Your complete guide to mastering the Spanish essential and scoring perfect soccarat
Jeff KoehlerPaella comes from the countryside around Valencia, where it began as a humble dish for workers in the orchards and vegetable fields. They simmered what ingredients they could find—tomatoes, beans, rabbit, snails—in a wide pan over the cuttings of orange trees before adding rice to absorb the flavors and make a filling midday meal. From there, paella drifted into villages and then cities and eventually became Spain’s national dish.
Along the way, it became a tourist-trap staple. It’s an unfortunate truth: Few restaurants serve decent paella, even in Spain. Industrially produced frozen versions, tricks like doctoring parboiled rice with coloring additives in place of saffron, and nontraditional ingredients like lobster and chorizo are a common, dispiriting sight.
Paella is at its best cooked at home, made with traditional, shortcut-free technique and served the moment it’s ready to an appreciative crowd. It’s something I learned 20 years ago when I moved to Spain and married into a family with roots in Valencia for whom making paella has been a weekend ritual for more than 40 years. Nothing in Spanish cooking compares to carrying a massive pan of golden-brown rice out to the table, or the pleasures of digging into one.
Go the extra mile to use bone-in meats and whole shrimp and prawns. Remember how all the other ingredients are mostly there to flavor the rice? Bones, shells, and heads mean deeper flavors in the stock that the rice cooks in.The traditional wide, shallow pan gives the dish its name—paella means “pan” in Valencian and Catalan—and it allows the rice to cook evenly without being stirred, which aids the formation of a crispy socarrat. A generously sized pan also doubles as a communal plate.
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