If you’re under the impression that the case is closed on the question of countertops, than you clearly haven’t perused the culinary landscape of sunny Spain, wherein a product called Silestone has caught the eyes (and the knife blades) of chefs from Galicia to Granada. Silestone was created by Cosentino Group, “a family-owned and wholly Spanish group focusing on the design, production, and distribution of surfaces for kitchens and bathrooms.”
Who knew they’d look to crystallised silicon dioxide (SiO2, for those with fresh memories of the periodic table), otherwise known as quartz, a natural compound whose formidable hardness and resistance to acids makes for excellent performance in the kitchen.
Silestone contains 94% quartz, meaning that it’s well-equipped to weather the perpetual barrage of chopping, slicing, dicing, filleting, and broad-edge squishing (and there’s a lot of that in Spain, given the national fetish for garlic). In addition to the prospect of an un-nickable cutting surface, Silestone offers an uber-hygienic cooking atmosphere: it’s the only quartz work-top with anti-bacterial protection. Couple that with attractive uniformity and an intrinsically beautiful color palette—one that includes solid colors as well as quartz’s organic translucent veining—and you have a work surface that rightly deserves to transcend the ocean-bound confines of Iberia.
As we saw some time back with Okite—another surface material made mostly of quartz (93%, in fact)—Silestone is also ideal for kitchens because it lacks porosity, that tendency to suck up liquid that renders granite less than ideal. This not only means that Silestone stays extremely clean and nigh-on germ-free, but also that it never stains, surely a godsend for designers as well as chefs, especially those with a yen for the aesthetic beauty of well-arranged foodstuffs and a put-together kitchen.
http://www.silestone.com/
If you also ask you what Cococook, then youre in the right place. Cococook, besides having a name that coos, is a restaurant which offers on site to take, or even to fight, nice dishes stamped, whose motto is Gourmet, Healthy and Balanced. And we, we love!
Caligo: A Family Of Three Noble Desert Wines From Spain
Late autumn in Spain’s Alt Penedes, in the hills outside of Barcelona. The annual harvest that yields the area’s dry red and white wines has past weeks before. Yet there are still white grapes on the vine. They’re beyond ripe. Morning mists blow in off the sea. A fungus forms on the grapes. It begins to suck the moisture out of the fruit. The grapes appear to be decaying. For the DG Viticultors vineyard and winery, everything is going exactly as they’d hoped.
DG Viticultors produces three white desert wines, or “mist wines,” from these grapes. The late harvest enables the grapes to over-ripen beyond the sweetness levels necessary to make dry wines. The fungus, called botrytis, or “noble rot,” then draws moisture from the grapes, further concentrating their flavor and sweetness. The resulting wine, under the best circumstances, balances sweetness with acidity, and offers pronounced flavors of ripe peach and toasty honey. This centuries-old winemaking process is thought to have originated in Tokaj, in Hungary, and continues today with the celebrated Sauternes wines of France and the Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese wines of Germany.
Caligo: A Family Of Three Noble Desert Wines From Spain | BaseNow.
Caligo from BaseDesign on Vimeo.
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