Inevitably, as new transplants to Spain, los dos were going to tell you about the different, strange, and remarkable things we’re seeing here in Spain — the Dorothy/Kansas things that are variously living-the-dream, am-I-dreaming, or WTF-this-is-a-nightmare sort of things. For this first take on things that make us go hmm, we consider things that make us go mmm: food.

1 Milk and OJ and eggs on the shelf

It’s ubiquitous here, in stores large and small. Milk and fruit juices in one-liter boxes or bottles on the grocery shelf. Thanks to ultra-high temperature pasteurization. So go ahead and buy ahead, but… it doesn’t last any longer than usual in the fridge once opened. Also stacked outside the fridges… eggs. Dunno if they too are highly pasteurized, but the Spaniards see no reason to chill their eggs.

2 Don’t look for tacos, burritos or nachos

It’s not Mexico or Central America or the U.S. here. It’s Spain. They brought the original Europeans over the Atlantic. They mixed with the Indios. The new people innovated with corn and beans and potatoes. And the breakfast buritto was born. But while the new ingredients came back to Europe, the concotions of the Americas have not been taken up here.

Taco, in Spain, means “swear word,” by the way. So if you ask for un taco, someone is likely to swear at you.

3 Hold the hot sauce

Probably because there are no gastronomic flights to Mexican food here, there’s no widespread use of hot sauce here, either. The grocery stores don’t have 20 kinds of hot sauce. We have yet to find Sriracha sauce either. (Waaaaah!) We’re developing the impression that Spaniards don’t much care for spicy foods. (More on this below.) Which makes it sort of the norm for Europe.

Google tells me that Europe isn’t a good climate for growing hot peppers. So Europeans don’t. And they don’t have a tradition of eating hot food. But here’s our little bottle of “piri-piri,” what you look for in the grocery if you want some sorta hottish sauce.

4 Potato Chips

Spain is a nirvana of potato chips. I googled “potato chips en España” (patatas fritas, not to be confused with papas fritas or french fries). It seems every self-respecting villa of any size in Córdoba province makes its own signature chip. The stores bear it out. The selection is endless. And every last chip is fantastic. Spain knows potato chips. Not a bad bag to be had.

We weren’t aware that chips were a thing when we were given little bowls of the crispy delights with an afternoon cerveza. Generally, the small gratis nosh you’re given (call it a tapas, if you will) is either a little dish of olives or potato chips. We especially like the double bag of chips. The outer paper package, left open at the top, filled with two plastic baggies full of delightful tater goodness.

5 The Tudela Artichoke

Aka Alcachofas Tudelas. I guess we’ve been spoiled with our basketball-size Globe artichokes in the U.S. The modestly-proportioned Tudela artichokes that are grown and sold in Andalucía are what we’re buying now. (We paw through the grocer displays in search of any that are larger than a tennis ball.) Size aside, they are certainly as delicious here as our beloved Globe varietal. Just not quite as satiating, veg for veg.

6 Beer, so near and dear

I thought I might write a post just about cerveza — but let’s hold that for another day. Cerveza is my drink of choice, so it’s been fascinating to discover how beer is done in Spain. Much to my surprise, the big national beers here — think Budweiser or Miller Lite in the States — are all really, really good. I prefer Mahou (pronounced like Warren Zevon’s “Ahh-ooo, werewolves of London”). But there’s also Campocruz, Estrella Galicia, Alhambra, San Miguel and others. When I order a glass of beer (del grifo, or from the tap) I don’t know what I’m being served. I don’t bother to ask. Every one of the Spanish beers I’ve mentioned beats the heck out of Coors or Pabst.

In New Mexico I was drinking India Pale Ales (IPAs) — only IPAs. More flavor, richer, more satisfying. I’ve found IPAs here, and I especially like one by a brewer called Ambar. But the mainstream Spanish pilseners are also flavorful, rich and satisfying. I’ve never enjoyed a pilsener in the U.S. more than I enjoy my local cervezas.

In the afternoons, when puttering around Córdoba or discovering Spain by roadway, los dos find a cafe and order a rioja (red wine) and a cerveza. (I’ll leave it to los dos numero uno to discuss the vino.) I can order my cervezas in three sizes: a caña, a copa or a pinta, all of them del grifo. The caña is 6.7 ounces. The copa is probably about 10 oz. And the pinta is your standard English pint.

A can of beer is 33 centiliters, or about 11 ounces. You can buy your cans of beer singly or in packs of 6, 8, or 12. You’re charged for a single can times the number of beers you buy. (It is common to see a 6-pack turned into a 4-pack when a shopper only wants two cans.) So, in the pic above, the cervezas range from .55 € to 1.19 € per can. That’s $3.35 to $7.44 per six pack. If you beer drinkers out there think this is pretty cheap, you would be correct. (Los dos need to do a post about prices here, which are substantially lower than in the U.S.)

7 Where’s the garlic?

Garlic, known in the Spanish world as Ajo, in its minced varietal, does not reside in jars of varying sizes in the produce department. In our first week here, while inhabiting the dark and damp Airbnb that, nevertheless, had a functional kitchen, we went a-shopping at the Mercadona and walked round and round looking for a jar of minced garlic. Eventually we relented and asked. And the kindly clerk walked us to the frozen aisle and pointed to a location featuring little frozen pouches of ajo. Exactly the same minced ajo we used in our former lives, but made available as a frozen confection instead of in a glass jar with water.

8 Apples. Apples?

No, no apples. ¡No manzanas! Or, more accurately, no variety of apples. Admittedly, this is kind of a first-world lament. I guess we’re going to have to do some work to suss out a honeycrisp from somewhere, because you’re lucky if you see both a red delicious and a green delicious in the same store.

No apple choices, no pix. Waaahh.

9 No, no me gusto picante

Los dos came here from the land of green chiles. Seriously freaking hot chile peppers. Picante doesn’t begin to describe the incendiary gustatory sensation of New Mexico’s green chiles. Spain, however, doesn’t do picante. The word translates as “spicy”. Spaniards do enjoy a flavorful palette in their meals. But hot? I think not. As explicated above, you just don’t see hot stuff here.

Tonight we attemptied making a routine dinner of soft tortilla tacos. We found some soft flour tortillas at the store. Ching! Fixings of onion and green pepper sauteed with garlic. Ching! Leftover roasted chicken from the churroría a couple of doors down. Ching! Avocados, no sweat. Ching!

And salsa… hmmm, no. Your average grocer here is going to think that salsa refers to a hot and steamy Latin American dance style. (Or an itty bitty bottle of hot stuff, as below.) So we improvised. We found a jar of something called Sofrito at the local little grocer, a tomato/onion combo, and picked up a jalapeño sauce. Combined in appropriate proportions, it’s actually pretty darned good given that the salsa we know and love does not exist in Spain. So we carry on, picante foods or no.

10 Jamón

This is a hard one. Jamón is the national food of Spain. It’s a dry-cured thin-sliced meat from the rear haunch of a pig. Think prosciutto, it’s cognate from Italy. The trouble is, neither of los dos is a fan. And jamón is literally everywhere in Spain. It doesn’t mean we can’t eat at a restaurant if we turn down jamón. It’s just a tad awkward admitting to our fellow Spaniards that we don’t favor what 48 million Spaniards think is really and truly fabuloso.

We admitted to our super cool landlords that we were’t thrilled wth jamón, that we felt it was like chewing paper, a dry, salty, unappetizing experience. Naturally, they suggested trying it again but getting some more expensive jamón, something at least 100 € per kilo. We’re likely to try this, just to see. Though, to be sure, we’re not big fans of prosciutto either. It may just have to be our unspoken secret, something we work around in literally every restaurante and taberna menu we enounter.

Below is a typical selection of haunches at a larger grocer here. These retail for one or two hundred euros. Every grocer seems to have this dry-cured pork in abundance. They slice it paper-thin all day, every day and slice it on demand for every comer. Booya!

There you have it. 10 things you probably didn’t know about food in Spain. We have more observations about life in Spain to share in posts coming up. Saludos!