Putting Spain Back in Spanish Food

Richard Perry/The New York Times

ASSEMBLY REQUIRED José Andrés preparing tomato seeds, diced tomato and Spanish anchovies. More Photos »

By GLENN COLLINS

Published: September 10, 2012

IT seems an impossible dream, if not the one that the Man of La Mancha crooned onstage. But here it goes: Over the next decade, dozens of American cooks schooled in the authentic cooking of Spain and trained in Spanish restaurants will begin to populate the United States. In due time, hundreds, then thousands, will serve up a cuisine that is not Mexican, or Caribbean, or Latin American, but one faithful to Spain. Not only will they staff a national roster of credibly Spanish restaurants, but they will go on to create new ones. Ultimately, that will ramp up American demand for the wine and products of Spain.

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To that end, the dreamer himself — not Don Quixote, but José Andrés, the best-known Spanish chef working in America — was cooking an egg in a culinary-school kitchen. He tipped a heated pan of olive oil and swirled the white as it coalesced around a gleaming yellow yolk. It echoed a classic Diego Velázquez painting from the early 17th century, “Old Woman Cooking Eggs.”

“It is Velázquez, it could not be more Spanish, and it is simple,” said Mr. Andrés, who has become the dean of Spanish Studies at the International Culinary Center in Manhattan. “Everyone thinks that Spanish technique is complicated, but it is really about simplicity, and that is exactly what we must teach.”

It was his passion for the cuisine of his homeland that led Mr. Andrés to suggest that the culinary center create a program that immerses future professionals in the cooking and language of Spain.

The course’s subagenda, to bring Spanish products more into the American mainstream, has never been more necessary. For even though Spain’s reputation for gastro chic continues to swell, thanks to the renown of Ferran Adrià and other chefs of the cocina de vanguardia, as the new Spanish cuisine is called, European austerity measures have brought on a culinary crisis in Spain. The unemployment rate there is 24 percent, the highest in Europe, and some 12,000 restaurants have gone out of business since 2008.

To Mr. Andrés, the new curriculum is nothing less than a show of faith in the future of Spanish cooking. “It may be thought of as fashionable now,” he said, “but it’s not some fad. It is here to stay.”

Mr. Andrés, who is 43 and owns 14 restaurants in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami and Washington (where he is based, and where he also owns a food truck named Pepe), has long wanted to foster a Spanish cooking school. He approached the culinary center’s founder and chief executive, Dorothy Cann Hamilton, whom he has known since the 1990s, during the James Beard Awards in May last year. “He told me, ‘We have to do a Spanish school,’ ” Ms. Hamilton recalled, adding that he said, “ ‘I’m sorry Italy got to you first.’ ” (Once known as the French Culinary Institute for its classical French kitchen instruction, the center added an Italian cooking program five years ago.)

To conceptualize with them, and to create the nuts and bolts of a Spanish curriculum, which was approved by the New York State Education Department in July after a two-month review, Mr. Andrés and Ms. Hamilton turned to Colman Andrews, a founder of Saveur magazine. Mr. Andrews was not only the biographer of Mr. Adrià, but also the author of the Spanish cooking canon “Catalan Cuisine,” published in 1988.

Much of the Spanish food in the United States has long been inauthentic, “a mélange of many cultures — Mexican, Dominican, Puerto Rican and Portuguese,” said Mr. Andrews, who is the editorial director of the food Web site The Daily Meal. “But this curriculum takes Spanish cuisine back to its roots.”

Mr. Andrews said that vast waves of French, Italian and Latin American immigrants over two centuries had given primary attention to their cuisines. Spanish food in the United States was so underrepresented, he said, that many Spanish people in the United States opened Italian restaurants, like Jean León, who in 1956 opened the famed hangout La Scala with the actor James Dean in Beverly Hills, Calif.

And so, in February, an initial class of 24 students will study for 10 weeks at the culinary center. The school expects the Spanish program to cost $5 million to open, including $1 million to develop the curriculum; tuition, as well as an intensive “kitchen Spanish” language program, will be $26,500. The first group will tour Spain for a week afterward with Mr. Andrés, sampling regional cuisine.

But Mr. Andrés envisions a six-month program for subsequent classes and is working to create it, so that students will spend a month in Spain experiencing the fare in different regions, then two months as interns in Spanish restaurants (planned tuition, as in the Italian program: some $43,000). As many as five groups could graduate each year, and the program could spread to Washington, Miami and Los Angeles if successful.

Mr. Andrés will swoop in as a guest lecturer, and so will Mr. Andrews, who may teach a separate course as well. The 28-year-old culinary center (whose graduates include Dan Barber, David Chang, Wylie Dufresne and Bobby Flay) has 1,000 annual professional students in its full-time six-month course and another 2,500 “recreational” course-takers.

For an afternoon recently, Mr. Andrés inhabited the fourth-floor school kitchen to hold forth on his aesthetic, and his technique, with Candy Argondizza, a culinary-center vice president who will oversee the course teachers. “Trying to capture José’s passion as a teacher — that will make our program work,” she said.

As an example of the radical simplicity of Spanish cooking, Mr. Andrés made the egg à la Velázquez, then mentioned that war horse, gazpacho, “which, if done correctly, is like no other soup in the world,” he said. “Hard-core gazpacho is, conceptually, a liquid salad.”

He hopes students will share his urgency to “nail down the basics of Spanish cooking before it gets too out of hand,” he said, bemoaning the growing vogue for fusion. “I love Mexican food and South American food, and I have those restaurants. But you don’t want Spanish cuisine to be bastardized.”

Students will be immersed in everything from allioli (the paste made from garlic, olive oil and salt, without the eggs used in the Provençal aioli) to sofritto (long-cooked onions) and romesco (tomato-nut sauce). They will also be schooled in cooking with traditional hot coals and wood fires, as well as techniques like salt–curing, air-drying and sausage-making.

Mr. Andrés also hopes that students will be given a deep understanding of the Spanish products underpinning its cuisine, including pimentón, Ibérico ham, dried seafood, cured tuna belly and the delicacy mojama (tuna packed in sea salt and hung in the sun to dry).

“Students must learn our products from the inside out,” he said. “They must be able to read a tomato.” To that end, Mr. Andrés showed Ms. Argondizza how he counted the rays emanating from the center point of the bottom of the tomato skin to learn where the chambered sections of seeds were underneath. He carefully cut open a large Roma and scooped out the seeds, deconstructing it to create a tomato-and-anchovy dish. “Seeds are the caviar of the tomato,” he said, “the most important part, and yet so often, they go to waste.”

Those taking the course will become versed, too, in classic Spanish cooking tools, including the wide, thin-bottomed cast-iron paella pan, designed to spread heat evenly over a sparse layer of rice; terra cotta cazuelas, pots for making stews, tapas and casseroles; and the plancha, the ubiquitous large multipurpose griddle that is, Mr. Andrés said, “a powerful tool for minimizing the loss of juices and flavor.”

His vision is multigenerational. “If eventually we create a pool of thousands of people graduating from the program, this opens the possibility of thousands of new American restaurants putting out more authentic cooking,” Mr. Andrés said. “Now is the moment to push for the next level of quality in Spanish cuisine.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 10, 2012
An earlier version of this article incorrectly listed the number of students in the new Spanish cooking class. It will have 24 students, not 22. Additionally, the article misstated the name of one of the culinary center’s graduates. His name is Dan Barber, not David.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 10, 2012
An earlier version of this article incorrectly listed the location of one of Mr. Andrés’s restaurants. The restaurant is located in Miami, not Hawaii. Additionally, the article incorrectly stated that romesco sauce has tarragon as an ingredient. The ingredient is tomato, not tarragon.

Origin information: The New York Times