Finger Food: 5 recipes to eat with your fingers

Vegan snacks to enjoy with your hands

The concept finger food born from the need to unite gourmet food with practical cooking. The idea is that the diner can be served on a communal plate and does not need no tool to take the “dish” to the mouth: no cutlery, no plate, no nothing.

On many occasions, one of the ingredients acts as a container and even as a cover. The idea is that they be easy and quick recipes to execute to free up kitchens in situations where they are saturated: it can be a banquet for 300 people or a dinner at home with friends.

They tend to be informal diningserved as a buffet, designed to share and create complicity among diners.

Original combinations are sought and they usually have crunchy textures, which create a sensation of instant fun. The idea is to synthesize all the flavors of a dish in one or two bites.

Haute cuisine trend

In gastronomy, we can say that they were Ferran Adria and the El Bulli restaurant team who began to bet on this type of experience around haute cuisine, creating a tasting menu in which many of the dishes could be picked up with your fingers. Thus, they broke with the tightness of French haute cuisine, allowing Asian influences to dominate.

Today many great chefs follow the trend. Among them, Andoni Luis Aduriz and the Mugaritz team, who offer a menu in which the absence of cutlery dominates, which manages to bring the diner closer to the essence of their cuisine.

It is not new

In societies like Indiaeating with your hands is an act of rapprochement and gratitude to nature.

A similar concept is used in sweet cooking, with the Famous little fourwhich are small sweet preparations designed to be eaten with the fingers and minimal preparation, which is why they are served at the end of the menu as a courtesy.

And it is also related to street food either street foodhighly developed especially in Mexico and the United States, thanks to which eating with your hands has become popular and dignified.

Back to origins

The trend reminds us that we are chiroterians, that is, animals endowed with hands to eat. We don’t need anything else. When you eat with your hands, doesn’t food taste better?

With our hands we can collect food from nature, wash it and prepare it to eat it with our hands as well.

Another important issue is the digestionwhich not only occurs inside the body, but also outside it: it begins with the eyes and continues through the sense of touch: When you touch a food, you are sending information to the brain and stomach about how that food is going to relate to your system.

We are creating a certain expectation, which adds another meaning to the experience and increases the sensation of gastronomic pleasure.

Like kids! Also frees us from the prejudices of protocol and it makes us happy by connecting with our childhood. And it is that eating with your hands is a real pleasure: to lick your fingers!