It’s March. That means it’s calçot season.

What’s a calçot, you ask? It’s perhaps Spain’s most famous onion, and it’s so revered in northeast Spain (Cataluña) that it has a whole season of parties that revolve around it. So of course we had to carry our Sammic scholars to experience it firsthand.  We visited a family farm, the Brothers Blanch, and one of its owners explained us the abc’s of calçots.

Specifically, a calçot is an onion that has been taken out of the land, allowed to sprout (like they do when you leave them too long in the pantry), then returned to the ground. Farmers, like the one above, carefully pile dirt for weeks until the sprouts become full-size onions that look more like leeks, with long, white stems.

Then they are harvested, and it’s the moment of truth. The calcots are charred over a huge, open flame, then wrapped quickly in newspaper. This makes for easy transport and also serves to steam them to perfect tenderness. Why?

Because they will then be served by the plateful, adorned with large bowls of sauce. Romesco sauce just happens to be the eighth wonder of the world: a rich, bright sauce of nuts, red peppers, the dried ñora chile, tomato, olive oil, a splash of vinegar and some kind of stale bread product. The charred calcots are then slipped free of their skins and…devoured.

This peeling is a really, really messy business. Imagine flakes of charred vegetable flying everywhere…on clothes, on bibs, on the table. At least there’s plenty of wine in the porrón to go around.

And now for the money shot:

You could say that Elisha more or less got the hang of  it.