Yecla – Gastronomy
- Details
- Parent Category: Travel Over There
- Category: 2014 - Gap Year
- Created: Tuesday, 10 June 2014 15:02
Click Here for Spanish Language Version
One of the best experiences a traveller can have when visiting a new culture is exploring their food. Spain is renowned across the world for its dishes and it is a joy to discover them. Personally, I think one of the greater joys comes in discovering the regional variations of these dishes.
Yecla had numerous variations and a few unique dishes that really enhanced our appreciation for the region.
To start with, it’s a wine producing area with the primary variety being Monastrell (Mourvèdre), a red wine, and the results are highly variable. We tried over a dozen of Monastrell’s while in the region and while no two were alike aside from being red and having an earthy flavour to them, some were highly enjoyable whilst others tasted terrible, and a few fell into the ‘drinkable’ category. The most interesting thing about this range is that they were all in the €3-7 price range in the supermarket. Check out http://www.yeclavino.com/ for more information on the areas wines.
If you are going to drink the wine you should probably eat a few dishes along the way and Yecla has some great variations.
One such dish is Yeclano Gazpachos. Traditionally Gazpacho is a cold tomato soup served in Andalusia, in Yecla however it was stewed meat (rabbit & quail or chicken) and vegetables served over a fried tortilla. First you eat the stew then eat the tortilla with either honey or anchovies. It was delicious.
Another is Gachasmigas. Migas is a highly variable dish and it all depends on where you are as to what you get, although for the most part the primary ingredient is bread. In Yecla it is a pancake made from oil, flour, water and garlic cooked over an open fire. It takes more than an hour to make and the final product is a grey doughy mass that you eat by scooping it out of the pan with bread! A very interesting meal.
And then comes the world famous dish Paella. According to http://dictionary.reference.com/ Paella is ‘a Spanish dish prepared by simmering together chicken, seafood, rice, vegetables, and saffron and other seasonings.’ Paella originated in Valencia and is usually eaten at lunch. We have been told that to get the true Paella, you have to go a Valencian home and have it made by a local, everything else is rice with meat and vegetables. We tried three paellas when we were in Yecla – a vegetable, a chicken and rabbit, and a squid ink. For the vegetable paella, some of the ingredients were par cooked separately, then the rice was cooked with cold stock and the vegetables added later. The chicken and rabbit was again multi staged with the vegetables cooked first then set aside, followed by browning the meat before putting the vegetables back in. Then water is added to the combined ingredients and once boiling, rice was added until the meal was ready. The squid ink we only saw the finish of when they added the ink once everything had been combined. Each of these dishes was wonderful to eat and cannot be compared with the other as the flavours were quite different and highlighted the regional variations.
A unique food we found in Yecla was Libricos. Libricos are a wafer biscuit with either a honey or chocolate filling made to a secret family recipe that is passed to the first born male of each generation. They are a delightful snack that are much better than the ingredients imply. If you find yourself in Yecla these are a must have. Visit http://www.libricosyecla.es/ for more information.
Yecla is a wonderful gastronomic destination, with a passion for food and life. Whether having Tortas Fritas for breakfast, Paella for lunch, or Gazpachos for Dinner followed by Libricos, there are some wonderful ways to eat your way through a day.
Other stories from Spain:
Yecla - Our Month Living in Spain
Yecla - Nuestro Mes de la vida en España
Yecla - Working without a Common Language
After a month on the road exploring Morocco & relaxing in Granada, we travelled by bus to Murcia then on to Yecla. Yecla is a town of 30,000 in the North of Murcia close to the border with Alicante and Valencia, and was the location we were going to spend the rest of March.
To understand how we came to visit Yecla, a place I’m sure most people won’t know, we have to go back a year to when Rina and I went on a Conservation Volunteers Australia Wombat Weekend. On this trip we met a Spanish couple, who lived in Adelaide, and their sister, who was visiting from Spain. We became friends over the course of the weekend and met for dinner a few times throughout the year. At one of these dinners we described our intention to visit Spain and work for an Organic Farm and hopefully experience a little of Spanish life. Martin told us that he and his brother were part of an organic collective in Yecla and said that he would see if it was possible for us to work with them. He did, and now we were travelling to a town we knew very little, of to meet people we didn’t know, let alone what they looked like.
When we arrived in the early evening we were greeted warmly by Pepi, Paco and Elie (Martin’s family) and soon found ourselves a little out of our depth. We had undertaken a small amount of study in Spanish the previous year but were not at all confident in speaking it, and for the most part people in Yecla did not speak English. Thankfully we had the foresight to download Google Translate to assist us with our vocabulary. For the first few days Google Translate was essentially how we spoke but gradually we began to understand the language and even to speak a little without the aid of a translator.
Yecla has many unique aspects to its culture which includes their dialect. Learning to understand Spanish here was interesting because of the unique words of Yecla as well as their pronunciation of words we already knew. It was common for them to drop the ‘s’ at the end of words and the ‘d’ from others (especially from the middle of a word). I’m sure that many people thought we were a bit soft in the head when we stared blankly, attempting to translate, as they spoke.
Aside from the people and food, we discovered that Yecla has been continuously inhabited for over 9000 years. There are archaeological sites throughout the area covering prehistoric cave paintings and early human settlements, Roman and Iberian ruins, a Medina (called Yakka) from early mediaeval times and ruins from when Yecla was the border between the kingdoms of Aragon and Castillo. Yecla also has a small but excellent museum, Museo Arqueológico Municipal de Yecla (MaYe). The museum is home to an excellent display of artefacts from the region with notes detailing their discovery and history. There are audio visual displays as well as physical displays. Throughout the city are plaques containing quotes from Azorin, a poet who adopted Yecla as his muse. Discovering all of this it made me wonder why I had never heard of it before.
On the Saturday morning after a hearty breakfast, we made our way out for our hike of the Ben Lomond circuit, directly behind the hostel, taking the Ptarmigan track up. The weather was nice but overcast as we started. The trail head is located just at the rear of a nearby cottage and we missed it on the first pass and had to double back. On the way back we encountered a group of tourists walking the loch northward to the next village who informed us of the trail head which is unmarked save for heavily trod mud.
We leave the hillside and make our way along the rocky merging of two hills (one of which was what we thought was the peak) and see the outline of the peak through the clouds, much further on than we thought. It is here that the acid begins to build in our knees and the hiking burn sets in. We put on our rain coats not so much because it is raining but more because we are walking in the condensate swaying in the breeze. Onwards and upwards we trek, alternating between rock, dirt and grassy tracks until we are on the rear on Ben Lomond, two thirds of the way to the peak, with visibility fluctuating between 20 and 40 metres.
The downhill went very smoothly taking only 1 ½ hours, on a trail wide enough for 2 or 3 abreast, half of which was in the cloud. Surprisingly, on our way up we encountered 3 others on the trail heading down, but on the back leg we came across around 30 people on their way up and another 20 we overtook on the way down, it was hard to believe that the trail was so busy especially given the weather. After 30 minutes descending, we emerged from the cloud into a richly coloured world overlooking the loch. The rain fell lightly and the temperature rose sharply, and after another 30 minutes we were back in the woodland.