Valencia Archives - Hungry Travelers

Valencia

Cake celebrates a signature taste of Valencia

Posted on July 2, 2022June 25, 2022 by Pat and David

The whole idea of a Valencian orange is confusing. The area around Valencia boasts a staggering number of orange orchards. Most of the trees bear sweet oranges, but not what is called a Valencia orange in the U.S. That would be a creation of William Wolfskill, an agronomist who hybridized the juice orange in the mid-19th century. He called it Valencia because the oranges of that part of Spain were famously sweet. Of course, they were sweet. They were what we now call mandarin oranges. And most of the citrus varieties grown in Valencia today are mandarins or one of the many mandarin-pomelo crosses. Orange remains one of the signature flavors of Valencian cuisine. Fresh oranges appear throughout the meal from an orange-onion salad to...Read More

La Mostra PROAVA explores Valencian wines

Posted on June 25, 2022June 25, 2022 by Pat and David

When we asked at the Valencia regional tourism office about wine touring, one staff member suggested that if we waited a week, we didn't need to go to the wines. They would come to us. La Mostra PROAVA (the PROAVA exposition) was scheduled at the Turia linear park. Created in 1993 with the help of the regional government, PROAVA is a cheerleader for artisanal wine and food from the region's three provinces: Valencia, Castellón, and Alicante. The 32nd Mostra offered more than 150 wines along with loads of beer, cheese, sausages, pates, oils, marmalades, and regional sweets. Dutifully, we bought our €10 tickets online, scouted out the park to see where the gates would be, and arranged to be near the front of the line...Read More

Valencia loves its tiger nut ‘milk’ with fartons

Posted on June 11, 2022June 7, 2022 by Pat and David

Valencia is famous for more than its rice dishes. Locals have been making a milky drink from the tiny tubers of Cyperus esculentus since the 13th century. Deeply chilled, it's the perfect refreshment on a warm day. The tubers are often tiger nuts because they're striped and have a hard shell. In Spanish, they're chufa and properly speaking, the vegan milk made from them is horchata de chufa. No one in Valencia bothers with such distinctions. The drink is horchata or orxata, pronounced the same despite the difference between Castellano and Valenciano spellings. The center of chufa cultivation is Alboraya, a marshy section of Valencia that was once its own town. You can buy tiger nuts on the street or in any public market, but...Read More

Modern times at the Mercado Colón

Posted on June 3, 2022June 3, 2022 by Pat and David

Valencia may not have the sheer number of buildings in the Modernisme style as Barcelona, but it does boast its own regional wrinkle of Art Nouveau. Valencianos reserved their most flamboyant structures of modernismo valenciano for the essentials of daily life. That includes the main post office, the train station, and two of the city markets. Had the city not built a neoclassical bullring a few decades earlier, the Plaza de Toros probably would have been Art Nouveau too. We've already written extensively about the Mercado Central, but the even more refined example of modernismo valenciano is Francisco Mora Berenguer's Mercado Colón. Mora studied under Domènech i Montaner, arguably second only to Gaudí among Barcelona's Modernisme architects. The Valenciano architect drew on some of the...Read More

Sants Joan’s embodies Valencian market food

Posted on May 28, 2022May 28, 2022 by Pat and David

Living next door to Valencia's Mercat Central for a month, we often skipped going out to eat. That's not self-pity. We liked cooking fresh market produce at home. There was a real advantage to that, since we never made up a menu until we found out what was available. The same doesn't always work for restaurants unless they go entirely with a chalkboard plate of fare. Many of the restaurants around the market supplement a printed menu with an occasional special based on what's in season. But then a place across the square from the market on the ancient steps to the Lonja caught our eyes. Taberna Sants Joan's (c/Pere Compte, 5, Valencia; +34 963 913 134; facebook.com/Santsjoans) proudly proclaimed that all their ingredients came...Read More

Agua de Valencia, born in the Café Madrid

Posted on May 8, 2022May 8, 2022 by Pat and David

Few cocktail names trip off the tongue with the lyric trill of Agua de Valencia. It even sounds sweet and clear. Purportedly invented at the Café Madrid in 1959 by bartender Constante Gil, it is so popular with tourists to Valencia that bottles labeled as Agua de Valencia are available everywhere from the Mercat Central to most souvenir shops. Look around the tables on Plaça de Mare de Deu behind the cathedral, and at least half sport a tall glass of the orange drink. And why not? Authentic Agua de Valencia relies on freshly squeezed juice from locally grown sweet oranges. (They are not ‶Valencia″ oranges, which were bred in California and named for the city.) Groves of sweet oranges surround Valencia. All grocery stores...Read More

Come on into my kitchen: food in Valencian tiles

Posted on April 23, 2022April 23, 2022 by Pat and David

We've always had a soft spot for Spanish tiles. Ever since our first visit to Madrid's decorative arts museum, our Platonic ideal of a kitchen has been the museum's 18th century tiled kitchen from Valencia. That was until we came to spend some extended time in Valencia. Many parts of Spain have ceramic traditions, some dating back to Roman Hispania. (Sevilla sisters Justa and Rufina were martyred in the 2nd century for refusing to make ceramics for a pagan festival.) The Moors brought their own pottery traditions with them and the Spaniards kept soaking up the influences like sponges. The Valencia region—especially the village of Manises—reached its ceramic apogee in the 17th–20th centuries. Now a neighborhood of Valencia on the airport Metro line, Manises still...Read More

Going to the source at the Albufera

Posted on April 20, 2022April 20, 2022 by Pat and David

We thought maybe we'd had our fill of rice dishes for a while once Tastarròs concluded. True, but we had not had our fill of Valencia's natural attractions. The rice-growing village of El Palmar, just six miles south of the city on the #24 bus (emtvalencia.es), sits on the shore of the Albufera. That's the Arabic name for a big, shallow lake that was once a saltwater lagoon. Judging by the prevalence of Phragmites reeds on the shores and in small reed islands, the lake still gets some saltwater inundation. Several kinds of ducks, bitterns, egrets, and herons use the reeds for shelter. Some local residents thatch their roofs with reeds. The lake teems with eels, bream, and mullet. Hm-m-m-m … rice and fish. Sounds...Read More

Monas de Pascua are edible Easter treats

Posted on April 17, 2022April 16, 2022 by Pat and David

We both grew up with the American tradition of Easter baskets—baskets with cellophane “grass” that were filled—ostensibly, by the Easter bunny—with candy. Easter after church was always the time for kids to spoil their appetites by gorging on jelly beans, chocolate eggs, and marshmallow peeps. (For our European readers, “peeps” are small yellow chicks made of marshmallow.) Here in Valencia, the tradition is a little different. The mona de Pascua is a baked Easter sweet bread with a decorated hard-boiled egg on top. Some sources call it a cake, but the texture is very much like a sweet brioche. In recent years, the hard-boiled egg has been widely replaced by a Kinder chocolate egg, and many bakeries (like the one at the bottom of this...Read More

Learning about all the Valencian rice dishes

Posted on April 14, 2022April 12, 2022 by Pat and David

Just walking around the Tastarròs festival provides an education in the astonishing variety of Valencian rice dishes. By far, the bulk of them are cooked in the wide, flat pans that we tend to associate with paella. In fact, the pan is called una paellera. The photo sequence above shows the first steps in making a paella. The paellas range in color from a ruddy yellow to deep red. Here is celebrity chef Santi Garrido of La Pepa Bluespace (lapepabluespace.com/) serving his arroz rojo de carabineros, which had eager diners lined up in a queue that stretched halfway around the plaza. Part of the appeal was his fame (he's a Valencian culinary rock star) and partly that he was using the huge red prawns (carabineros)...Read More