It all started as a game, a diversion and to see what happens. Dani Valls Halling, alias Dannychef, born in Barcelona, decided to adapt a fashionable product like the guild to the gastronomic profile of all the autonomous communities of Spain and to register it on his Tiktok and Instagram account. “Everyone is crazy about guilds. They are very visual and allow you to distinguish the ingredients,” he says. Perhaps the ‘Gildas Autonómicas’ video series was born among laughter, but it quickly became something very serious: there are publications that already exceed one million views on Tiktok.
Each episode was experienced with soap opera fervor in the parish of internet users, just read the avalanche of comments that the videos generated. Here’s a success autonomous community that aroused love and hate, as it could not be otherwise, since it aroused two intangibles: the pride of belonging to your community and the gastronomic money that we spend in this country. He made a mess, as a certain lifeguard would say. And I like it.
Gildas Autonómicas: the origin
Dani Valls works for Realfooding in marketing activities and; As a hobby he publishes his video recipes online, almost always enriched with a few drops of jokes of the kind that annoy purists and enthusiasts so much. ñigiri, a nigiri prepared with socarrat paella, might be one of the funniest provocations. He leaves his job as a representative of musical artists to dedicate himself to the world of cooking, an interest that has accompanied him for as long as he can remember. As a child, he loved cooking with his grandmothers and mother, and later, recipes served as a refuge from stress.
Obviously he always has to cook for his friends – very much, his colleague – and so the pandemonium of the guild began. “My friends and I have always liked doing guildas.” Once, having to prepare a snack for a family who had left them a house on the Costa Brava, he decided to prepare a different guild, Galician style. “I added octopus and oil with paprika, and I really liked it! So I decided to expand the proposal to other autonomous communities, I found it fun, and from there the first video of ‘Gildas Autonómicas’ was born, with Galicia, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands”, he says.
The parish was overwhelmed by a torrent of requests to expand the proposal to other communities. Spaniards devoured by FOMO who demand, demand, order the publication of the guild of their land! So Dani went back to being Dannychef, raised the stakes and got to work to complete the serial, with all the communities represented by their corresponding guild through their most typical ingredients, combined with the inevitable piparra-olives-anchovies combination. “I immediately knew I was going to have a lot of fun,” he recalls.
Hearts of Spain
Dani Valls’ fun attitude is just the right one to take on an online game where the culinary pride of each community is considered, and they can even give you your ID card. You can tell that the mind behind Gildas Autonómicas is having a lot of fun and growing with each new video. But come on, it was scary. “It gave me a certain respect, especially the guilds of Valencia and the Canary Islands. With both I did research like I hadn’t done since the competition: I went crazy with the mojo picón recipe, I spent hours trying and researching, because I knew it was a topic that could cause blisters,” he says.
Yes, mojo picón in a guild; We need to recognize the work behind many of the pieces. The Canarian one, in addition to the mojo base, also has wrinkled potatoes, olives stuffed with almogrote, majorero cheese and 100% Canarian attention to detail: a can of strawberry Clipper donated by a friend from the island. According to Dani, it’s the Guild that has garnered the most love. “‘Finally a peninsula that does things well’, they told me in some comments. When they told me that finally someone did the mojo picón well, I was very happy, they were the most grateful.”
Living on the edge, on a stick
If you need to add portions of lamb cooked for almost three hours to the Aragonese guild, you just add them. The Madrid guild, the one that cost Dani the most due to the difficulty of fitting the ingredients into the skewer format, presents an obscene assembly with bravas potatoes and tripe. The most laborious, the Valencian guild, with its olives marinated in orange peel, Denia prawns and pickled garrofons, is placed on a base of socarrat paella. One of the most difficult places in my opinion, Valencia, rewards you with countless and very few comments of approval hatred.
“It wasn’t easy to choose and match the ingredients. Sometimes you can’t put certain things, because there are products that, no matter how good, don’t belong in a guild. I dedicated a lot of research and testing to them.” The Asturian guild thought about adding the fabada and also a piece of cachopo, but it seemed very simple. “When I saw that recipes for battered olives went viral, I decided to marinate them in cider, fill them with ham and cabrales and pay homage to the cachopo with this format,” he says.
Aside from the typical ingredients of each land, almost all the proposals have a base, a sauce, a preparation or even some off-script wink applauded by the people, as happened with the Murcian guild, which rests on a salad with its inevitable bread donut. At the end of the video, the Murcia guild adds a squeeze of lemon and some black pepper. “I spent a lot of time in Murcia and I know that Murcians do it with sacked potatoes, but it is a gesture that is not well known outside their homeland. It is a note that many Murcians have appreciated,” he comments.
I hate pickle
But not everything was praised. The Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands and Murcia are among the most loved, but hatred does not rest and always finds cracks through which the poison can filter. Having said that, before delving into the dark side of guilds, we must not forget two things:
a) Gildas Autonómicas has no evangelizing ambition: it is pure entertainment.
b) When you publish something related to food on the networks (especially appealing to autonomous communities) you will always receive capons, no matter how good your intentions are.
For starters, good old Dani is often reminded that what he makes are not guildas, but banderillas: the gastronomic neurosis over nomenclature is relentless. On paper a guild should only have olives, anchovies and piparra, for everything else: banderilla. “From a purist point of view they are right, but when I go to a bar or talk to people, everyone uses the term guild. My day is gildas, nothing happens, I like to take it with humour”, he comments.
Humor is a good shield, because the scrutinizing eye of autonomies will bring out all your mistakes without compassion. Perhaps for this reason the guild that generated the most criticism was the Asturian one: you don’t play with cachopo and cider, guaje. “I got some criticism because I added York ham to the cachopo olive. A mistake, I know; I ate the cachopo, I know they use Serrano ham, but I missed it.” They also criticized him for the sparkling cider I used to macerate the olives, because it wasn’t real cider. “However, many of these criticisms are not a hatred aggressive, in fact some thank me for trying,” he says.
With the black pudding we encountered
The Castile and León guild has also raised ugly faces among some Internet users. The black pudding of discord. “I bought a black pudding thinking it was from Burgos and found out it wasn’t, because it was made of rice.” On the other hand, the sobrasada he used for the Balearic one also received criticism, because it was spreadable, from Mercadona, wow. “These are details that I would have liked to correct, I’m a very perfectionist, but, obviously, I didn’t foresee at any point that this would become this big.” One of the good things about “Gildas Autonómicas” is that it learned a lot of things. “Although it’s also true that sometimes you find yourself at two in the morning, with the kitchen upside down, sweating, and you ask yourself: what the hell am I doing?”, he says.
But don’t let anyone be scared. Dani Vall has no intention of taking his foot off the accelerator. Those who enjoyed this highly creative gastro/autonomous game should prepare for the next phase of Operation Gildas, because its intellectual author assures that he is already thinking about the new series: Country Gildas! I’m really looking forward to seeing how he does against Finland.
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