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Tapas is a dining experience that offers something for everyone. Traditionally heralded from highly social Spanish culture, tapas meals which involve multiple small but delicious dishes can be great for sharing with friends, family, or simply to enjoy on your own. Much like a tasting menu, tapas is fun, tasty, and provides you with a chance to show off during your cooking sessions. At least, it will if you get your tapas recipes just right. 

After all, tapas dishes are so small that there’s nowhere to hide. To cook great tapas, you need a strong understanding of your ingredients and flavor profiles. In this article, we’ll consider how you can develop precisely that. 

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Experience the Real Deal

Until you’ve tasted authentic tapas, everything you make will seem like a pale imitation. To avoid this, you’ll want to experience tapas flavors for yourself, preferably cooked by a chef who knows exactly what they’re doing. Luckily, you no longer need to head to Spain to see tapas at its finest. Authentic restaurants like Pita Jungle provide classic, delicious tapas dishes, which are also available on a daily happy hour menu to help you get a true tapas taste. While tasting these dishes, try to get a real feel for things like flavor profiles which, most commonly, will include tastes like garlic, olive oil, and paprika. It’s also important to pay attention to portion sizes and presentation, as these are equally important to tapas success. 

Perfect Your Ingredients

Tapas dishes may be small, but they can still pack a big punch. Most often, this is because professional tapas chefs use top quality ingredients to make their creations extra special. You certainly can’t get away with cheap, poor-quality ingredients on your tapas menu. Instead, seek high-quality options, like rich dark olive oil, authentic Spanish anchovies, and ingredients with additional flavor combinations, like wood-roasted peppers. Because these dishes are so small, you can get away with only small portions of each ingredient, but paying that little bit extra will take your tapas from tepid to restaurant-hot. 

Always Find Balance

Tapas dishes contain a plethora of strong ingredients, all of which will be fighting for the top spot. However, if you let one taste overwhelm the others, your dish will inevitably hit just one note, instead of becoming the flavor marvel that tapas should be. During the cooking process, keep balance at the forefront of your mind. If you sense vinegar starting to overpower things, balance it with an ingredient like honey. Equally, if you can only taste garlic in your dish, add a dash of fiery smoked paprika to offset the issue. It’s especially important to taste your dishes throughout, so that you build an informed, layered flavor profile that hits all the right notes. 

The size of tapas dishes might make them look like an easy option, but there’s a lot more to this cooking than meets the eye. Take your tapas to the next level when you cook with these top tips in mind.