Monday 26 August 2013

Bravas potatoes

Fried potatoes with brava sauce (salsa brava), is probably one of the most popular Spanish tapas served frequently to wine or beer. Bravo in Spanish means wild, angry, and so is the traditional sauce served with this dish - very spicy. This dish consists of potatoes, cut into large cubes, fried until golden brown in oil and then topped with the sauce. Sometimes the potatoes are first cooked and then diced and fried. Different are also the methods of preparing the sauce. The classic one coming from Madrid and patented there in 1960, is a sauce based basically on tomato sauce and cayenne pepper. In Catalonia and Valencia, however, the sauce is often prepared with olive oil, smoked paprika, vinegar and chili called guindilla and is usually accompanied by alioli sauce made of garlic and olive oil (in Catalan all means garlic and oli means oil). Sometimes fried potatoes are topped with a pink sauce which is a mixture of spicy tomato sauce and mayonnaise.