qyron

You’re having draft calls/warnings?

This genius ancestors must be rolling in their graves…

Good for you, then.

Standard chili around my part of the world is this one.

Medium strong.

I’ve read you guys have a too sweet baseline for flavours, due to the overwhelming presence of corn syrup in everything.

Iberian cuisine, as in Portuguese and Spanish (fuck those guys; they can’t make proper bread even if you teach them!), can be spicy but adding heat to a dish serves to accentuate the underlying flavours.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a simple roasted chicken with lemon and mussels.

The chicken is just prepared by seasoning the chicken with coarse salt and stuffing it with a whole lemon, with the ends cut, and roasting in the oven. With the chicken ready, you just take the lemon from inside the bird and squeeze it over. Base flavours are lemon and salt, with the chicken fat binding everything together. You should complain the meat is a bit under salted; it means you are actually tasting it.

The mussels are prepared with white wine, salt and garlic. The garlic is chopped and slightly fried, just until fragrant, in olive oil. The mussels are thrown in, lightly salted, tossed in the base, over high heat, then the wine added and the pot covered to steam the mussels until all are open. Or can just sprinkle salt over the mussels on your plate. You want to taste the mussel.

These are basic dishes any child can eat. Not too extreme flavours. Adding a chopped chilli to the mussels base and a chilli inside the chicken will add a sligh note of heat to the dishes, embolden the overall flavours, but you will still be getting the base flavours after swallowing, lingering in your mouth.

Food should leave a memory. It’s supposed to be flavourful, not painful.

Orange goes well with fat rich meats and the thyme accentuates it. That’s a nice take. But I risk the original oranges used would be bitter oranges, to give the dish an extra touch.

Try to roast some pork belly marinated in orange juice, white wine, garlic and bay leaves. Overnight and chilled. Then allow the meat to dry over a rack for thirty minutes and give it some coarse salt. Drizzle with a bit of olive oil. Low heat oven for two hours, then high heat to crisp the skin. Turn upside down midway. Bast regularly with the marinade. Slice thin, serve with finely choped onion, garlic, bell pepper and parsley, with orange zest added to it. In the fat that rendered, over high heat, sautée two chillies, add two or three sliced oranges and allow to brown at the edges. Sprinkle with thyme. Fresh bread and a strong red wine. Don’t drive afterwards.

To quote a portuguese writer, very loosely: better food is served on a portuguese farm kitchen table than in the great dinning halls of Europe.

Yes, it is, and, yes, it is!

Funny seeing this, especially from an iberian perpective, because local culinary is mostly the same as theirs. With the slight difference we actually have the balls to spice our food.