Staff Reporter
AFTER Guillermo Varela’s Austrian girlfriend told him his cooking was so delicious he needed to share it, he started to upload his Spanish recipes online.
Varela had been cooking for her and their friends while living in Berlin, homesick for his country’s cuisine.
Beginning with just 600 followers, his mouth-watering recipes for tortilla, paella, croquettes, Russian salad and octopus à feira, have enticed more than 330,000 followers and millions of views since.
READ. MORE: Famous wine region in Spain unsurprisingly wins best destination for a vineyard mini-break this summer
Under the handle Cooking from Spain, Varela shares his instructional cooking videos with added flair, including jokes, and background information on the recipes, like fun anecdotes, or the background origins of the dishes he’s cooking.
In his video about Russian salad, he shares the controversy surrounding the origin of its name, which he claims is ‘as Spanish as my Spanish accent in English.’
At the beginning he thought making the quick 40-second videos would be easy, but had to teach himself editing, and he would end up spending four to five hours over the entire process.
While studying for his degree in Industrial Engineering at the University of Vigo, in his hometown, Vaerla discovered his true passion was cooking, when he’d come home after class and make lunch for his family.
He’s since started a newsletter writing about gastronomy and a YouTube channel, hoping to share Spain’s iconic dishes with a global audience.
Vaerla said Spanish cuisine isn’t as well-known.
“It’s our fault. Many times, we’ve tried to take advantage of tourists and scam them instead of selling our cuisine well. In other countries, they use their cuisine as a showcase for the world,” he told El Paìs.
“It’s unacceptable that a tourist leaves with the idea that a calamari sandwich is the scam they sell you in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor.”
READ MORE: SPANISH RECIPE: Andalucian Fish Casserole (Cazuela de Pescado)
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