I’m a fan of Paella, the national dish of Spain made with rice, that can include meats, seafood, sausages and vegetables. I posted about it a few years back and have included the recipe below.
Paella is the perfect definition of a one pot meal. There’s something exciting and vital about paella that can be missing from other one pot meals-like pork and beans for instance. Not that I have anything against pork and beans. They’re nice and homey and brown.
Paella can easily be made with ingredients from the grocery store, with the possible exception of saffron. But if you are lucky like we are in the Bay Area it can be an excuse to go to The Spanish Table in Berkeley to get all things Paella. Front and center on their home page is the word “PAELLA” in large yellow letters.
They sell authentic paella pans which are flat and round allowing lots of surface area for the crispy browned rice crust that forms on the bottom. They have Spanish sausages, a paella spice blend (so you don’t have to purchase smoked paprika, and saffron separately), and paella rice which is a very short grained white rice. Additionally they offer three paella cookbooks and other ingredients to spruce up your paella like squid ink and cooking bases for a variety of paellas.
This past weekend Kim and Erik invited us over to initiate their brand new paella pan. It was my first time cooking paella on an outdoor grill over smoldering wood. Kim, had picked up fennel, onion, and garlic for the base. She went to Spanish Table and in addition to the paella pan purchased chorizo, rice and the paella spice blend. Next she picked up chicken thighs with the skin on and bone in (for best flavor, you want the skin and the bone on the thigh’s), and she had some lovely thin sweet red peppers from the farmers market. Lastly there was homemade tomato confit and chicken broth in her kitchen to make our paella even more delicious.
The hardest part was regulating the heat with a live fire. We used the olive oil from the confit as our cooking oil, it would only add even more flavor. First we seasoned the chicken with salt and pepper and browned it, next we removed it from the pan and added the fennel, onion, and garlic and sautéed until the vegetables were soft. Since we were unfamiliar with the paella spice blend we added about 1 1/2 T of it to the vegetables, it is a mild blend and we could have added more without it being too spicy. We slightly toasted the spices by sautéing a minute or two and then added the rice to the pan, cooking an additional minute or so. Next the chicken was returned to the pan, and the chorizo, tomatoes, red peppers, and chicken broth were added. We brought it all to a boil and let it cook about 10 minutes and then moved the grill to a higher setting to continue to simmer the paella an additional 10 minutes.
While the paella was cooking Kim made her classic aioli by hand the old fashioned way in a mortar and pestle. It’s a real challenge to make aioli that way, it can easily break (meaning the egg and oil don’t blend and become grainy) but Kim’s came out thick and golden. We placed the cooked paella on a garden bench and served ourselves generous portions of paella with a dollop of aioli and drank chilled rose in the garden. I had brought an almond cake with sea salt frosting for dessert.
Paella is very photogenic in all circumstances, but when you add an outdoor grill, whole thin red peppers, and tomato confit…well it’s just breath taking!
Thanks Kim and Erik for a wonderful evening!
If you’d like to try making paella, here’s my previously posted Paella recipe.
