Where does Migas come from?

Today I come with another traditional recipe that come from Spain: Migas. You can find many different versions of this plate depending where you go in Spain but, for me the best and more traditional ones are from La Mancha, a vast area located in the middle east of the Iberian Peninsula.

The ingredients for this dish are bread, dry red pepper, garlic, chorizo and bacon. Easy ingredients, right? Well if you read this and have all the ingredients in your kitchen, this will be your next lunch. Are you ready? Because this is a great election to pleasantly surprise your family and guests.

Well, if the picture flattered your eyes, made your mouth water and you ran to buy all the ingredients, is time to start cooking!!!

What is the origin of Migas?

The Migas dish has a surprisingly aristocratic origin, although they have always been associated to the rural world, where shepherds used to make it to make the most of their leftovers.

But their origin goes back further in time, when the Muslims where the owners of the Iberian Peninsula over the year 800 after Christ. This plate was a delicious present that aristocratic Muslims families used to give to their important visitors. At this time, the dish was called Tharid, instead of Migas.

It was years after, above 1600 after Christ, when poorer times arrived and rural people transformed the Arab Tharid into the Migas we know today. The reason why you can find this food in different versions all around the country is because of the transhumant routes the shepherds used to do every year to feed their animals and spreading this awesome plate all over Spain, where people of each place used the typical ingredients of their area to make their own version.

Ingredients:

• 500 g of hard bread. This could be bread of two or three days.
• 500 g of grapes.
• 250 mL of water with salt.
• 200 mL of Extra Virgin olive oil.
• 3 big and fresh chorizos.
• 5 strips of bacon with approximately thickness of 1 cm.
• 6 garlic cloves
• 1 big and dry ‘choricero’ pepper.

Time of preparation: 45 minutes.

You may wonder what are dry ‘choricero’ peppers. Well, they are a type of red pepper that is left in the sun to dry before it is cooked. Here you can see how it looks like:

How to cook Migas:

First step: Ingredients preparation.

In first place, we are going to prepare the most important ingredient for Migas: the bread. We should dice it in homogeneous pieces and keep aside.

Now is time to cut the chorizos in small pieces and dice the strips of bacon and preserve. Then clean and chop the dry pepper and keep it aside with the bacon and chorizo.

Peel the cloves and preserve them.

Top Tip: It is really important to prepare all the ingredients and the tools you will need for the preparation of the recipe before start cooking. This will allow you to face the preparation of Migas with more calm and confidence, focusing on the times and avoid searching the things in the last minute with the possible consequences.

Top Tip: Preserve the ingredients in the three different groups pointed above, we are going to use them in groups and, following this basic step will make the preparation far easier

Top Tip: Don’t forget to cut the bread in homogeneous pieces, is the most important ingredient for the recipe, and a good preparation will definitely influence the final result.

Second Step: Prepare the bread.

In this step, we are going to spread the pieces of bread on a big wet cloth to soak them with the water with salt afterwards. We should distribute the water with salt in such a way as to cover all the bread.

Now we cover all the bread with the cloth as it were an envelope and we left it there for 1 hour and a half to two hours.

Top Tip: In order to have a better distribution of the humidity, we need to distribute the water with salt properly and, along this 2 hours of rest, we should turn the cloth over from time to time.

Third Step: Fry the ingredients.

Meanwhile the bread is resting, we can start preparing the rest of ingredients. For this, we start heating a small pan with some of the oil inside.

Once the oil it hot, we fry the cleaned and cut dry pepper, the diced bacon and the chopped chorizo. The chorizo should be toasted before you remove from the fire.

When the ingredients are properly made, we put them on a paper to drain the extra oil from them and preserve.

Top Tip: We must be very careful when we add the dry pepper to the pan, it burns so easily, so maintain it alone just time enough to cook it a little and then add the rest of the ingredients and mix everything up.

Top Tip: Another important tip to reach best results possible is to add the ingredients following a particular order: dry pepper powder, bacon and chorizo.

Top Tip: Safe some of the oil you used to fry the ingredients above, it has a lot of flavour and we can use it afterwards to make the Migas tastier.

Fourth Step: Prepare the dry pepper.

Then smash the dry ‘choricero’ pepper inside a mortar until it gets the consistence of powder and keep aside with the bacon and chorizo.

Final Step.

Now we put a big pan with the rest of the oil, and if you saved some before add it too, on the fire and wait for it to get hot enough.

When this happen, we turn the fire to low heat and add the garlics, be careful they don’t burn!!! Leave them alone for a short time and add the wet bread.

We should be very careful at this point or the bread will paste to the bottom of the pan and will burn. To avoid this keep turning the bread over every time with the help of a spatula until it is loose and golden in colour.

When the bread has the golden colour is time to add the rest of the ingredients and keep mixing everything for a couple of minutes.

Divide in different plates and add some grapes in each one. Now you have a delicious plate of Migas ready to eat!