Christmas is a time for consuming, consuming, and being collectively right here in Spain. Uncover the most conventional Spanish Christmas meals with these scrumptious Spanish recipes. Put together a basic vacation feast, Spanish model!
Christmas in Spain is widely known, above all else, on the desk. Households pack into overflowing eating rooms for vacation meals that last more than most American soccer video games.
We now have loads of alternatives to feast all through the vacations, beginning with All Saint’s Day on November 1st and stretching till the Epiphany on January sixth. In between, there are numerous Saint’s Days, Structure Day, Christmas, and New 12 months’s!
These conventional Spanish Christmas recipes which were handed down via the generations are actually the principle occasion.
They’re good for an enormous dinner on Christmas Eve and all through the vacation weeks till your remaining slice of roscón de Reyes cake is completed on Three Kings’ Day on January sixth.
Study extra: Spanish Christmas traditions defined
What are the principle vacation meals in Spain?
There are 5 big meals (at a minimal!) earlier than the vacation season is over:
- Christmas Eve dinner
- Christmas Day lunch
- New 12 months’s Eve dinner
- New 12 months’s Day lunch
- Three Kings’ Day lunch
Every goes a bit like this:
- Appetizer course: Often a large buffet of Spanish tapas
- First course: Usually a piping scorching Spanish soup
- Second course: Roasted meat or fish and a few sides
- Dessert: A banquet of Christmas sweets, fruit, nuts, and candy wines and liquors
Learn all about Spanish Christmas desserts right here.
Whereas the menu varies broadly from household to household and area to area, listed here are a number of of my favourite Spanish Christmas recipes to provide you a style of the vacations in Spain. I make these with my household yearly – maybe you’ll too!
Prime 25 Spanish Christmas Meals (with recipes)
Tapas Course
Because the household gathers for the meal, a bounty of small dishes, spreads, and finger meals covers the desk.
The tapas (small dishes) and aperitivos (appetizers and cocktails) vary from patés unfold over crackers to tuna tartare. This section of the meal nearly all the time contains numerous seafood dishes, mostly shrimp, clams, mussels, or langoustines. You will additionally discover octopus, scallops, and sea snails.
Some concepts for festive Spanish tapas embody:
1. Tetilla Cheese Puffs with Sesame Seeds and Honey
Clean Tetilla cheese from the northwestern Spanish area of Galicia is the star of those evenly fried cheese puffs. With a touch of smoky paprika and a candy drizzle of native honey, they have an inclination to vanish shortly!
You will not discover cheese puffs fairly often in Spain, however at Christmas, no holds are barred. This can be a time when folks get away new recipes and inventive creations so as to add some flare to the extra conventional dishes.
Get the recipe for these Tetilla cheese puffs right here.
2. Smoked Salmon Pintxos
This simple salmon pintxos recipe is considered one of my favorites since it is so fast and likewise everybody appears to adore it. Toast a sliced baguette, unfold with cream cheese, and prime with the perfect smoked salmon you will discover. They will make sure you disappear shortly!
3. Excellent Boiled Shrimp
No Spanish Christmas desk is full with out shrimp. Whereas these little sea creatures go by many names in Spain, among the hottest varieties are langostinos (prawns or jumbo shrimp) and gambas (deepwater rose shrimp).
In the course of the holidays, shrimp are served in many alternative methods. They’re combined into salads, chopped into savory tartlets, tucked into mini-sandwiches, and stacked entire onto plates beneath a sprinkle of salt.
If you may get your palms on a few of Spain’s greatest shrimp, like contemporary gambas rojas from the southern city of Huelva, undoubtedly go for a easy recipe like this Excellent Boiled Shrimp to let their true taste shine.
4. Gooseneck Barnacles (Percebes)
Is it a rooster foot? A fowl beak? A dinosaur claw? Nope, these craggy two-inch-long creatures are gooseneck barnacles. They’re probably the most costly kinds of seafood in Spain and probably the most harmful to gather.
Round 5 folks per yr die on the ferocious Galician shoreline amassing the tasty barnacles that cling to the black rocks. Christmas is the preferred time of yr for these percebes, that are normally served boiled.
See extra of Galicia’s superb delicacies in our Galicia seafood information!
5. Cured Ham Croquettes
Cured Iberian ham is a should at Spanish Christmas dinners. Extra of this delectable cured ham is bought in December than in each different month of the yr!
Whereas the good things is served in paper-thin slices to be savored all by itself, the much less knightly hams usually make their manner into a wide range of conventional tapas.
My private favourite is croquettes. Cured Serrano ham and béchamel cream sauce on the within, olive oil fried crust on the surface. Spanish croquettes are my vice.
Get the recipe: Here is the right way to make conventional Spanish croquettes
6. Ensaladilla Rusa
Many household Christmas spreads embody an ensaladilla Rusa as a part of the tapas course. This chilly potato and mayonnaise-based salad might be time-consuming to make from scratch, however properly price it. It is scrumptious and a type of dishes folks count on to see over the vacations!
Get the recipe: simple ensaladilla Rusa
7. Fish Paté (Pastel de Cabracho)
One of many seemingly infinite choices for Christmas appetizers is Pastel de Cabracho, or scorpionfish paté. This pinkish loaf is comprised of boiling scorpionfish with carrot and leek, then pureeing the combination with egg, tomato paste, and heavy cream.
The result’s a dish straight out of my grandmother’s Nineteen Nineties pastel lounge. Coral pink and completely spreadable, pastel de cabracho is normally eaten with small toast crackers or sliced bread. And when you get your head across the thought of fish dip, it is truly fairly tasty!
8. Child Eels
These spaghetti-like little creatures are a delicacy so uncommon and costly {that a} less expensive knock-off has swooped in to fill the demand. Actual child eels, which promote for about €200 per kilo, are known as angulas. The rather more inexpensive imitation child eels that are comprised of surimi fish are known as gulas.
Each are normally sautéed with olive oil, garlic, and cayenne pepper and served in ceramic dishes known as cazuelas.
9. Spanish Hummus
Whereas hummus will not be Spanish in origin, it is extremely popular nowadays in supermarkets and likewise in eating places. I wish to spruce up my home made hummus with substances like paprika, cumin, and pine nuts. What Spanish hummus recipe do you want greatest?
First Course
After a trove of tapas, issues begin getting severe. The small plates are whisked away to get replaced by a dish requiring correct utensils. Most frequently the primary course is a lightweight, brothy soup or a salad.
Some concepts for a Spanish-inspired first course for the vacations embody:
10. Spanish Seafood Soup
The parade of seafood doesn’t cease at tapas. Most of the most conventional first programs at a Spanish vacation meal include some sort of seafood soup. Widespread substances embody shrimp, clams, and mussels together with fish like hake or monk.
Do that recipe (scroll to the tip) for Spanish-inspired seafood chowder!
11. Galets Soup
In Catalonia, the Christmas soup all the time comes with a selected sort of pasta shell known as a galet. In the course of the holidays big plastic sculptures of shells are a part of the Christmas decorations in many cities within the area.
Galets Soup will get its wealthy taste from the meat that’s boiled with the soup. Whereas the big cuts are saved for the second course, floor meat is commonly stuffed into the shells or served alongside them as in this Galets soup recipe.
12. Tuna Stomach, Blood Orange and Avocado Salad
A light-weight salad can also be generally seen as the primary course at Spain’s vacation meals. Salads right here are inclined to let the greens and toppings shine through the use of very mild dressings. Typically occasions a drizzle of olive oil and a splash of vinegar is all of the dressing it wants!
A favourite winter salad of mine is this tuna stomach, blood orange, and avocado salad.
13. Clams in Sherry a la Marinera
In Andalusia, the vacations all the time embody an enormous platter of those scrumptious clams a la marinera. The garlic and sherry sauce is completely scrumptious and value a strive!
You may make these at residence simply with this easy Spanish clams recipe.
Second Course
It is a good factor that Christmas meals in Spain are hours-long affairs, in any other case, I might by no means be hungry sufficient by the point the second course got here! And belief me, you need to be hungry for this feast.
The remainder of the meal looks like kid’s play in comparison with most second-course dishes. Roasting is the secret whether or not or not it’s lamb, fish, turkey, or suckling pig.
14. Baked Fish with Lemon and Herbs
If the vacation meal is at night time, the principle course is most frequently going to be fish. Among the hottest Christmas fish in Spain are lubina (European seabass), rodaballo (turbot), dorada (gilt head bream) and bacalao (cod).
On this recipe for baked dorada with lemon and herbs, the fish is baked entire, locking in moisture and making certain the fish seems good and juicy.
15. Pan Fried Spanish Cod
For an additional basic preparation, you may do this pan-fried Spanish cod. This can be a easy delicacy, and cod is an costly (and due to this fact festive) fish alternative nowadays!
16. Gradual Roasted Spanish Lamb
Neighborhood butcher retailers are bustling locations throughout the Christmas season as households hustle in to order and choose up their meat for roasting.
Most of the time, that meat is lamb. Whereas suckling pig and even some beef recipes might make it to the desk, the dish I most frequently hear about at Spanish Christmas dinners is roasted lamb.
This slow-roasted Spanish lamb recipe makes a darn good rendition of a standard Spanish roasted lamb utilizing substances which might be simple to seek out exterior of Spain.
17. Rooster Pepitoria (Pollo a la Pepitoria)
This isn’t an excellent conventional vacation dish, however it is likely one of the most scrumptious and historic Spanish rooster stews, so I might guess it has been served at loads of vacation feasts! Plus, it makes use of costly substances like almonds and saffron so as to add taste, which means it is match for a particular meal.
Get the recipe: Spanish rooster stew pepitoria
18. Roasted Greens with Romesco Sauce
I needed to incorporate a vegan/vegetarian choice right here, and there’s nothing higher than creamy Spanish romesco sauce with good Mediterranean roast greens.
Dessert
I’ve a whole article about Spanish desserts, and Spanish Christmas desserts have much more to supply!
Simply while you assume the consuming has ended, a three-part dessert awaits. First comes what you would possibly sometimes consider as Spanish dessert: flan, some form of bread pudding, cake, or tarts.
Subsequent is the unfold of conventional Christmas sweets like turrón (nougat and almond bars), polvorones and mantecados (powdery almond cookies), fig bars, candied fruits, nuts (almonds, walnuts, pistachios, and so on.), and contemporary seasonal fruit like apples, mandarins, persimmon, and pomegranate.
Final comes the liqueurs like brandy or orujo (moonshine-like liqueur distilled from grape skins usually flavored with herbs or made right into a creamy Bailey’s like liqueur). Your Spanish Christmas recipes should not full with out these candy additions!
For a Spanish dessert at your desk, strive a few of my favorites:
19. Lemon Olive Oil Cake
An extremely moist cake that might go completely with a post-lunch espresso. The olive oil within the recipe actually comes via, which means it is best to use the good things!
The right lemon olive oil cake recipe right here.
Not a lemon fan? Do that apple olive oil cake as an alternative!
20. Polvorones
The quintessential Spanish Christmas cookie! Rising up with US cookie tradition, it took me some time to like these dry, crumbly cookies. However after residing right here almost 20 years I can safely say they’re well worth the energy!
Do that Spanish polvorones recipe at residence.
21. Arroz con Leche
Easy, scrumptious, and never too heavy, arroz con leche is an ideal Christmas dessert. A touch of cinnamon makes this chilly, creamy rice pudding additional scrumptious.
22. Turrón de Alicante
Whereas there at the moment are umpteen kinds of turrón, the basic recipe is brief and candy: honey, almonds, sugar, and egg whites. This recipe for turrón duro (or arduous turrón) is from Alicante.
A really related model from Jijona, referred to as turrón blando (delicate turrón) is far softer and jogs my memory of a sweeter, extra compact model of almond butter.
23. Basque Cheesecake
It may not be completely a Christmas dessert, however Spanish cheesecake deserves a spot on the desk for any particular meal! This decadent Basque cheesecake recipe is so wealthy that one cake will feed loads of visitors. It is so scrumptious that you just’d by no means guess it solely had a handful of substances!
24. Spanish Flan
Spanish flan is a scrumptious dessert for any special day. And though it may be intimidating — it is actually fairly simple and adaptable. I really like the basic Spanish flan recipe but additionally make an excellent coconut flan. For Thanksgiving, I make pumpkin flan!
25. Roscon de Reyes
Final however not least, I go away you with my beloved roscón de reyes recipe. This barely candy brioche-style ring is normally lined in sugared fruit and sliced in half. It is then stuffed with contemporary whipped cream — chocolate or plain. It is extra sometimes eaten for Three Kings’ Day (January sixth) however you may see it served all through the vacations.
Simply watch out you do not discover the bean hidden inside — you may need to pay for the roscón!
Extra Vacation Traditions in Spain
What are your prime Spanish Christmas recipes? Do any of those conventional Spanish Christmas meals catch your eye?
