Bread

Bread is eaten with every main meal in Spain — it is used to sop up the juices left on the plate. The quality of bread varies greatly from south to north, with hard, crusty ‘industrial’-style bread being popular in the south, and moister, denser and more rustic bread more popular in the north-west. As Spanish cooks waste nothing, the bread used to cook with is generally stale. In this book we generally recommend you use two-day-old pasta dura, available in Italian bakeries and other good street bakeries.