00 — GARDEN
Where our cooking begins
A few kilometres from Casas-Ibáñez, in the Júcar valley near Jorquera, we grow the garden that feeds every one of our menus. It isn't a decorative patch: it's where Oba-'s cooking begins.
Isaac, a friend of the chefs and an agriculture expert, looks after every corner of the land. We're not chasing trends here: we close the circle with what our closest surroundings can give us.
ANCESTRAL TECHNIQUE
We irrigate using an Arab-style system, designed to manage water as efficiently as possible in land that knows water stress well. It's an ancestral technique we combine with Japanese methods and local know-how: a mix that answers to the land as it is, not as we'd like it to be.
WHAT WE GROW
Lettuces, rocket, plums, elderberry, blackberries, bay and edible flowers grow alongside a pear tree of almost-forgotten old varieties. Garlic, onion and potato are left out: they demand too much water for what they give back.
Much of the work is about recovering what was about to disappear: native riverside vegetables and endangered species that only survive because someone keeps planting them. What we don't grow ourselves comes from close by, from a network of around 45 small producers who share this same way of understanding produce.
FROM THE GARDEN TO THE PLATE
"Everything comes from here." That's how Juan Sahuquillo sums up what happens between the garden and the table. Two dishes on the menu change every day depending on what was picked that same morning: the cooks look at the map of the land and decide where it's time to go.
Hanging melons, old tubers, wild herbs and sheep's dairy move in and out of the menu as their moment comes. Even what's left over finds a place: chickpea surplus is malted and fermented into our own Weissbier, brewed at the restaurant.
Soon we'll open the garden to anyone who wants to get to know it: guided visits through this wild landscape that is, in truth, where every dish at Oba- begins.