Gastronomy is culture. Catalonia has the great advantage of offering one of the best Mediterranean cuisine in the world; a very healthy cooking that wonderfully mixes textures, flavours and ingredients. However, we often get absorbed by our daily routine and end up eating the same things again and again. This is why this post offers seven gastronomic workshops that will help you to prepare typical Catalan recipes with local products.
To go on reading, you don’t need any special tools or ingredients; feeling like cooking and discovering dishes made with local and seasonal products is enough! Take a pen and paper and write down all the details!
Cooking with local products
The first cooking workshop with local and seasonal products we recommend is by En Ruta Girona, a company specialized in active tourism located in La Garrotxa. This activity is very useful to discover the products that are available during each season and to take advantage of all their benefits through innovative recipes. The experts share their culinary savoir-faire and use the best products to make avant-garde or traditional dishes. A perfect experience to live with your family or your friends! The cooks adapt to your group and can even come to your house for a customized workshop!
Recipes with wild plants
In Catalonia, wild food cooking is being recovered and more and more people are interested in discovering the edible species and plants you can find in Catalonia. Eixarcolant association and Els Corremarges cooperative offer activities that link local wild plants and gastronomy.
Here are two gastronomic workshops with local products we recommend:
- Discover, cook and taste edible wild plants. This outing in the country (Jorba) will allow you to identify and pick wild edible species and to go for a workshop on wild cooking. Using the species you have picked and other local and seasonal products, you will make and taste a series of dishes.
- During this Wild food cooking workshop, you will have the opportunity to discover the world of edible spontaneous plants and to learn about their culinary possibilities. This practical workshop starts with a small introduction about how to identify the plants and finishes with the preparation of three or four small dishes that you will have the pleasure to eat afterwards, of course!
These two gastronomic workshops are aimed at raising awareness of our immediate vegetal environment.
Gastronomic workshops with honey
Honey is a natural, millenary and versatile product that goes well with all kinds of dishes (cold, hot, salty or sweet). Muria Centre d’Interpretació Apícola is specialized in handmade honey. If you visit the company, you will have the opportunity to discover the world of apiculture with your own eyes. It also provides easy gastronomic honey-based workshops in which kids can participate. Here are two of them:
- Nuts and honey workshop. Honey goes very well with nuts. The mix of these two single products can create homemade, sweet and energetic desserts or snacks: energetic bars or delicious muesli to mix with milk or yoghurt.
- Honey cake workshop. Honey is present in many cake recipes. As it is sweet, it is used as sweetener and substitute for sugar. Mel Muria will help you to make a cake you will take and taste home!
Olive oil workshop
Olive oil is undoubtedly a key element of the traditional Mediterranean diet. This post had therefore to mention a gastronomic workshop based on this ingredient.
Identitat Extra Virgin Olive Oil is a family project that spreads the benefits of olive oil for our health through oleotourism experiences. One of its star activity is the workshop called Make your own olive oil: during a guided tasting session of the oils they produce, you will learn to assess the different tastes and sensations of single-varietal oils and to distinguish the qualities of the oils. You will then create and customize your own olive oil and take a 250-ml bottle home. A whole oleotourist experience!
Sake making process and tasting
To finish our list of gastronomic workshops with local products, here is an activity that mixes Delta and Asian cultures: Bici & Sake, by Deltacleta, is a cycling route through Ebro Delta that takes you to Can Kensho, an ecoshop that produces sake. For people who ignore it, sake is a Japanese alcoholic beverage made from rice. Once there, you will have the opportunity to go for a guided tour through Kensho Sake workshop, to taste their sake (made from rice from Ebro Delta, obviously!) with oysters and traditional tapas, and to make some Kensho products. If you feel like cooking and discovering more recipes, you will find a lot more on Kensho’s website!
As you can see, gastronomy is a complete world that allows us to play and combine ingredients in order to create original and unique dishes. If you want to innovate or give someone the opportunity to go for a gastronomic workshop with local products, visit our gastronomic experiences section and have a look at all the activities we offer!
