An international menu for New Year’s Eve accompanied by our Albariños

This international menu for New Year’s Eve paired with Pazo Baión will take you from the Atlantic coast to the Far East on a culinary journey around the world to say goodbye to the year

Christmas Eve is the traditional and family Christmas celebration par excellence. However, New Year’s Eve is a different party. More carefree, more mischievous, and less tied to conventions and traditions. So why not surprise your loved ones with an international menu for New Year’s Eve? A culinary proposal that allows you to travel through the gastronomies of several countries without leaving home. An experience made up of aromas and flavors.

Each country has its own typical Christmas dishes. For example, in Italy, the year ends with lentils. What for us is a stew with which we fight the cold, for them it is a ritual that serves to conjure good luck for the new year. More surreal is a tradition that has taken hold in Japan over the last few decades and symbolizes the penetration of American culture in the land of the rising sun: eating a bucket of fried chicken from a famous American multinational.

However, it is also possible to trace the connections that exist between many national cuisines and cultures. For example, roast lamb is typical of Spain, but also of Portugal (cabrito assado) or Italy (abbacchio). While baked capon is another of the classics of Christmas gastronomy in our country, it is also very appreciated in France, Italy, and practically all the countries of America.

Open your notes app or grab a pen and paper and get ready to write down the recipes for an international menu for New Year’s Eve that pairs perfectly with Pazo Baión’s single estate-albariños. Are you ready to travel from the heart of O Salnés to one of the first countries to welcome the new year?

Oysters and Pazo Baión. A delicatessen devoured by the Sun King

Louis XIV, one of the people who accumulated the most power throughout history, was a lover of gastronomy. He devoured countless preparations and products, yet one of his favorites was huîtres.

The devotion to this fruit of the sea among the Gauls is such that it has become a typical dish for Christmas dinners. In Spain there is also a great passion for this mollusk. If you don’t believe us, we invite you to take a stroll through the restaurants of the Rías Baixas or the iconic Mercado da Pedra in Vigo.

Beyond their delicious taste or sophisticated texture, oysters are a great option to open an international menu for New Year’s Eve because their preparation does not involve any work. Just decide how many oysters to buy for each person (three or four is usually a good number) and have them in clean water for a few hours beforehand.

Once you are all ready for dinner, just open them, squeeze a little lemon juice on them to maximize their flavor… and let them slide into your mouth!

What’s the best way to round off this first course of our international menu for New Year’s Eve? A glass of Pazo Baión, a fresh and fruity Albariño that pairs perfectly with seafood. A balanced wine that enhances and complements the experience of tasting good oysters.

If there is only one virtue of the French, it is undoubtedly their good taste.

Spaghetti alle vongole and Pazo Baión. A classic of Italian gastronomy

We continue with another dish in which the protagonist is a mollusk fruit. In this case, clams. The second stop of our international menu for New Year’s Eve takes us to the Italian region of Campania, where one of the most iconic cities of the transalpine country is located: Naples, the birthplace of the pizza of the same name.

Why are we traveling to Campania? One of the typical Christmas dishes of this region is spaghetti alle vongole or spaghetti with clams.

Preparation

Although this dish requires more effort than the previous one, it is extremely simple to make:

1. The most important thing is to make sure the clams are free of sand. To do this, you must put them in water with vinegar for a couple of hours. Then, drain them and run them through a stream of water to remove any remaining impurities.
2. Chop the garlic and sauté it with the olive oil, add the clams, and pour the wine over them.
3. At the same time, put the spaghetti to cook. As you already have enough to organize the whole dinner, we are not going to tell you to make them yourself, but we recommend you buy them fresh.
4. Once the clams have opened and the alcohol in the wine has evaporated you can add the spaghetti, add the parsley, and sauté everything together for a couple of minutes.

Afterward, you will only have to serve this well-known dish of Italian gastronomy and fill your guests’ glasses with Pazo Baión. The fruity and floral notes of our flagship blend with the aromas of this dish and enhance them.

If there is one stop on this international menu for New Year’s Eve that 100% of your family will love, including the little ones, it will undoubtedly be this culinary sojourn to Italy.

Roast turkey and mashed potatoes with Fontan Vines. From the USA with love

Turkey has become an American cultural icon. That’s why, when we think of this bird, it is impossible not to travel mentally to the United States. Roast turkey is the star dish of Thanksgiving Day, which is, to a certain extent, the starting signal for the Christmas holidays, but it also dominates American tables during Christmas lunches and dinners.

Therefore, for our international menu for New Year’s Eve, we have opted for turkey as the main dish. A tasty option, but lighter than other alternatives such as suckling pig.

Preparation

How can you prepare this delicious dish from an international menu for New Year’s Eve?

1. Crush the garlic with the oil and add the thyme, salt, pepper, and all the spices that you like or that you know your guests love. Use this mixture to paint the turkey and leave it shiny.
2. Preheat the oven to 180º, and stuff the turkey with the apples, raisins, and nuts. Do not press down to put in too much, let the ingredients remain loose. Tie the legs of the turkey and place it on a tray. Place a container of water underneath it to achieve a bain-marie effect that will help hydrate the turkey and prevent it from becoming too dry. Cover this star of our international menu for New Year’s Eve with aluminum foil to prevent the skin from burning.
3. Every 30 minutes, bathe the turkey with the water it produces during cooking to help hydrate it.
4. When the 2.5 hours are up, uncover the turkey so that the skin takes on an appetizing golden hue.
5. How do you know when it’s done? If you have a thermometer, it should have a temperature of 80º in one of its thighs. If you don’t have one, you don’t have to buy one to prepare this international menu for New Year’s Eve, because you can use the pricking technique. If when you prick the thickest part of the thigh, juice with blood comes out, it means that it has not yet been cooked for a long time.
6. As you can see, this dish from our international menu for New Year’s Eve does not require endless elaborations, but it does require you to keep an eye on the turkey to make it tender and delicious. Especially after 2 hours. Also, keep in mind that the cooking time varies greatly depending on the size of the bird. A 6 kg turkey will be ready in about 3 hours. On the other hand, a 12 kg turkey will need almost 5 hours.
7. Mashed potatoes are a perfect accompaniment to this carnivorous dish from our international menu for New Year’s Eve. Boil the potatoes with salt, peel them, mash them with a potato masher or, if you don’t have one, with a fork, add the cheese to the hot mixture to melt it, stir until you get a homogeneous mass, and season to taste with salt and pepper.

To finish with this American elaboration of the international menu for New Year’s Eve, serve the turkey, carve it, and accompany it with Vides de Fontán. This Albariño, with a complex three-year aging, has a fascinating aromatic composition that includes notes of pastry and brioche.

Kurisumasu Keiki and Gran a Gran. The Japanese emoji cake to sweeten the end of the year.

The three countries we have visited so far thanks to our international menu for New Year’s Eve have in common, among other things, that their cultures and traditions are closely related to Christianity, so the Christmas holidays are very important in these countries … and in ours.

However, Christmas has become globalized, and, above all, the end of the year is an ephemeris all over the world, even in those countries where the birth of Jesus Christ is not celebrated on December 25. Take, for example, the last stop on our international New Year’s Eve menu: Japan.

Starting in the 1950s, when Japan recovered from a tough post-war period after being defeated by the United States, kurisumasu keiki, or Christmas cake, became popular.

This dessert, which is more than a hundred years old, has become an icon of the Christmas season to the point that it has its emoji in our everyday apps like WhatsApp: 🍰.

Preparation

Do you want to finish this international menu for New Year’s Eve by seducing the sweet tooth in your family? Just follow these steps:

1. Beat the eggs with the sugar and stir in the flour.
2. Pour the mixture into a greased buttered pan and bake it in a preheated oven at 200º for 20 minutes. When you take the cake out of the oven, let it cool down so you can work with it.
3. At the same time, prepare the syrup by heating the water and sugar. When boiling, add the brandy and let the syrup temper.
4. Halve the strawberries from top to bottom.
5. Whip the cream with the sugar.
6. Now it is time for the goldsmith’s work: open the cake in half, cover the bottom with the syrup, add a layer of cream and half of the strawberries, put the second half of the cake, cover the whole cake with the rest of the cream, including the sides. Place the strawberries on top.

The result will be a beautiful cake just like the one of the emoji that, in addition, visually has two of the colors par excellence of Christmas: white and red and, also, the two colors of the flag of Japan. Our friends from the Far East do not leave no stone unturned. Accompany this iconic dessert with a semi-dry and raised Albariño: Gran a Gran. The honeyed and candied fruit aromas of this Rías Baixas marry wonderfully with the most succulent sweets and will leave your guests with a beautiful taste in their mouths.

One last recommendation before we say goodbye, put on a glass of Pazo Baión, Vides de Fontán, or Gran a Gran, choose a record that you like, and enjoy cooking this international menu for New Year’s Eve. We can’t materially take you to Bordeaux, Naples, New York, or Tokyo, but our Rías Baixas can take you through five centuries of history.