When we were thinking of dishes to make for Spain, our minds immediately went to tapas – a collection of small and delicious dishes to be shared around a table. Of the most popular tapas dishes, patatas bravas, is one of our favourites, so we thought it would be the perfect dish to start our Spanish journey with.
As you’ll notice, this recipe does not require a lot of ingredients, and is very simple to make. We used a recipe from BOSH! by Henry Firth and Ian Theasby, which means this is also vegan!
In order to make sure we had the best veggies going into this, we used Get Fresh Swansea. This meant we got excellent potatoes and chilli peppers, as well as an actual Spanish onion – look at the size of it! We are also trying to grow our own chillis at the moment courtesy of our friends gifting us a plant. It’s going well so far, but it’ll be a while before we grow them well enough to use this many.
Patatas bravas (if you have not had them before) are essentially cubed fried potatoes in a spicy sauce.
Of course the first step was to prep the potatoes, by cutting them into cubes and parboiling them, making sure to not cook them for too long to stop them becoming perfect for mash!
While the potatoes were boiling, we got to work on making the sauce itself. This involved chopping up the huge onion and adding all the chillies. We removed the seeds from ours but if you are a fan of the heat then feel free to leave them in.
The colour of the fresh ingredients was amazing and we could see that it would result in a very vibrant sauce. We also used dried rosemary and thyme in this recipe, however it would be elevated with fresh herbs for an extra little punch of flavour.
Once the chopped tomatoes were added and the sauce was simmering away, it was time to turn our attention back to the potatoes. The parboiled cubes were added to a pan with oil and fried until slightly crispy.
If you time this right while cooking, the sauce and the potatoes are basically ready at the same time. The only thing left to do is blend the sauce to make it smooth, and begin assembling the dish.
The final sauce was very bright, and made the whole dish look very appetising!
When it comes to serving patatas bravas, there are a few options. It may be that they are part of a wider tapas spread, in which case a small dish will do. However, we decided to pile the potatoes and sauce onto a large plate, grabbed a fork each and dug in!
We also added a sprinkling of paprika and onto the cooked potatoes, before adding the sauce, just for an extra bit of spice.
Feel free to also add a dollop of aioli on top, mainly because it’s delicious! We recommend the LEON aioli, but of course you can make your own.
Overall this was a very quick and easy dish to put together and it was delicious! Please let us know if you give this a go – we’d love to hear from you.
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