Wandering chef Rick Stein talks to Richard McComb about Spain, tapas and tilting at windmills.

It has always been a mystery why Spain, the favourite holiday destination of Brits, has failed to attract the culinary gravitas of French or Italian cooking.

High street restaurants and domestic menus resonate with Franco-Italian influences but thoughts of Spanish cooking typically conjure up images of paella or the dining fantasy of mega-bucks places such as El Bulli.

There is hardly any recognition of the bits – the very tasty bits, like Toledo spiced rabbit, rice with monkfish, Catalan noodles with seafood – that fall in between these extremes.

Rick Stein, one the nation’s favourite chefs, is in little doubt about one of the reasons for the underselling of Spanish food.

“I think it is largely down to the Spanish themselves.

“They are not very good at marketing their own food,” says Stein, who will appearing at the BBC Good Food Show Winter at Birmingham’s NEC next month.

“Traditionally, they have not needed to, or wanted to, because Spain is a big country.

“When you go there you’ve got this sense of history. It’s for a long time been slightly isolated from the rest of Europe, particularly because of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime.

“I think until recently it is has looked into itself.

“Now everything is changing. In most cities in the UK there is at least one good Spanish tapas bar using the really good raw materials like the hams and the chorizo sausages, the olive oils and anchovies.

Once you go to a really good tapas bar you start to get a picture of what it’s really like.”

Stein’s lifetime love affair with the country, which he has visited since childhood, produced one of the year’s best TV food shows when the chef took in all points north, south, east and west to give a genuine taste of the big-flavoured cooking on offer in Spain.

The resulting cook book, showcasing 140 recipes with a Stein-esque Spanish spin, is beautifully presented.

And here’s a thing: the recipes are neither going to bankrupt you nor leave you in a stressed heap in the kitchen.

I put it to the chef that there are some things Brits could learn from their counterparts in Galicia, Extremadura and Andalucia, not least the need for strong flavours and simplicity.

“I do think so,” says Stein. “Certainly the feedback I’ve been getting from people is that they think the recipes are very doable.”

In the book, he recounts a trip to a restaurant in La Mancha, where the chef was cooking garlic soup, sopa de ajo.

“In La Mancha they grow lots of garlic, lots of olives, lots of red peppers and lots of wheat.

“That’s all there is to the dish, with an egg. It takes about two minutes to make,” he recounts.

“You heat olive oil in a pan, throw in a lot of sliced garlic and hot smoky pimentón.

“You fry it a little, then pour on stock or water, season, break an egg into it, stir it up a little, then pour it over some grilled crusty bread and finish with a lick of good olive oil.

“It’s as good a soup as you’re likely to get anywhere.”

In fact, Stein believes there are similarities between British and Spanish food.

“The ingredients aren’t the same but they rely on really good raw materials,” he says.

To emphasise the point, the chef talks about a programme he has been making on Spanish Christmas food.

Turkey is replaced by lamb but simplicity rather than elaborate preparation and outlandish ingredients predominate.

Stein says: “Their favoured dish for Christmas is a shoulder of lamb baked with potatoes, onions and apples, slow-cooked for about three hours.

“I said to them, ‘Why is it so special?’ And they said, ‘Well, you can just put it in the oven and leave it.’ Get stuck into having a few drinks with your friends.

“Which is actually what turkey should be about, it’s just that so many food writers say, ‘You put it in, you take it out, put it in, put baking foil on it ... Escoffier, in his book on British food, just says, ‘Roast in a moderate oven.’

“That’s the entire direction for cooking a turkey.”

There’s no setting of alarm clocks and rising at 6.20am to peel the Brussels sprouts.

“The Spanish don’t seem to suffer from that anxiety,” adds Stein.

He loves the take-us-as-you-find-us mentality of Spanish tapas bars and restaurants, which are high on shoulder shrugging and low on pretence.

Stein is drawn to the “ruggedly real,” the lack of pomp, in the national character.

“I find it terribly refreshing,” he says.

“I don’t think it will last, funnily enough, because I think they are getting much more aware of the need to present their food.

“But I love it. It’s like when you go into a Chinese restaurant in Soho.

“They are not there to say ‘Hello.’ They are there to give you the food.

“If you said to them, ‘That was absolutely delicious,’ they would say to you, ‘Yeah? What?’”

Although Stein is best known for the restaurants he runs in Padstow, this is a chef with itchy feet.

I am talking to him at his flat in London and he is preparing to fly to Australia, where he has another home, and New Zealand for October. In November, he will be hunting for truffles in Italy and will fit in his cookery demonstrations at the NEC’s Good Food Show before the three-day Padstow Christmas Festival.

The common theme is food. Always food.