Catalan Christmas dish: ‘galets’ soup

Although the Christmas holiday period has come to an end, the galets soup is a dish eaten throughout the winter because it is ideal to get warm and mitigate the effect of low temperatures. In Catalonia is tradition on Christmas Day to get reunited with the whole family and eat galets soup (also known as ‘escudella’), a broth of meat and vegetables with a type of snail shaped pasta with ‘carn d’olla’, the meat the broth has been made with. The ‘galets’ have a hole so people fill them with mince before they boil them, which adds flavor to this type of soup, already very tasty . The ‘carn d’olla’ is eaten as a second course. The calorie level of this dish helps with the cold winter, therefore, we recommend that you prepare it at any time of the season. Its preparation is very simple but requires patience because the long time of the boiling process will give more flavor to the broth. If you live in one of the ShBarcelona rental apartments during your stay in Barcelona and you want to feel even more involved with the city, or if you are a bad cook local inhabitant, we recommend you to follow this simple recipe to surprise your guests at a lunch or a dinner.

The ingredients for the ‘galets’ soup and the ‘carn d’olla’ are (for 8 people) :

• a piece of rib of beef
• a leek
• tip pork chop
• average cabbage
• pig foot
• a handful of soaked chickpeas
• Barbed bone
• salt
• ham bone
• pepper
• quarter of a chicken
• water
• two pieces of bacon
• 300 gr of galets
• two white and two black sausages
• flour
• 4 potatoes
• 150g minced beef
• 2 carrots
• breadcrumbs
• a celery
• 1 chopped garlic
• a parsnip
• parsley
• a turnip
• an egg

Elaboration:

For the broth you have to put all the meat in a pot with cold water, except the sausages and the minced meat. Boil it for one hour and add the chickpeas and after another hour add all the vegetables except the potatoes. You have to respect the cooking time for each ingredient added to the broth so that everything is fully cook. While the broth is boiling we can start preparing the “pilota”, a mass of meat that is added to the broth for it to be more tasty with minced beef, bread crumbs, garlic, parsley, pepper, egg and salt, everything mixed .

After another hour we add the potatoes, sausages, the “pilota” meat and some salt. Let it boil for half an hour and take off the vegetables and the meat from the broth and add the ‘galets’ stuffed with minced beef to boil it again. The soup is served with pasta as a starter and vegetables, beans and meat that has been used for the broth are served as a second course, as I said.

There are several variations that can be introduced in terms of the ingredients for the broth or adding some ingredients when is served, but everything depends on the cooking time and, as my grandmother use to say, the love that you put in each step.

We hope you enjoy this dish!