26:45
I'm going to see a friend, Chris Hadlington, a chef from Plymouth who now owns a house in the Cantabrian mountains. He spoken fondly about the village where he now lives and I had warm expectations. Well, here we are in the village of Sombaye. It's not very picturesque. It's beautiful, isn't it? What? It's a high altitude, I must say, but thousand meters up Really? Yeah. Gosh, it's cold. Very cold, especially for me, yeah. So, where's this bar that here it is. This is the bar. Looks like a shed.
Well, literally, the guy that runs it, it's he owns the barn and this is a community bar, so it's not licensed, it has no taxes and it's literally run for the people in the village. Gosh. It never closes. If there's nobody here, you just help yourself to a beer and pop the money on the counter. My gosh. Here we go. This is wonderful. This is a real boys' bar. And here we are. Always nice bowl of uh Is it? That's Yeah, that's the caldo. That caldo is literally they'll give you a shot just to warm you up, but it's made with the
the bones from the these are beef bones and garbanzos, which are the chickpeas, pimienta, the peppers, carrots and onions and you drink it in a little cup or a little glass and they'll just give you the clear broth and the stock is just stunning. Well, you'll taste it in a minute. So, it's called caldo. It's just It's called caldo. Caldo is just stock. It's the Spanish word for stock, yeah, caldo. All the time there to warm you up. Fernando. Fernando looks after the bar. Very nice to meet Fernando. Hola, Fernando. Can we have something to drink? I would have thought some um dos vinos, por favor.
Vino. Well, I mean, it's unbelievably fabulous. I had no idea. I just thought it was all going to be neat and tidy, but this is rougher than I could have imagined. It sort of reminds me like in Cornwall, you've got all these like pretty villages full of holiday cottages. Then there's a few villages left that got these disused cars, you know, with the wheels off on blocks all around. It's like this. Well, this is very much a working village. This is where the people look after the cattle, look after Um, would you ever get any tourists up in there?
Never see a tourist up here. That's the joy of coming up. And what about the food then? Oh, the food in this part of the world, well, it you know, living amongst the mountains is fantastic. They hunt wild boar. They hunt venison. The rivers are full of fresh brown trout. In fact, my neighbor, last night when I got home, had just fished out two brown trout for my supper. How fantastic is that? Straight out of the river that day. This is Sounds like Ernest Hemingway. It sounds like It's great. So, what would you eat? What do they eat? I mean, presumably there's no restaurants around here. But so No restaurants up here. Down in the valley you'd get restaurants. You'd eat
whatever was available. I mean, when I first arrived here, you think, well, the food's fantastic. And then you when you go to another restaurant, and it's the same food. And the same food the next restaurant. But what you realize is that they only eat A what's local and B what's in season. So, you end you start to become very, very picky. Who cooks the best cocido? And how important is food and eating to the locals? Oh, they It's a religion. Very much a religion. I tell you these people that they, you know, whatever happens, at 1:00 it's lunchtime. For a snack, Fernando fries fatty salted belly pork, which goes really well with the wine, and then slices of black pudding.
This was made by Adelina in the next village down the valley. I know this is not to everyone's taste, but it is to mine, and it may not be around for much longer. Aude has just been mixing some rice which is boiled and cooled in this lovely terracotta pot. Then she's added um fat. Onions fried in fat. Twice as much onion to the fat. And I think the onion, the very slow cooked onion in lard, is apart from the blood which is just about to go in. That's what makes really good morcilla to me. It's got that slightly sweet taste of onion in it.
Now she's adding um sweet paprika. Dulce.
