Easy Catalan comfort food, perfect for winter

Trinxat is just four ingredients, and a great way to eat winter vegetables

When you look in your pantry, what do you see? Beans (of course!), and maybe some onions and garlic, a winter squash, some cans of tuna. Wintertime can be hard! We all miss tomatoes and peppers and corn, right?

Well, I know you have potatoes in the pantry, and it’s easy enough to come by a head of cabbage. With that, and a little bacon and some garlic, you have a perfect winter dish from the mountains of Catalonia! It’s true comfort food, the kind of dish that many Catalans grew up with—and me too, since I spent most of my childhood in Barcelona.

This dish is called Trinxat, which comes from the Catalan word trinxar, to chop or shred. Some people—maybe like my friend Eric Ripert, who claims he’s French, but actually he grew up in Andorra!—will say it’s an Andorran dish. But what language do they speak in Andorra? Catalan, people!

Here’s a little potato tip for making this dish: it’s important to boil your potatoes whole, with the peels on. You might think, José, it takes longer to cook them that way, why wouldn’t I just peel them and cut them in cubes to boil faster? Well, my friends—they will absorb too much water that way, which you’ll then have a hard time getting out as you caramelize the trinxat. So I think it’s worth the extra 15 minutes of cooking.

Oh, and for the vegetarians out there, you can just skip the bacon and use olive oil to cook the garlic. You might need a little extra salt, so taste the mixture before cooking it and season it as you like.

I hope you enjoy this taste of Catalonia in the middle of winter!

Trinxat

Serves 4