Typical food in Granada

Eight of the ten come from municipal sources: Granada city council's food tourism page and its Carta Gastronómica Granadina. The two that do not — plato alpujarreño and berenjenas fritas con miel de caña — appear on neither of the council's two lists; we have taken them from Guía Repsol's page on Granada cooking, and we say so, so that it is clear where each thing comes from. The ingredients are cross-checked against that same page. What follows is each dish on its own.

Habas con jamón. The city council puts them at the head of its food pages and adds a detail that matters: the ham is from Trevélez, in the Alpujarra. They are young broad beans sautéed with onion and a few slices of cured ham, and very often they arrive with one or two fried eggs on top.

It is a genuinely seasonal dish, not a permanent menu fixture: it is made with the young broad bean from the Vega de Granada, so its moment is spring. If you see it chalked on a board in October, it will hardly be with fresh beans from the Vega.

Jamón de Trevélez holds a Protected Geographical Indication, and its rulebook is one of the most specific there is: it is dried at over 1,200 metres of altitude in eight municipalities on the southern side of Sierra Nevada, and the minimum curing time is 14, 17 or 20 months depending on what the piece weighs fresh. That altitude, with its cold dry air, is what the mark protects.

A cold orange salad with salt cod. It has peeled and chopped orange, desalted salt cod, onion or spring onion, black olives and olive oil. It sounds odd written down and it works: the sweetness of the orange cuts the salt of the cod.

It is a good summary of Granada's make-do cooking: salted fish, citrus and oil. It is served cold, it has no date in the calendar, and on some menus it appears simply as “ensalada de naranja”, so if you look for it by name and cannot see it, ask.

It is Granada's winter stew and it is eaten on 17 January, the feast day of San Antón. It has white beans, dried broad beans and rice — some add chickpeas — with almost everything the pig slaughter gives: fresh and cured spine, pork fat, tail, cheek, ear, trotters, ham bone and black pudding, with potatoes and fennel.

The city council describes it in exactly those words, “a traditional stew of the city and its province”, not of one particular village. It is heavy going even for a Granada winter, which is properly cold: if you order it as a single course, do not count on doing much else that afternoon.

One nuance that saves you a disappointment: it is a dish with a date, but the date is not a single day. The council itself, when publishing the recipe, warns that restaurants in Granada serve it until the end of January, so arriving on the 18th does not mean you have missed it. What you will not find is olla de San Antón in June.

Lamb offal: brains, testicles and sweetbreads, bound with egg. Some versions add very thinly sliced potato or roast pepper, but that is the base of the dish, and the name comes from the Sacromonte.

We say it plainly because it is worth saying: if offal is not for you, do not order it for the sake of culinary tourism. And if it is, ask what goes into the house version before you order, because the proportion of brains to testicles is not the same everywhere.

Patatas a lo pobre with fried eggs and cured sausage on top: chorizo, black pudding and, depending on the house, a piece of pork loin, serrano ham and fried peppers as well. It is a mountain dish that came down to the city a long time ago.

It comes from the Alpujarra, the same district where jamón de Trevélez is cured. It is a good one to order to share, and in our experience it is the safest bet when tastes at the table differ: almost everyone finds something they like on the plate.

In the same family are the migas granadinas — bread crumbled and fried with a fried egg and produce from the Alpujarra — which the council also lists among the characteristic dishes.

Salaíllas with fresh broad beans and salt cod. The salaílla is a flatbread with coarse salt and oil on top, and the council expressly lists habas con salaíllas as the snack of the day of San Cecilio, the city's patron saint. The same source adds a second date that almost nobody mentions: the Día de la Cruz. If you come in May and see them, it is not an oddity.

The pilgrimage climbs to the Abadía del Sacromonte on a Sunday in February, and the handout is municipal and enormous: for one of these occasions the council announced 3,500 kilos of salaíllas, 180 kilos of salt cod and a tonne of fresh broad beans. That gives you the scale: it is not a restaurant tradition, it is half the city eating bread and broad beans on the hillside.

The pionono from Santa Fe above all others, and it is the only sweet that Granada city council puts in its Carta Gastronómica Granadina. It is a soaked sponge, rolled on itself and finished with a sweetened, toasted cream, and it is small. It was born in Santa Fe, in the Vega de Granada, at the hands of the confectioner Ceferino Isla González, and both its name and its shape are a nod to the silhouette of the head of Pope Pius IX, known as Pío Nono.

We have to be honest about the year: Santa Fe town council, which is the source from the town where it was invented, gives 1897; Guía Repsol gives 1854. We go with 1897 because it is the municipal source, but it is worth knowing that both figures are in circulation.

Alongside it, the council mentions the soplillos de la Alpujarra — an almond meringue —, the torta real from Motril, the cuajada de carnaval and several convent sweets: the huevos moles from San Antón, the bizcochada from Zafra, the pestiños from La Encarnación or the hojaldre from San Jerónimo. The convent ones are not always on sale, so ask before setting out to find them.

The espárrago de Huétor-Tájar, the green-purple one known here as triguero, is the most seasonal of the three: it is picked by hand between March and June in six municipalities of the Vega Baja del Genil, that is, in the same vega the broad beans come from. If your dates fall in those months, it is the easiest of them to find fresh and the hardest to reproduce at home.

In that tapas are not a dish, they are a system. What this page collects are the Granada recipes; the tapa is the local custom of serving something to eat with every drink without charging for it separately, and what arrives with your beer can be anything from a typical dish off this list to a sandwich with no local roots at all.

How it works in practice, on which streets and what to expect depending on the area, we cover separately, in the Granada tapas guide. Here we stay with the dishes.

And there is a third thing that is not this either: the night. Tapas hopping overlaps with it but is not the same, and which areas people go out in, how late the venues stay open and what can be heard from where is covered in nightlife in Granada.

Remojón and habas con jamón, yes, with no complications: they are two frying-pan-and-knife dishes. Olla de San Antón needs several hours and a big pot, and tortilla del Sacromonte means finding the offal, which is not on every supermarket shelf.

For the ingredients, the place is the San Agustín municipal market, right in the centre next to the cathedral. We do not publish its opening hours: the council's municipal register does not list them and the websites that give them do not agree with one another, so confirm it before going rather than trusting a copied detail.

The 10 apartments we run all have a fitted kitchen, so this is feasible in any of them. If you are going to cook properly — long stews, an oven, a table for everyone — the one that makes it easiest is Laurel, with a separate kitchen: fridge, microwave, oven, coffee maker, toaster, kettle and juicer. The equipment in each one is set out on the apartment pages, and if you have a specific question about the kitchen in one of them before booking you can ask us directly.