Grilled: The Ultimate Spring Onions

(Photo courtesy of Nancy Loseke)

When Steven learned his assistant, Nancy Loseke, was Barcelona-bound recently, he urged her to seek out calçots, chargrilled spring onions that are unique to Catalonia. She found them, and pronounced them “one of the best bites of the trip.”

I found calçots on a menu my first night in Barcelona. The waiter gave me a doubtful look when I ordered them, but delivered a ramekin of a thick, reddish-orange sauce called romesco, a tall stack of paper napkins, and a heaping platter of what looked like steroidal scallions, their white parts charred black.

He demonstrated how to eat them: You pull off the blackened outer layers, your fingers protected from the heat and ash by napkins, dip the tender stalk in romesco sauce, then munch it down to the green parts. His demo drew the obvious attention of the neighboring tables. I ate the rest of my calçots with unvarnished gusto, and was, I believe, personally responsible for the run the kitchen had that night on calçots.

Calçots (pronounced CAL-sots) are a labor-intensive vegetable, taking about a year to mature. They are started in the spring from seed, then the bulbs are dug up around mid-summer and stored in a dark, cool place to dry. In a few weeks, their tops are cut off and the bulbs are shallowly replanted. Within days, each bulb sprouts 5 to 7 shoots (calçots), which are repeatedly mounded with soil to keep the stalks pale and tender, much in the way white asparagus is cultivated.

The annual arrival of calçots in the marketplace is celebrated at a Catalonian festival called Calçotada, held the last Sunday in January in the village of Valls southwest of Barcelona. Thousands of calçots are grilled outside over fires of vine trimmings, wrapped in newspapers to steam, and then served on heated red clay roofing tiles.

At this time, true calçots are not being imported to the U.S. Believe me, I checked. But as Steven points out in his recipe in The Barbecue Bible (page 392), you can substitute small spring leeks or large scallions. You’ll find a recipe for romesco sauce on page 469.