Ready For A Traditional Spanish Feast? Try These Spanish Christmas Recipes

It’s the most wonderful time of the year to eat, drink, and be merry! And in Spain that is one of the main focuses of the Christmas holidays. Families gather to eat, drink, and spend time with each other. These meals have multiple courses and take several leisurely hours to enjoy.

And the dishes on the menu? They might not be quite what you’re used to if you’re reading this from your home in the UK or the U.S!

There isn’t just one main holiday meal in Spain. As well as feasting on Christmas Day, you’ll find Spanish families gathering to eat epic amounts of food for Christmas eve dinner, New Year’s Eve dinner, New Year’s Eve lunch, and again for lunch on Three Kings Day.

Want to inject a little Spanish style into your Christmas menu? These are some of the best Christmas recipes for you to try:

How Many Courses Do You Eat For A Spanish Festive Meal?

When you sit down for a traditional Spanish meal during the holiday period, you’ll enjoy at least 4 decadent courses. These are:

• An appetizer course that is typically served buffet style and usually made up of Spanish tapas dishes.
• A first course, which is a piping hot Spanish soup.
• The second and main course. This is traditional in Spain as it is in other parts of Europe. It comprises of either roasted meat or roasted fish and a couple of side dishes.
• Finally you’ll have dessert which is another banquet of sweets, nuts, fruits, and then sweet wine to wash it all down with.

 Of course because each autonomous region in Spain is unique, you will find regional variations across this menu plan. But this is what a typical Spanish Christmas lunch will look like.

Recipes For Spanish Christmas Tapas Dishes

This is a marathon, not a sprint! So you don’t want to pick too many heavy dishes at this early stage of your menu. Pick simple dishes that can be eaten with your fingers, so that they’re easy to serve and easy to whisk away when the next course is ready.  

Tetilla Cheese Puffs with Sesame Seeds and Honey

Cheese puffs aren’t a common dish in Spain, but this rich and decadent treat is served at Christmas when no holds are barred. Create balls from grated Tetilla cheese from the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia and egg yolk. Flour and roll in sesame seeds before deep frying and drizzling in locally sourced honey.

Smoked Salmon Pintxos

This cold tapas dish is as convenient as it is delicious because it can be prepared in advance. Toast a sliced baguette, spread with cream cheese, and top with the best smoked salmon you can find. These can be made in seconds, and they’ll disappear in seconds too!

Ensaladilla Rusa

Ensaladilla Rusa (Russian salad) is a popular tapas dish in Spain and around the world. This is another tapas dish that’s eaten cold, making it ideal for Christmas celebrations as it can be prepared in advance. This is a cold salad made of potatoes, peas and mayonnaise, and is another great recipe for using up leftovers.

You can find our delicious Russian salad recipe here.

Boiled Shrimp

Boiled shrimp are incredibly popular in Spain and they can be served in a myriad of different ways over Christmas. From a classic shrimp cocktail to salads and tartlets, the only limit is your imagination. But simply boiling them and letting their delicious flavour stand alone is a great option for a Christmas tapas selection.

Cured Ham Croquettes

Croquettes are one of most classic and well known of the Spanish tapas dishes and truly delicious. More cured Iberian ham is sold in Spain in December than in any other month of the year, and this is a great dish for using up any leftovers you might have. Ham is served in a creamy bechamel sauce and coated in crispy breadcrumbs.

You can find our ham croquetas recipe here.

Fish Paté (Pastel de Cabracho)

Spanish festive meals often have a focus on fresh, locally caught fish dishes. But this delicious fish dish can be prepared in advance. This pinkish loaf is made from boiling scorpionfish with carrot and leek, then pureeing the mixture with egg, tomato paste, and heavy cream. Serve simply, by spreading on fresh bread or toast crackers.

Recipes For Spanish Christmas First Course Dishes

The first course dish in the Spanish Christmas menu is almost aways a rich and hearty soup. If you’re not interested in soup then you could also try a salad: something light that will refresh the pallette always goes down well.

Spanish Seafood Soup

Seafood soup is the most common first course on the Spanish Christmas menu, and this soup is usually made with shrimp, clams, and mussels along with fish like hake or monk. But you can use whatever is fresh and accessible to you. To make this straightforward recipe, your seafood is simple cooked in a tasty bisque with a tomato base.

Gazpacho Soup

Although gazpacho soup is typically served during the summer months to help you cool down on a hot day, if you’re cooking for huge numbers of friends and family members this Christmas and you want to make the day as easy as possible for yourself, you could consider a pre-prepared cold soup. And gazpacho is a great choice!

You can find our gazpacho recipe here.

Galets Soup

Galets soup is an incredibly filling pasta-based soup.  Galets are are oversized pasta shells which are then stuffed with mince meat and other rich flavours, before being served in a water-based meaty soup. They are traditionally eaten in Spain at Christmas.

You can read more about galets in our Christmas foods article here.

Tuna Belly, Blood Orange and Avocado Salad

Don’t want to serve soup? Then this is a great Christmas salad packed full of seasonal colours and flavours.  

Simply prepare your ingredients and let them do all the talking: there’s no need for a heavy salad dressing here. A light drizzle of olive oil and a splash of vinegar makes the perfect dressing to bring out the flavours of the high-quality fish and the rich veggies.

Recipes For Spanish Christmas Second Course Dishes

At this point you’re probably thinking you wouldn’t be able to eat another thing, but Spanish Christmas meals are spread out over several hours so that you’ll have plenty of appetite by the time your second, and main, course arrives.

This is the main portion of the meal and a decadent feast. You can expect the table to be laden with roasted meats or fish as well as several side dishes.

Baked Fish With Lemon And Herbs

Evening Christmas meals almost always have fish rather than meat as their centrepiece. The dishes that are most frequently chosen include lubina (European seabass), rodaballo (turbot), dorada (gilt head bream) and bacalao (cod). In this recipe the fish is baked whole and smothered with a refreshing lemon and herb crust.

Pan Fried Spanish Cod

For a smaller affair where a whole fish would simply be too much, try smaller individual portions of pan fried Spanish cod. Cod is expensive, so this is a treat often reserved only for Christmas celebrations. Serve simply, by pan frying then seasoning to taste.

Roast Suckling Pig

Cochinillo is a roast suckling pig, and is an incredibly popular Christmas dinner dish around the region of Castilla y León, although there is no reason you can’t enjoy this delicacy anywhere in Spain. The piglet is traditionally served on a simple bed of onions and potatoes, and is roasted until the skin becomes crispy and brown.

Recipes For Spanish Christmas Desserts

Spanish dessert could almost be considered 2 different courses at Christmas time. First there are hearty desserts like cake and flan, then seasonal sweets, nuts, and dessert wines are introduced to the table. Nougat and marzipan are two of the most common sweets to grace a Spanish Christmas dessert table.

Lemon Olive Oil Cake

For something fruity and refreshing to end your meal, try lemon olive oil cake. This is a moist cake and the taste of the olive oil really shines through, so a top tip is to use the best quality oil you can afford. If you’re not a fan of lemons then don’t worry. You can make versions of this cake with oranges or apples instead.

Polvorones

These are dry crumbly cookies that are the most traditional Christmas biscuit in Spain. They’re the equivalent of shortbread in the UK or sugar cookies in the U.S. They are thin cookies covered in a generous sprinkling of powdered sugar that snap when you break them. They’re both satisfying and delicious.

Arroz con Leche

Finally, this rich and creamy rice pudding is perfect for Christmas dessert. Unlike rice pudding in the UK, this dish is served cold but that means that it has a much firmer texture. It’s sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, which only adds to the Christmas taste and feel of this firm favourite dish.

Are you thinking of moving to Spain, so that you can spend next Christmas indulging in these delicious delicacies? Why not get in touch with our local property experts, who are perfectly placed to help you turn your dreams of Spanish home ownership into a reality.