Vive las verduras

Vegetables: essence and identity, natural cooking

Josean Martínez Alija, from the Guggenheim restaurant in Bilbao

"Vegetables are a luxury product, because a luxury product is one that is scarce or lacking". That statement came from Josean Martínez Alija from the Guggenheim restaurant in Bilbao, who qualified that he wasn’t taking about the vegetables we might buy every day in the shops or at the market. In his kitchen he works with products such as the Derio dwarf chard which virtually stopped being grown 50 years ago and today is only grown for home consumption by a few farmhouses, with production of no more than 200 kilos a year; or the onions and broad beans from Zalla which are now being featured in top restaurants for the first time. Martínez Alija recommends handling them “as little as possible” so as not to ruin what he defines as "the flavour of the familiar".

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