What is the origin of the potato omelette?


With or without onion, little curdled or well done, the omelette It is one of the signature recipes of the kitchen traditional Spanish and emblem of the great culinary fusion with Latin America. This Tuesday celebrates its own day thanks to recipes that can accompany the morning coffee, the aperitif vermouth or constitute a meal in itself.

With an origin that, according to several historians, could go back to the 18th century in the town of Villanueva de la Serena (Extremadura), the omelette is an eternal icon of the gastronomy Spanish, which offers a range of forms of kitchen traditional ones that converge with new avant-garde recipes of this equation of egg, potatoes, olive oil and, not always onion.

As enduring over time as the recipe itself is, are the debates about whether it should be made with onion or without it, in addition to the cooking time of the egg, dividing its followers between recipes that opt ​​for a very curdled point versus to others of a more liquid consistency.

“The omelette it is a fully emotional dish; we like the tortilla that we ate when we were little, the one that they made for us at home, whether it was rare or very well done, so there are as many cooking points as there are fathers and mothers cooking in the world,” Patxi Zumárraga, in front together with Nino Reduello from the restaurant Las tortillas de Gabino (Madrid), specializing in this dish that they now also take home.

For Zumárraga, the essential thing is to work with a good raw material, placing special emphasis on frying the potato: “it has to be done slowly, letting it snatch a little at the end so that it maintains its flavor”, he adds about one of the tricks of preparing this dish, leaving the choice of adding onion or not to personal taste, so decisive in this dish.

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“It is preferred with onion and undercooked, well sealed and very juicy,” they explain to Efe from the Casa Dani bar in Madrid’s Mercado de la Paz, another of the epicenters specialized in this delicacy, which was made in 2019 with the prize for the Better omelette from Spain at the II International Potato Gastronomic Forum in Tenerife, and who specialize in this dish, make thousands a day to eat on the premises and also to take away.

Consumed in a thousand formats that range from whole tortillas, to half or pinchos, at Casa Dani “more than 80% of customers opt for whole tortillas”, they recount about the dish, which has made Casa Dani one of the most remarkable to go and taste it.

And it is precisely while researching the origin of the dish that gastronomic critic Jose Carlos Capel discovered that it was originally made “with lard instead of olive oil,” explains Juanjo López, in charge of La Retasca (Madrid), where it offers that original recipe.

“The result is a sweet and mellow omelette,” López explains to Efe about this type of omelette, which has become one of the most popular dishes at La Restasca, replicating this original recipe “prior to the use of olive oil, which It has replaced butter for approximately a little over a century,” he details.

And in the line of tradition, a geographical point linked to the omelette is the municipality of Betanzos, in A Coruña, which has its own variety and which, according to Alberto García, at the head of Mesón O’ Pote, popular for this tortilla, became famous “120 years ago thanks to Mrs. Angelita, who made this recipe in La Caja, a transit restaurant located on the Madrid-Coruña highway”.

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With a higher percentage of egg than thin and irregular cut potatoes and made “by frying and not by poaching”, and with a final curd that respects “the original color of the yellow egg, very bright and not toasted”, this omelette is a one of the most acclaimed varieties as well as being very easy to identify; “When you open it, it spreads out,” says García.

The Madrid-based Taberna Pedraza bets on this recipe, whose tortillas are so in demand that they installed a counter that today marks more than 65,000 units ordered in just seven years, and which, according to Efe, is detailed by Carmen Carro, at the helm together with Santiago Pedraza , they are prepared “at the moment of being consumed”.

“When we found out about the Betanzos tortilla, we liked it so much that we wanted to follow this recipe, which caught on and was quite popular,” he explains about this dish, which can sell thousands a week and whose counter number people use as an amulet: “there are people who they tell us that they use the number for the lottery”, he indicates about anecdotes referring to his particular accountant.

Traditional recipes that converge with new modalities, such as the one offered at Rocacho, with beef cecina and goat cheese foam, or those that have their own “hastag”, such as the one prepared at Colósimo, which dominates social media posts under the hashtag # Concebollista, and that make this dish a timeless gastronomic emblem.

Source-www.diariolibre.com