We only need a few simple ingredients to make the perfect sauce. And it’s perfect because it suits almost any dish, and it doesn’t ruin or overshadow their flavours. This sauce can form an alliance with meat, fish, and even chips/French fries. However, its perfect companion is the calçot, a type of onion that is really common in Catalonia. We could say this is a variant of the romesco sauce, typical in Tarragona, only a bit lighter.
Ingredients
2kg ripe tomatoes
60g almonds
50g hazelnuts
250ml extra virgin olive oil
A garlic clove
2 teaspoons choricero peppers
5 slices of bread
3 rosegons to sweeten it up
1 teaspoon sweet Pimentón de la Vera (paprika)
Salt and chilli to taste
Directions
Some vegetables and a dish of salvitxada on a table. | Shutterstock
- To start with, we should prepare the tomatoes and garlic. Cut out the stem and mark a cross on each tomato’s lower part. Place them upside down on a large tray and pour a generous dash of olive oil, as well as adding a whole garlic clove, washed and without peeling. Bake at 180ºC for an hour and a half.
- Meanwhile, toast the bread, the almonds and the hazelnuts with a bit of oil in a frying pan over medium heat. The nuts should be slightly browned, and the bread, crunchy.
- Once the tomatoes are well cooked, take them out of the oven and peel them one by one—wait will they aren’t scorching hot though, we don’t want to get burns! Peel the garlic cloves too.
- Take a food processor or a blender and mix all the ingredients except the oil: tomatoes, garlic, almonds, hazelnuts, bread, choricero peppers, rosegons (see recipe here), pimentón/paprika, salt, and chilli. Mix until blended.
- To end with, slowly pour the olive oil into the mixture. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the exact amount listed above. We can add more or less depending on the texture we want the sauce to have. After that, the only thing we have to do is keep it in the fridge and enjoy the salvitxada!
