That almost a dozen chefs collaborate to create a recipe capable of summarizing the gastronomic essence of a territory is not common. Furthermore, the result is a dish available for now in fifteen restaurants and at the same price, either. But that is exactly what has happened with Arròs de Castelldefels, a new recipe resulting from the shared work of historians, farmers, fishermen and chefs and which wants to become the new symbol of the cuisine of this coastal town and the entire region.
“We are the gastronomic capital of the region,” Angel Ortiz Chumillas, president of the Gremi d’Hostaleria de Castelldefels i el Baix Llobregat, proudly recalls. So no complexes about being between two great poles of tourist attraction such as Barcelona and Sitges, he defends. “The feeling in Castelldefels restoration is that we have the feeling of being above the entire area,” he claims with pride.
A capital that now has its own rice dish as its flag. Although rice with seafood is the most requested in the town – explains Ortiz – the objective is to turn this recipe into a classic on the local menu, but also into a seal of quality and a city brand.
The chefs Manuel A. Ortiz (Casa Andalucía), Sergio Cocera (Embarcadero), José Luis Pol (CBC), Vicente Lladró (The Plane), Miguel Yepes (La Canasta), Ángel and Pedro Moya (Cheche), Octavi Torres (Tiburón Beach Club) and César Rodríguez (Solraig) have been responsible for this rice.
We approached the latter, Solraig, to try it. On the beach is one of the most popular restaurants when it comes to eating rice in the area and, in fact, in 2018 and 2019 it was chosen among the three best in the country specializing in this dish.
In its menu, as in that of 14 other establishments in the town, the aforementioned Arròs de Castelldefels has appeared since last October. At 23 euros per serving, the same as in the rest of the places that offer it. Minimum for two people, there is no individual rice option.
The recipe uses local ingredients to create a kind of sea and mountain in a rice version, with cuttlefish, shrimp, pork ribs, artichoke, beans, fennel and rosemary. It comes with two generously sized prawns per person, good rice and tasty but without being one of those that later take their toll in the afternoon.
Can’t marking a canonical recipe end up like the Valencian paella thing? “If we want it to be Castelldefells rice, we cannot go beyond this line, we all have to do the same,” they defend from Gremi. However, it is clarified that there are some fixed ingredients, and others that are seasonal and will vary, with the freshness of the local product as the main axis.
In fact, working with the Parc Agrari del Baix Llobregat team has been part of the process of preparing this recipe in which all the chefs have participated for months. The historians Jordi Tresseres and Alfonso López Borgoñoz have also played a prominent role, investigating the Castelldefels recipe book to see the place that rice has occupied over the years.
The most interesting discovery has been, without a doubt, rescuing from oblivion a dish that became very famous in the region: terrelló rice and in which eels and frogs were two of the main ingredients in this popular recipe.
“The terrelló – they explain – was a neighborhood community project called by the Castelldefels City Council to carry out cleaning and repair work on roads, corridors and drains for one or two days. During those days a popular meal was made that at first was a large escudella, but later it was replaced by rice with the animals that were found on these roads and lagoons.
A practice that disappeared in the last decades of the 19th century with the arrival of teams of workers who took care of larger works, such as the Sant Boi road or the Vals-Vilanova-Barcelona railway.
“Castelldefels was one of the first places in Catalonia where rice was cooked in paella,” historians point out. The now disappeared cultivation of rice in the Llobregat Delta brought many workers from Valencia to the area to sow and harvest, and brought with them what was then known as Valencian paella, the flat casserole with two handles.
“In addition to the many recipes for rice in clay or iron pots that were made in the fishermen’s huts in the area, the Valencian paella recipe from Mas de Can Ferret is surely one of the oldest preserved in Catalonia” , they point out.
A rich gastronomic legacy that serves as the pillar of this new Castelldefels rice of the 21st century that already adds to the rice-growing history of the place.
