tour out in the Born district to get a really good sense of not only the city's food but its history too. Our first stop took us to a shop run by a husband and wife couple dedicated to making the best breakfast pastries. Inside is a very sweet woman called Maria Jesus that is going to do churros and chocolate for you. I'm very happy to show you this place because she's like my grandma here, so I'm very happy today. But how do I explain that? Everything here inside is homemade, okay? From the chocolate to the base to the churros, okay? But you could almost know about that without or before being with me, if you knew how to make it. Look at the words here. Churrería, nothing crazy, it means a churros place, okay? So the bottom word here is Granja. Granja means a farm, both in Catalan and Spanish. So basically, 40, 50 years ago, the farmers on the countryside, they started with the idea of... We're opening small shops like this one to be able to sell the fresh product to more people in the big city. We're talking about milk places, cereals, meat, anything. There's many of them. Check it out when you see one because it's always very authentic. Some of them became a bit messy but most of them have the same way of thinking about the product. It's always good to buy it. Now, let's go. In addition to their olive oil fried churros, I was about to try churros' popular cousin, Churros, and of course, thick drinking chocolate. You try it before you dip things inside, so you know how it is. She adds some touches of cinnamon and orange blossom. You have some water for the way, okay? Oye, ¿por qué lo tiras? It's like a delicious spoon, you see how thick that is, it's not too sweet either, it's perfect for the churro. Now I'm going to try the porres, this guy is thicker and not as sweet as the churro. I'm still going to eat it but I prefer the churro. And of course I had to get a photo with the chef before we left. So first off on our culinary adventure we just had some churros and really lovely thick hot chocolate and then some porres, they were absolutely delicious. I think the churro was my favorite. As we walked through the streets of Born, I started to get a better sense of how the locals lived. Our next stop, the Santa Catalina Market, is the second oldest market in the city after La Boqueria. Miguel's tip was to keep an eye out for the grandmas when you're shopping, because just like I learned growing up in Ireland, no one makes food with more love than your granny. If you open a book about Spanish food or Mediterranean gastronomy, for example, they will tell you Spanish gastronomy or Mediterranean gastronomy is a gastronomy of products and a gastronomy of transformation, meaning that the idea is to take the produce you have, the best quality, and to transform it to make a dish that is going to fit your people. But transforming sometimes means actually not doing anything when you have an amazing squid. Don't cook it too much, don't put many, so it's really not. There's some spices, maybe some of that. So that is an ability that they started to have, to adapt. And when you do that every day, not for fancy purpose, but to feed your people, so you have to do it, you have to improvise and adapt every day for 30 years. When you do that for 30 years, it becomes part of your DNA to improvise, to adapt. The good thing is that you're never gonna starve in Spain, okay? They will always feed you, okay? Okay. Let's go. I've already seen three grannies. I'm in my 20s. And feed us, Miguel did. We enjoyed a variety of Spanish cheeses, including a lesser known one called Payoyo, a goat's cheese mixed with a little bit of sheep's milk. Mmm, that's good. Kind of creamy and salty at the same time. Being a semi-curado is not that dry. There's a little nugget in here. Thank you. Definitely all about food and cones. It's cold. Then it was on to the jamón, where we learned how the Spanish create these amazing results. There are four elements you can play with to higher the quality. So let's say we are in a group, we want to raise it, we can make some good jamón. The first element would be, obviously, the animal we choose The second element I was going to give you is the way we feed this animal, this is the important thing. Third element that is very useful to know, the leg we take from the pig is going to make a difference. What we call jamón in Spain is only the back legs, only the back legs of the animal. The front legs are called paletas. We make a difference like you make a difference when you take any piece of animal, steak or roast beef, right? But the paleta will be a little bit more muscular, a bit harder, okay, when the back legs are more tender or fatter. Last element, very important, the curing process. We cure the ham, we don't cook it. You've seen it hanging, right? So what happens is that we do the same as the cheese. So which one is this again? The jamón. I'm going to tell you. Okay. I'm going to tell you after. Okay. I promise you. Like a guessing game. So, which one did you like the most? This one. It's kind of sweet. This one? Yeah, sweet and salty. This one? Oh, it's yum. I think this is my favorite. This jamón was a little bit softer, and it was like sweet and salty. Oh, yum. After the cheese and jamón, I started to get a little bit thirsty, so fortunately, Miguel had a plan. Now the bottle you have here, this one, is called a Boron, B-O-R-O-N. The bottle was invented at the end of Middle Age for the only purpose of man sharing the same bottle. So of course, everybody had to try some, including my husband, Kevin and I. Now that we had a few snacks to start out the day, it was time for something a little bit more substantial. Let's go. Tapa time. Our tapas time. I love tapas and our lunch stop reinforced that even more. It was just a reminder about how even the littlest bite brings people together. Tapas is not, now it's like a design, right? It is a design, it's like the fact of basically doing small portions. The reason we started to eat like this, it wasn't for design, it wasn't like people in the office say oh we're going to have this, we're going to do small portions, no, it happened naturally from a very convenient process, basically imagine you're working class people, you work in the construction for example, these guys were really poor, so when they used to go to the bar, the tavern, they used to ask for the same, but they could only afford the drink or the food. Now you can imagine what choice they would make. So, of course, they would choose the wine and no food. They would go back to work tipsy and nothing in their belly, which was probably very fun, not super nice for productivity. So the king established a new law saying that for every... A glass of alcohol that was ordered in every bar, restaurant or tavern, you would have to give a free sample of food, a free tapa. And it started to be something that was very convenient. The bars were always giving small portions because it was more convenient. That's the beginning, that's how tapas were born. A fried sort of ball, mashed potato inside in meat, gently. Nice. Gorgeous, thank you. Very good. This is a charming place, I want to come to the other. Oh yeah. Yum. They bake well. That's yummy. Those patatas bravas are really good aren't they? What I like about them is that they're always like really crispy and crunchy. I think it's the double frying. I think it is the double frying. Very special here. You reach a level where food becomes emotion, there's a story in the dish. In this case, of course, the way it looks tells the beginning of the story, so it plays a big role. But when you talk about tapas, you know, it's popular, it's like all together, you don't even look at the food, you take it and you don't even look at it, and then you have it in your mouth, you're still talking with your friend, and you're like, oh wow, that was good, you know, so you don't even look at it. It doesn't need to be pretty, is my opinion. It's a little bit like Irish food. Irish food, it doesn't always look the best, but it tastes amazing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Loved it. I had patatas bravas, which are like my favorite thing ever. I had two glasses of cava for lunch, which was absolutely delicious. I had some calamari. What else did I have, Kevin? I had two glasses of cava. Next up, we explored a shop that has been doing what they do best for years. They light a fire behind here, there is a funnel here, you put your nuts and stuff in here and it smokes it and toasts it at the same time. It's pretty incredible isn't it? Did he say it was like in the 1800s? 1851? Is that right? That's incredible. Like this is all original wall and original kiln. That's impressive, smell is unbelievable. All of these nuts here, macadamia nuts, almonds, hazelnuts, they're all roasted in the fire back there. Can you do the best you can? In the kilo. Amazing. Look at that. Delicious. It's like caramel and nuts. Toasted almonds. Check these out. They're Spanish toasted almonds. What I love about them is that they're all different shapes and sizes. Different textures. Thickness. This is what almonds should be. They're not uniformed. They're absolutely lovely. We made our way to Barcelona, a seaside neighborhood that featured our next eat. Miguel had definitely saved the best for last. Lovely, rich rice and seafood paella. See ya. That's beautiful. So I do this... Look at the color, we like, you don't get prawns like the color of that where we're from. Yeah, are they gorgeous? Is it gorgeous? According to Miguel, paella can succeed or fail by seconds. The goal is tender rice and perfectly cooked shellfish all at the same time. They make you work for it, don't they? For paella. There you go. Mmm. Oh yeah, they are really good. I think this is some of the nicest paella I've ever had. I've never had. Now, of course, we had to end our meal with a little dessert. This is the end of our meal, Tarta de Santiago. Mmm, it's like an almond cake, it's good. How are you holding up? Good, I'm stuffed. Paella, sangria, cake, cheese, jamon. In Spain, great food is about the magical combination of good ingredients simply prepared. What Barcelona exemplifies is that great food really is about emotion, especially love. I want to say a huge thank you to Miguel and Secret Food Tours Barcelona for bringing us on a fantastic adventure.