Escalivada: Catalonia's Smoke-Softened Vegetables

Escalivada is four vegetables and a fire, and it is the most Catalan thing I know how to cook. Aubergines and peppers go into the embers, stay there until the skins are carbon and the insides have surrendered completely, and then get peeled by hand, torn into strips, and dressed with oil and salt. That is the entire dish. It takes an hour, almost all of it unattended, and it tastes of woodsmoke and concentrated vegetable sugar in a way that nothing done in a saucepan ever will.

The twist I would not now cook it without is the tray juices. Roast four vegetables at 220C for an hour and a startling amount of dark liquid collects underneath them — aubergine water, pepper juice, onion syrup, all of it caramelising at the edges of the tray. Most recipes let the washing-up take it. Instead, pour it into a pan, sharpen it with sherry vinegar, reduce it to three tablespoons of near-black syrup and whisk the oil into that. The dressing then tastes of the same vegetables, only louder. It costs four minutes and it makes escalivada taste like a restaurant made it.

To cook in the ashes

The name tells you the method. Escalivar is Catalan, from caliu, meaning embers or hot ashes — the word means to cook in the embers. This is a dish from before ovens were domestic objects, when there was a fire in the house all winter and the sensible thing to do with a vegetable was to bury it in the ash at the edge and forget about it until it collapsed.

It belongs to the Catalan-speaking lands broadly — Catalonia, Valencia, Aragón, the Balearics, and Roussillon over the French border, where it turns up on menus as escalivade. The same instinct exists all around the Mediterranean and beyond: Levantine baba ghanoush, Balkan ajvar, Georgian ajapsandali, Indian baingan bharta. Everywhere people had aubergines and open fires, someone worked out that burning the outside is how you get at the inside.

What distinguishes the Catalan version is its restraint. No spice, no dairy, no cooking after the roast. The vegetables are torn by hand, laid out in separate colours, and dressed with oil, salt and — in some houses, arguably heretically — a little vinegar. It is a dish that trusts the fire to have done the work.

The vegetables, and the argument about which ones

Aubergine and red pepper are compulsory. Onion is nearly universal. Beyond that, opinion divides sharply and regionally: tomatoes are common in Valencia and frowned on in parts of inland Catalonia; garlic is standard in most versions; some cooks add courgette, which I think is a waste of tray space because courgette has no sugar to concentrate and turns to slime.

Buy aubergines that feel light for their size, with taut glossy skin and a green calyx. A heavy aubergine is a seedy old aubergine and will be bitter. There is no need to salt and drain them — that advice belongs to the varieties of fifty years ago, which were genuinely bitter, and modern aubergines have had it bred out.

The peppers should be the long pointed ones if you can get them — they have thinner walls, thicker flesh and more sugar than the blocky bell peppers, and they peel more easily. Red only. Green peppers have no sugar and taste of grass after an hour in the oven.

Leave the onions in their skins. The papery layers do the same job as the burnt skin on a calçot, protecting the flesh so it steams and sweetens while the outside chars.

Why the skins have to burn

There are two mechanisms working, and understanding them tells you when to stop.

First, the burning. The skin is mostly cellulose and wax, and it chars long before the flesh inside does anything at all. That carbon layer is what gives escalivada its smoke — genuine pyrolysis compounds transferring into the outermost millimetre of the flesh. Roast at 180C until the vegetables are merely soft and you have made something perfectly nice that tastes of nothing in particular. The smoke is the dish.

Second, the collapse. Aubergine flesh is a sponge of air pockets held in a pectin matrix. At around 70C the cells rupture and the air escapes, which is why an aubergine visibly deflates in the oven and why it goes from squeaky and unpleasant to silky. There is no such thing as a slightly undercooked aubergine — it is either raw-tasting and awful or completely collapsed and wonderful, and the transition happens fast. When it looks like a punctured bag, it is done.

The steaming rest is the third mechanism, and it is the one people skip. Twenty minutes under a plate and the trapped moisture works between the charred skin and the flesh, breaking the bond. Skip it and you will spend twenty minutes picking black flecks off with a knife and losing half the flesh.

The dressing, in more detail

The tray juices are worth a paragraph of their own, because the instinct to bin them is strong and wrong.

An aubergine is about 92 per cent water and a red pepper roughly the same. Over an hour at 220C, a good deal of that comes out, hits a hot metal tray, and starts reducing immediately. The sugars caramelise where the liquid is shallowest, at the edges, which is why the residue there is dark and sticky and tastes like the concentrated essence of the thing you just roasted. Scrape it.

The reduction takes three or four minutes. You are looking for roughly 3 tbsp of liquid with the viscosity of maple syrup — it will coat the back of a spoon and hold a line when you drag a finger through it. Go too far and it turns to bitter tar in about thirty seconds, so keep the heat moderate and watch it.

The vinegar goes in before the reduction, so its harshness cooks off and leaves the acidity behind. Sherry vinegar is right; its oxidised, nutty character suits roasted vegetables. Red wine vinegar is a reasonable stand-in. Balsamic is too sweet and drowns the smoke.

The oil goes in off the heat and whisked, so it emulsifies into the syrup rather than sitting on top of it. Roasted garlic mashed in gives it body and helps the emulsion hold. If it splits as it cools, whisk in a teaspoon of warm water.

If your tray produced almost no juice — which happens if the vegetables were crowded and steamed rather than roasted — make the dressing anyway with 2 tbsp of water, the vinegar, the garlic and the oil, and accept that it is a lesser thing.

Things that go wrong

The skins will not come off. No steaming rest, or the vegetables were undercooked. Twenty minutes under a plate is the minimum; thirty does no harm.

The aubergine is bitter and squeaky. Undercooked. There is no rescue. It needed another fifteen minutes and a total collapse.

Everything is watery and pale. The tray was crowded, so the vegetables steamed in their own moisture instead of roasting. Use two trays. The vegetables must not touch.

It tastes of nothing. Oven too low, or the skins never blackened. The char is the flavour.

An aubergine exploded. You did not prick it. Steam has nowhere to go and the pressure eventually wins. Six holes, right through.

Do not wash the peppers

The single most common ruination. Charred skin is fiddly and your fingers get black and the tap is right there, and running a peeled pepper under water takes every trace of smoke with it, along with the juice and most of the flavour. Peel dry. Wipe your fingers on a cloth. A few flecks of black left behind are correct and every Catalan grandmother’s escalivada has them.

Fire, if you have it

An oven at 220C is a good approximation and what I use most weeks. A fire is better. On a charcoal barbecue, put the vegetables directly on the bars over medium embers and turn them every ten minutes — you get real smoke rather than the memory of it, and the aubergines take about 35 minutes. A gas hob works for the peppers alone: hold them over the flame with tongs, turning, until black all over, about 6 minutes each.

The direct-on-embers method that gives the dish its name is worth doing once. Rake the fire, bury the aubergines in the hot ash, and leave them for 30 minutes. They come out looking like something excavated and taste extraordinary.

Serving, and what it goes on

Room temperature. Escalivada straight from the fridge is muted and slightly waxy, and the oil has clouded — take it out an hour ahead.

Its home is on bread. Catalans pile it on toast rubbed with tomato, sometimes with an anchovy laid over the top, and that combination — smoke, sweetness, salt — is one of the great things to eat standing in a kitchen. It also sits happily beside grilled lamb or a whole roast fish, and it makes the best sandwich filling of the summer with a slice of goat’s cheese.

For a Catalan table, serve it before calçots with salvitxada if you are already committed to an afternoon of charring things, or alongside romesco, which is built on the same roasted peppers. Caponata is the Sicilian answer to the same aubergine question and instructive to eat next to it.

Escalivada as a building block

Half the value of a tray of escalivada is what it becomes over the following week. It is a mother preparation in the way a sofrito is.

Blitzed smooth with a spoonful of the dressing and a squeeze of lemon, it becomes a dip that will hold its own against any baba ghanoush. Stirred through hot pasta with a torn anchovy and some parsley, it makes a ten-minute dinner. Piled onto a coca, the Catalan flatbread, with anchovies and black olives, it is the region’s answer to pizza and better than that description suggests.

It also goes into an omelette beautifully — chop the strips small, fold them through beaten egg, and cook it slowly the way you would a Spanish omelette. The smoke comes through everything.

Storage

Escalivada keeps for five days in the fridge in a sealed jar, submerged under a layer of olive oil, and it improves for the first two. The oil becomes intensely smoky and vegetal and is worth keeping after the vegetables have gone — use it for dressing, or for frying an egg.

It freezes acceptably, which is unusual for a vegetable dish. Freeze the peeled strips without the dressing; they lose a little texture and keep all their smoke. Roast a double tray in September when peppers are cheap and good, and eat escalivada in February.