La Tomatina, the festival where we throw tomatoes...!

This southern Spanish party is all about the beauty of summer fruit (or is it a vegetable...??)

Amigos, you know that we Spaniards love food! So much that we create huge festivals where thousands of people come together to celebrate what’s in season.

For example, maybe you’ve heard of the Calçotada Festival held in January, when Catalans start to get really excited about calçots, the beautiful vegetables that are like a cross between a spring onion and a leek harvested in the deepest part of winter. Every year the small town of Valls holds a festival in late January to celebrate the calçot harvest—grilling hundreds of calçots over open fires set up in one of the town squares. Farmers even compete to see who has grown the year’s best calçots, and others mix up beautiful bowls of smoky romesco to dip them. Delicious!

Now of course we are not in January, but in the height of summer, when tomatoes are at their peak…so ripe and so sweet. This is the time for La Tomatina, a festival that takes place in the Valencian city of Buñol in late August…or more precisely, the last Wednesday of the month, which this year is August 31.

But La Tomatina is a little different from Calçotada; instead of eating the tomatoes, they’re used for the world’s biggest tomato fight. The signal for the beginning of the fight is the firing of a cannon, and then the chaos begins. More than 150,000 tomatoes are thrown around the town’s Plaza del Pueblo. The streets are turned into rivers of tomato pulp and juice…you have to make sure you wear an outfit that is ready to get destroyed!

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I like to use the Tomatina Festival as an excuse to make lots of my favorite tomato recipes like salmorejo (a traditional soup from Andalucía, made with tomato, bread, extra virgin olive oil, and garlic). And of course, I make pan con tomate and tomato sauce that I store in jars to save for the colder months when I crave a little taste of summer. 

On Wednesday, I’ll share a recipe for gazpacho. I love gazpacho, probably because it’s one of my wife’s specialties. Patricia is from Andalucía in the south of Spain, a region known for sherry and hams…and, thanks to gazpacho, as the cold-soup capital of the world. Every summer, when you open the refrigerator in my house, you'll see a big glass pitcher filled with a rich, creamy red soup. I am telling you…this recipe changed my life!

And if you’d rather not cook (or blend up some tomatoes and olive oil), you can just visit one of my restaurants…starting next week we have a lot of Tomatina celebrations happening. We’ll have special menus at Jaleo in Chicago, Las Vegas, and Washington, D.C., and in New York City at Mercado Little Spain.