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FOOD AND DRINK

The best Spanish food and drink to keep you cool during the summer heat

If the summer heat is making you lose your appetite, these delicious Spanish food and drink specialties will help fill you up whilst keeping you cool. ¡Buen provecho! (Enjoy your meal).

Published: 4 June 2019 09:51 CEST
Updated: 21 July 2023 14:03 CEST
salmorejo spain summer food
Salmorejo is classic Spanish summer dish which is yummy and refreshing in equal measure. Photo: Cat from Wales/Wikipedia (CC BY 2.0)

Gazpacho

While outside of the Iberian peninsula, soup tends to be reserved for the coldest of months, Spaniards have their own ideas about food. Gazpacho is a soup served cold, traditionally made of tomatoes, cucumbers, garlic. Look out for modern versions with a twist, such as Gazpacho with a hint of watermelon.

Refreshing and healthy gazpacho is loved by Spaniards. Photo: GeeJo/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)
 
 

Ajoblanco

Sometimes called “white gazpacho”, this cold garlic soup is popular in Andalusia in southern Spain. In Málaga, it is often served with fresh fruit like apples, grapes or melons.

READ ALSO: Recipe: How to make Andalusian Ajo Blanco soup

Get some of your ‘five a day’ whilst cooling down with ajoblanco. Photo: Popo le Chien/Wikipedia (Public Domain)

Papas aliñás

This cold summery potato salad dish comes from Cádiz in southern Spain. It’s prepared with onions, parsley, sherry vinegar and usually topped with slices of hard-boiled egg.

Papás aliñás can be hearty without being too filling on a hot summer’s day in Spain. Photo: Xemenendura/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Salmorejo

Much like its sister dish, gazpacho, this cold soup graces the menu of many a Spanish restaurant during the summer. It’s thicker and creamier than gazpacho and is often served, as pictured, with bits of serrano ham and hard-boiled eggs on top.

Salmorejo cordobés from the Andalusian city of Córdoba is the most famous of all salmorejos. Photo: Cat from Wales/Wikipedia (CC BY 2.0)

Salpicón de marisco

Translating to seafood medley, this Spanish dish is made with diced or minced tomatoes, onions, prawns and other seafood.

The lobster is optional in your salpicón de marisco. Photo: Juan Mejuto/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Horchata
 
This cool drink is made in different ways depending on whether it’s in Spain or Latin America. The Spanish beverage is typically extracted from chufas, or tigernuts, and mixed with water and sugar for a sweet, creamy flavour.
 
Glasses of horchata served alongside Valencian pastries fartones. Photo: Núria/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)
 
 
 
Granizados
 
Basically a Spanish version of a slushy or a snow cone, these freezing cold beverages come quite in handy when the mercury starts to rise.
 
Snow cones are just as common in Spain as in other countries. Photo: Manop/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

 
 
Helado de turrón
 
If you’re desperate to try Spanish specialty and Christmas favourite, turrón, but also need a cooling fix, why not mix the two by sampling the nougat-like snack in ice-cream form? A popular flavour in Spanish heladerías (ice-cream shops), you’ll have no problem finding this very Spanish summery treat wherever you might be in the country.
 
Have an ice cold Christmas treat this summer with some ‘helado de turrón’. Photo: Lotus Head/Wikipedia

 
 
 

Tinto de verano or sangría

The tinto de verano mixture of red wine and lemonade (or casera, a sweetened soda water) is best served on a terraza and only ever ordered in the hottest months of the year. While tourists stick to sangria, tinto de verano is a much more authentic summer drink among Spaniards, and is guaranteed to quench that summer thirst.

READ MORE: Daily dilemmas –  Tinto de verano or sangría for the perfect Spanish summer drink?

A thirst-quenching glass of sangría always does the job, as does tinto de verano. Photo: Paul Morales/Pixabay

Café con hielo

Need your caffeine fix but can’t stand the thought of a hot drink? Don’t panic! Order your coffee just the way you like it but with a side of ice. It’s an art to tip the hot drink into the ice-filled glass (never the other way round) without spilling it across the table but for coffee addicts, it’s one worth mastering.

Café con hielo is Spain’s answer to Greece’s frappé. Photo: Daniel Lobo/Wikipedia (CC BY 2.0)
 

Watermelon

Juicy, thirst-quenching and refreshing, sandía, to use the Spanish name, is the perfect treat to cool you down on a hot afternoon. Guaranteed to put a smile on the sweatiest face!

Expect to see plenty of watermelon in Spanish supermarkets during the summer. Photo: STR/AFP
 

READ MORE: How to avoid heatstroke when Spain starts to sizzle

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FOOD AND DRINK

How hi-tech hops are keeping beer bitter in Spain as climate bites

Outside a warehouse in northwestern Spain, it's a freezing, foggy morning but inside it's balmy, the warmth and LED lights fooling 360 hop plants to flower as if it were late August.

Published: 21 March 2024 09:27 CET
How hi-tech hops are keeping beer bitter in Spain as climate bites

Mounted on a soaring grid system of cables and wire, these vigorous climbing plants are in full flower, covered in delicate papery-green hops which are prized for giving beer its unique aroma and crisp, refreshing bitterness.

Normally farmed outside, the hop plants are part of a unique indoor farming project by Spanish startup Ekonoke, which has developed an alternative way to cultivate this climate-vulnerable crop in order to protect the drinkability of beer.

Experts say rising temperatures and increased droughts have made Europe’s hop harvests increasingly unpredictable, lowering yields and reducing the quality of the alpha acids in its resins and oils that are so crucial to the taste and character of different beers.

“Climate change is affecting the field, and last year we were down 40 percent on hop production in Europe,” said Giacomo Guala, policy adviser on hops for Copa-Cogeca, which groups the European Union’s main farmers unions.

“You don’t get rain when you’re supposed to, or too much rain when you’re not supposed to, so that predictability is no longer there,” he told AFP.

Hi-tech hops

Brewers are already feeling that unpredictability.

Having a stable supply of hops was “crucial” as there was no alternative to give that bitterness, explained Jose Luis Olmedo, head of research and development at Cosecha de Galicia, the innovation arm of Spanish brewer Hijos de Rivera, which makes Estrella Galicia beer.

Reliant until now on field-grown hops, the Galicia-based brewer quickly saw the potential of the indoor hops grown by Ekonoke.

When the startup raised €4.2 million in investment rounds in 2022, it said “a significant” chunk of it came from the brewer.

An employee hand-picks indoor-grown hops during harvest at Ekonoke company’s facility. (Photo by Brais Lorenzo / AFP)

It also caught the attention of the world’s largest brewer AB InBev, joining its startup accelerator programme.

“What brewers are most interested in is the guaranteed supply of quantity and quality,” said Ekonoke chief executive Ines Sagrario at their 1,200-square-metre (13,000-square-foot) pilot farm in Chantada, where they harvested their first crop in mid-February.

They began trials at their Madrid lab in 2019, starting with four plants and scaling to 24, slashing the growing time and using “15 times less water” than outdoors, while aiming “to reach 20”.

“In this warehouse, we control all the environmental and nutrient parameters and the lighting factors, using LED lights to provide the plant what it needs when it needs it,” said Sagrario.

The lights replicate the different colours and intensity of sunlight at each stage of the growth cycle when they bathe the rapidly growing plants in an ambient purple glow.

Halving the growth cycle

The heady scent of hops permeates the air as a huge bine laden with hop cones is cut from its trellis, tumbling to the floor before being carried out to a red harvesting machine.

Grown without soil, the bines are fed by a closed system that allows constant reuse of the nutrient-infused water and doesn’t use pesticides, relying instead on tightly controlled access protocols.

“In the field, although the cycle is six months, they can only harvest once a year, because you need the correct growing conditions,” said agronomist and chief operations officer Ana Saez.

Ana Saez, 45, agronomist and chief operating officer, harvests indoor-grown hops at Ekonoke. (Photo by Brais Lorenzo / AFP)

“Here, as we can control and replicate ‘spring’, we’ve reduced the crop cycle to three months.”

Multiple trials had shown their hops contained “more alpha acids per kilogram” than those in the field, Saez said, pointing to the abundance of yellow powdery lupulin clinging to the cones.

By summer, three grow rooms will be operational with more than 1,000 plants maturing on a staggered basis.

“Once we finish learning everything we need to learn in this pilot, we will be building a full-scale industrial facility with 12,000 square metres of growing area,” said Sagrario, whose 12-strong team has so far managed to replicate five different hop cultivars.

For Hijos de Rivera, it’s a project of “strategic” importance, with the brewer planning to have the facility fully operational “by the end of 2025”, said Olmedo.

Mirek Trnka, a bioclimatologist from the Czech Academy of Sciences, said hydroponics was one solution, but scaling up to meet market demands would be tricky.

“Even though the hop is a minority crop, you’d have to upsize operations quite significantly to match the current production globally by hydroponic growth,” he told AFP.

At Ekonoke, they see their role as using science and technology to protect the hops’ biodiversity and eventually developing new hybrids “to give more quantity and quality using less resources”.

“People ask us if hop farmers outdoors feel threatened by us, but we’re not threatening them. Climate change is threatening them,” said Sagrario.

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