‘That little bit of escapism we need’: Tostada’s Roxanne Toal on bringing a taste of Spain to our kitchens

If you haven’t had an authentic paella in Spain, you don’t know what you’re missing, Roxanne Toal tells Hannah Twiggs. That’s why she set up Tostada, to unite her two passions: cooking and travel (and toast)

Classic paella you can have delivered by the postie (Roxanne Toal/Tostada)

It’s a mild night in early July last year. Roxanne Toal is anxiously checking and double checking jars of sofrito sauce, vacuum-packed fresh seafood, sachets of paprika and saffron, bags of homemade stock and stacks of paelleras upon paelleras. It’s the first week people from two different households have been able to meet in months. Businesses are tentatively opening their doors once more. It’s also the night before her lockdown born-and-bred business, Tostada, sends out its first batch of products: paella cooking kits. Everything must be perfect.

“When you’re a chef, you’re quite used to the stress,” Toal tells me over the phone almost nine months later, a sense of nervousness still palpable in her North Yorkshire accent. But even someone with 17 years’ worth of experience in high-adrenaline kitchens still feels the pang of apprehension the day before a big project. “I stayed up all night trying to get everything ready and perfect.”

Well, the stress and sleepless nights have certainly paid off. What started as a passion project on social media has turned into a full-time career – not to mention a hugely popular brand, name-dropped by some of the biggest in the biz.

“I had had it in my head for a long time that I wanted to do something for myself that was hugely influenced by my time in Spain,” Toal explains, “and that has obviously come across in my food. When I was working in restaurants, I obviously didn’t always have the total freedom to do exactly what I wanted, so I always had this little idea in my head that I would do something.”

When the first lockdown struck last year, the 33-year-old had just moved from Manchester to Whitley Bay in the north-east with her husband Gary and dog Billie to start a new job. But, in an unfortunate turn of events and, like so many others in the hospitality industry, when the pandemic forced restaurants to close, Toal was not only out of work but also missed out on furlough – so it was time for a rethink. “I guess lockdown made a lot of people re-evaluate and think about what they actually wanted,” she says, quick to point out how lucky she was to move to the coast at just the right time.

Toal created Tostada to unite her two passions: cooking and travel (and toast) (Roxanne Toal)

Feeling nostalgic for the kitchen, she started posting recipes and photos from her travels and instantly struck a chord with cooped-up home chefs in search of some escapism. “People were saying it was brightening up their day. I tried to share recipes because a lot of people started cooking and had a bit more time to do it,” she says.

Tostada was the perfect platform to combine her two loves: eating and travel (I wryly point out there is also a third love: toast, AKA tostada.

“I think I go on about toast a little too much,” she says (she does!). Her love for Spanish cuisine stems from the time she spent in Menorca with her family when she was younger: “I’ve been going there since I was a child because – I’m very lucky – my parents have a house out there. That’s where my whole love story with Spain started.”

Later, she moved to Menorca then studied Spanish in Salamanca before moving to Madrid. She returned in 2016.

“I absolutely loved Madrid,” she says. “It’s the most beautiful city and people are friendly but it still feels huge. It’s got a lot of little things.”

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Like most of us, she longs to travel again but speaks even more passionately about the dining culture in Spain. “I remember when I was younger everyone would gather around the table to eat. They would sit there for hours and it was like a whole event. Spanish people rarely just sit in front of the telly and eat their tea.” Perhaps that’s where the idea for the paella kits originated. “It’s that thing of: the paella gets put down in the middle of the table and everyone digs in and shares and chats,” she muses. “It’s that informal style of dining where you all have to get involved. That’s what I love about a lot of the dishes from Spain.”

Launching a meal kit designed to bring people together over a large pan of delicious food to share in the middle of a pandemic – when most people are forced to eat their tea in front of the telly – was an unexpected stroke of genius that even Toal still can’t quite believe. She says: “It took off more than I ever imagined it would.”

The kits proved to be hugely popular, with Toal whipping up a new batch almost every week to keep up with demand and coming up with new flavour combinations, such as a vegan version with wild mushroom, leek, fresh black truffle, lemon and saffron aioli.

“If you haven’t been to Spain and enjoyed a really good paella, then you don’t know what you’re missing out on. I was craving authentic paella, and wanted others to enjoy it too,” she says. “The idea came to me really because I couldn’t go to Spain and thought: ‘Well, I’m just going to bring a little bit to me’.” And to the rest of us, too. Initially the paella kits were a test but after she saw how popular they were after they launched, they became a staple of the brand. 

The paella kit with everything you could possibly need, including a paellera pan (Roxanne Toal/Tostada)

That’s not to say there wasn’t a lot of trial and error. Keeping things sustainable is given and it was certainly important to Toal but not as easy as everyone might assume. “A lot of time and effort that people don’t see goes into researching packaging and finding eco-friendly options. It’s not as widely available, it’s not as cheap but I got there in the end,” she explains. Sourcing the best of the best was also important when it came down to the ingredients in the kits, she says. “I tried to find the best possible local suppliers that I could, like my local farm where I get my vegetables is zero-waste and organic. I’m very lucky with where I live as well as I’m by the coast so I have a local fish quay, where I get all my fish from.” For the seafood option, she sourced monkfish, prawns and mussels and for the veggies there’s marinated artichokes, Navarrico red peppers and organic green and broad beans.

This respect for the origins of ingredients and how they’re treated is also something she picked up in Spain. “They’re very good at having quite simple food but with amazing ingredients treated really well,” she says. “It just tastes so different, so fresh and so lovely. There’s so much love put into the food. They really care about it and I like that.” Here, there is a huge difference in taste between salad tomatoes you can buy in a supermarket and the fresher, usually organic, by-the-kilogram kind you find in more local shops, she says. “There’s a huge difference in the quality of ingredients, though sometimes I think that can be underestimated. I can’t tell people how much of a difference there is. The difference in taste is insane.”

While we were all nursing our sourdough starters last year, Toal’s home became the Tostada test kitchen. “I practised and practised and we ate a lot of paella leading up to it. I think my husband is sick of paella now,” she laughs. Getting her recipe down to a T was one thing but turning it into a postable product that people could then recreate in their own home was quite another. “I was trying to make it easy for people to make so that it was still enjoyable but so they’d still have the feeling that they’d made it themselves.”

Egg and anchovies. Don’t underestimate what you can put on a piece of toast (Roxanne Toal/Tostada)

The desire to support one another seems rife in the food industry and among bloggers on social media at the moment, I point out. “When I started in kitchens it was quite a competitive industry but it definitely feels a bit more supportive,” Toal agrees, adding: “The hospitality industry has gone through such a hard time in the past year, everyone just understands what everyone else is going through and have decided to support each other. A lot more people have decided to support local or independent businesses and realised that they needed the help, which was really nice.”

Toal is the first to admit that she climbed a steep learning curve but when she sees the pictures of her paella kits in action, it’s all worth it. “I’ve had really nice feedback from people saying, ‘We feel like we’re on holiday, it smells like we’re on holiday, we’re going to pretend we’re in Spain tonight,’ and they’ve made sangria and everything. It was so nice to see that,” she says fondly. “A lot of people have said that it gave them that little bit of escapism that was needed during lockdown.”

The success of the kits has led to other collaborations, such as a postal picnic with Manchester’s All Day Cake, a Tostada-themed pizza with Flint Pizza in Newcastle, limited edition tea towels designed by Julie Ann-Smith, an artist in Brighton, and Dot Bagels in Newcastle for the “Juan and Only” bagel, with even more lined up. It’s all taking off now but if lockdown hadn’t happened in the first place, Tostada might never have been brought to life. There was also a mental block: “I probably would have started Tostada years ago if it wasn’t for imposter syndrome and the fear of putting myself out there,” she tells me, adding that it’s still something with which she constantly battles.

The Romesco toast topper, perfect with grilled veg and a bit of sourdough (Roxanne Toal/Tostada)

“It’s a strange one because I think you wouldn’t expect a chef to be very shy but I always have been. I was very shy and quiet as a kid.” But she always had a passion for food so when lockdown gave her an opportunity, “I just went for it.” Despite the massive success of the kits, the collaborations and the growing fandom, there’s still a niggling sense of self-doubt: “You have all your friends and family telling you how amazing you are, that you should go off and do it, but until you put yourself out there and see other people enjoying it, you don’t really believe it. Although, I still don’t!”

This humility and constant need to acknowledge what she calls her “luck” – what most of us call hard graft – is what is most endearing about Toal, though I think it does her a bit of a disservice. She’s achieved all this as, “a one-woman band. I’m doing it all myself so it’s stressful, but in a good way. It’s more rewarding, the sense of achievement is higher,” she admits, after some probing.

So many of us find it hard to switch off and Toal feels that too: “Because it’s my own and I love what I’m doing, I want to work because I enjoy it,” she says. So what does this one-woman band sit back, relax and chomp down on after a busy day’s work? The answer should already be obvious. “My ultimate favourite thing is pan con tomate” (literally tomatoes on toast and a staple found at any cafe in Spain).

“That is my favourite thing to eat. When I say that to people, they say, ‘You’re a chef and your favourite thing is just tomatoes on toast?’ It’s just amazing...”, she trails off. Tostada wouldn’t have been complete without some kind of toast product – it’s the name of it, after all – so enter: toast toppers. A bit of a hark back to the Eighties’ condiment but a new and improved, and seriously delicious, version. There’s the Romesco, a rich red pepper and tomato sauce, perfect with grilled veggies; Sobrasada, paprika-cured Menorcan sausage spread, need I say more; and Dulce de Leche con Cafe, a caramel coffee flavour for sweet teeth.

Clearly, “there’s so many options,” she says, and as parting advice from this addict to another: “Don’t underestimate what you can put on a piece of toast.”