The bar that won Bizkaia’s best potato omelette reveals their secret recipe

Iñigo Ramos from Teike in Balmaceda has announced that from now on he will not focus solely on making tortillas. Nothing like this happens every morning anymore. He knows that, thanks to Kopa, more people will come to the place to try it, but he prefers to keep doing other things – including putxeras – and inventing some “rare” specialties from time to time, like the octopus he once cooked . .. For the most traditional, classic preparation of eggs, potatoes and onions, the trick is to chop and fry just enough of the onions to hide them in the potatoes. “The hidden onion,” he calls it. Potatoes, sour and fried. All made with extra virgin olive oil of the Arbequina variety. “Rare, very rare” where they like it. And just like that, he went to the judges’ table and received an award for doing everything right.

Álvaro Lafarga, the chef at Bilbao’s Markina restaurant, has his own secret for making the best potato omelet in the region: he uses three shallots and no onions – neither Zarra purple onion, nor any other onion. With this amount, it adds more flavor to a recipe where you put in eleven whole eggs and don’t add any individual yolks. He fried it in extra virgin olive oil…with just a splash of sunflower. The work submitted to the jury did not convince them at all, since it did not seal the edges very well – and sealing is very important for Markina to accommodate a very juicy interior – but for those who had to “criticize” it directly on the spot, they Thought it turned out beautifully, the onions were nicely caramelized, juicy and had just the right amount of saltiness.

Iñaki Lazkano from Sorginzulo uses 10 eggs and the yolks of two more eggs to “enrich” the omelette. The key to defeating them is “gently, with a little air.” And potato variety is “very important”. They like to make it with Agata, a sweeter French potato, whose sweetness is later offset with “high-quality red onions from Zara.” At Sorgizulo, with any tortilla they make, everything is weighed so they can say, at most, how much salt was added during preparation: 12 grams. No more, no less. For everything, extra virgin olive oil. For the jury, “everything was good, well made, juicy and fluffy, just right”.

Goizane Bilbao has reached the 2022 finals with an omelette that “pleases customers” in a “family” bar. Used a kilogram of sour potatoes because “it’s my favorite potato because of the color, the taste and the way it’s fried”; normally she would lay 10 eggs but ended up laying 9 An egg that “needs adjustment”. Very important: these eggs come from Euskaber, who discovered them in Kopa in 2022 and has not stopped using them. As for the onions, they take a long, long time to caramelize, and the salt… depends on the eye. «It’s set up and that’s what we offer every day in the bar. “With a sweetness that I wanted to show the jury.” A review of this one was that it was “very juicy, very rich with caramelized onions, and the ‘crisp’ point of the potato was what made it different from other potatoes.” This one was Evolution of the recipe compared to the previous version.

Kopa Goiko ended up in the hands of a member of the Kaixo Gastrobar, who Jorge Pacheco, unlike almost everyone else involved, defended it as “always a tortilla without onions.” It is said. Locally they also make it with – and other variants – but the protagonist is another. To achieve this, in addition to “forever love”, they cut the potatoes into cubes and fry them over high heat until golden brown; so that the taste of the potatoes will be obvious when eating. Once they are mixed with the beaten eggs, let them rest for a few minutes. The result was a juicy tortilla that won over the popular jury.