Spanish cuisine tickles the palate in a thousand ways: ugly but delicious creatures called goose barnacles; boiled octopus with a dash of olive oil and paprika; thick, mushy sausage made from pig's blood.
Spaniards are nothing if not dedicated eaters.
Now, hard-core food fanatics are drooling over the prospect of something truly superlative from Spain, at least in price: a salt-cured ham costing US$2,100 per leg. It's a price believed to make it the most expensive ham in the world.
PHOTO: AP
Don't grab your wallet just yet. And forget about asking for just a slice.
The 2006 Alba Quercus Reserve won't be available until late next year and you must buy the whole ham or nothing. But that hasn't dissuaded gastronomic Web sites from buzzing with talk of the farm where it is being produced, likening it to a Mount Olympus of pork.
Its mastermind, Manuel Maldonado, 44, comes from a long line of ham producers in a country that's nuts about the stuff. In bars and restaurants, legs of ham hanging from the wall are as common as TV sets.
But Maldonado is taking the art of the ham to new heights, pampering his pigs with a free-range lifestyle and top-quality diet of acorns before slaughtering them, then curing the meat for two years -- twice as long as his competitors.
Maldonado credits that last step with creating a delicacy that justifies the price.
He had hoped to roll out his ham this year, but felt the first batch fell short of his ultra-demanding standards. He hopes to do better this time and have it ready around Christmas next year.
This is a limited edition piece: Maldonado will produce just 80 to 100 legs.
With Spanish pigs bound for ham glory, diet is everything. The least expensive ham is made from pigs fed on grain, whereas mid-grade hams come from pigs raised on a combination of wheat and acorns.
Then there are Spain's poshest pigs, which feast exclusively on acorns, producing a rich flavor and oily texture that make the meat a delicacy. Spain's finest hams are not considered first-rate without an "acorn-fed" stamp on the label.
At least some gourmets apparently haven't been put off by the price of Maldonado's work. One food blog, Directo al Paladar, called the cost of the ham "almost a gift," considering how it is made.
Maldonado has yet to set a price for customers who buy the 6kg hams directly from him, but the food site Ibergour.com has a dozen for sale at US$2,100 each and is now accepting US$250 deposits for ham available next year.
Is it ridiculous to pay that for a piece of pig?
No, Maldonado says. A ham like this can be shared among 20 people, he notes, whereas a bottle of the finest wine going for the same amount goes down quickly among just a few.
For four generations, Maldonado's family has been making ham in this town of 5,000 in Spain's southwest Extremadura region.
Their herds of black Iberian beauties are kept on a handful of acorn-rich farms in the surrounding meadowlands, walking freely up to 10km daily without any swineherds to look after them.
After the pigs are butchered, they are cured in high-grade sea salts.
The hams then are brought into one of Maldonado's two warehouse-size cellars where they cure for two years, hanging on a series of interconnected hooks from floor to ceiling, like curtains.
Maldonado will only give a ham the top-grade seal if it passes his olfactory test after the curing process.
In his cellar, Maldonado drew one of the hams close and rubbed his thumbs gently against it.
"Ham provides us with life," he said with a smile.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of