About Fish
Surrounded by the sea on three sides, the Iberian peninsula has always had an active fishing industry: from the sheltered Mediterranean waters of Catalonia to the deep seas off the coast of Andalucía, from the wilder open seas of the northern Atlantic, to the rich coastal waters of Galicia to the west of Spain, for millennia fishermen have gone out in boats seeking a catch. The coasts too provided their harvest, goose necked barnacles (percebes), spider crabs (txangurro), razor clams (navajas) oysters and mussels, all of them consumed in great quantities.
Before the development of refrigeration there were a variety of ways of preserving fish, drying, salting, pickling, smoking, canning or bottling or combinations of these methods. Many of the products produced at first out of necessity, such as bacalao, are now part of the gastronomic fabric of the culture.
Brindisa imports a good number of fish products from Spain, a country that loves its seafood, and which have been prepared using a variety of the methods mentioned above. There is bacalao, salt cod, which has been consumed in Spain for well over a thousand years and mojama, an air dried loin of tuna simply salted and hung out in the sun. There are boquerones, while anchovies, cooked by the chemical action of the vinegar in which they are placed; anchovies, hot smoked over beech wood and tinned in olive oil; and there are tuna products, prepared and packed by hand still.