Lanzarote's cuisine: a celebration of its seafood larder

He runs the highly successful Miramar restaurant, which has earned him two Michelin stars and has established him as a true master of the use of produce, an essential part of his cuisine. "We have a wonderful pantry and that makes creativity easier. Lanzarote has an enviable marine environment, which I believe is under-exploited. It is important to focus on the excellence of the product, support the producers and keep the talent on the island," he recommends.

In this way, Paco has opened the Wordcanic 2023 kitchen, choosing some of the best products from the area to prepare some dishes from his Mediterranean vision. He began with a frozen sponge of soldado, a shrimp-like species that is very abundant on the Canary Islands seabed, which he placed raw in tartar on a frozen sponge of freeze-dried codium seaweed. Dotted with a cold sauce with the texture of a gel and a garum made with the head of a soldier, he has further enhanced the umani of the dish.
The second dish was a holoturia, a version of the espardeña that Paco uses at home. He grilled the meat and used the skins to make a juice with shallots and kombu, adding the dashi made from the stomachs. He used the fragrant lemons to make a lemon miso and served it with a crunchy crust, also made from holothurian shells. The third creation was black limpets, "a delicious product whose fishing is now banned in our area". He used the juice of the limpets, boiled for five hours, to make a sorbet and the livers to make a sauce of intense flavour. On the empty shell, he placed a base of olive oil and finely sliced limpet meat, bathed in the sorbet. 

For the fourth dish, Paco used a vieja, the less noble parts of which he slowly stewed with seaweed and sea pasta to make a silky gel, to bathe on the plate a supreme of vieja, "matured for a day" and grilled, enriched with a mixture of huacatai oil and sea lettuce, "a really useful preparation. I think that in Lanzarote we should look more for dishes that can be kept for a long time". Finally, in the kitchen installed in the Jameos, he has brought an original carabinero powder, "made with tails cured with kombu and salt, frozen at -400 and subjected to friction", which he has placed on a spot of sauce emulsified with the essence of the heads and water. On the original painting, he has placed dots of carabinero garum, combined with others of an emulsion of Laurencia seaweed "with a taste similar to rock mussels" and cubes of a gel made with seawater.