Paella

Paella is one of those dishes, like barbecue, that can spark endless heated debate. Everyone makes it differently, and everyone has found that one particular paella that is the apotheosis of paella. After that pinnacle is reached, no other paella will ever compare.

For example, some people swear that paella that isn't made in Valencia can never be true paella, due to the quality of the water in Valencia. And some people say that paella can not have both seafood and chicken in the same dish. (I happen to like it that way, though.) And then there are the paellas that are made with vermicelli (pasta), or beans, or the original, which is made with rabbits and snails, with no seafood in sight.

My Dad had a perfect paella in New York about 30 years ago, and nothing since has ever come close. For a few years now I've tried recreating that dish, and the response is always the same: "It's good, but it's not it."

This year, it was time to step it up a notch. In the past, I had attempted to make this dish by throwing some stuff into a casserole dish and throwing the whole thing in the oven for a while, but I realized that this inauthentic approach was just not going to cut it. It would never be that paella.

Therefore, it was time to ponder the variables that are generally considered part of an authentic paella. Most importantly, it's made in a paella pan. This is a large, shallow, circular pan that is ideally made of carbon steel. To be super-authentic, this pan is set over a wood fire, but I wasn't feeling that ambitious--obtaining the pan was just about the height of my aspirations. Part of the reason the pan is so important is because it enables the formation of a brown crust on the bottom of the dish. The brown crust is called soccarat, and some people claim that it's the key to a great paella, and in Spain, people apparently fight over the crusty bits.

(The Paella Pan)

Also of importance is the rice--short-grain rice is a necessity, and if you want to be really accurate, Bomba and Calasparra are preferred. However, these rice varieties can be difficult to find, so Arborio or Carnaroli are acceptable in a pinch.

Paprika is a part of all paellas, and smoked Spanish paprika is the ideal choice. This particular type of paprika can also be difficult to find, but it's worth ordering online because it's far more complex than regular paprika, and the smokiness will lend the finished dish that little 'something.' However, if you would like to use normal paprika, just make sure it's the 'sweet' variety, as opposed to the 'hot' variety.

Roasted red peppers are frequently a part of paella, and piquillo peppers are supposedly the best available. They're roasted over wood fires and retain their texture a bit better than normal roasted red peppers. Or so I hear. I had ordered some for this version of paella, but they didn't arrive in time, so experimenting with them will happen on another occasion.

So when it came time to attempt a more authentic version of paella, most of the key components were in place, and overall it was a success. We got a little bit of brown crust, and one tiny bit where the crust was a bit too brown. The paella was flavorful and delicious, and it was fun to eat, partially because the way it's brought to the table in a really big pan is in itself so entertaining.

If you decide to make the recipe as it's printed below, I apologize for the rather vague timing instructions. Ours took a while for the rice to cook (about 50 minutes), but I think that has a lot to do with the fact that I was afraid of burning the bottom, so I kept the heat a bit lower than the original recipe instructs. However, I left the directions as far as heat and timing pretty close to the original, as I feel it's probably correct; I just tweaked a few things (like the use of tinfoil), which I discuss in the recipe below. Your cooking times may also vary based on the size of your stove, so basically, just be careful as you cook--watch, listen, and smell, and you'll end up with a delicious dinner. Or, like I say each time we're about to embark on a new culinary adventure--you can always order some pizza.

Paella

(Inspired by This Recipe)

• 1 5 lb bag mussels
• 3 large, ripe tomatoes
• 10 blanched almonds, ideally Marcona
• 3 cloves garlic
• Packed 1/4 cup Italian parsley
• 1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 package dried chorizo, cut into 1/4 inch slices
• 1 pound shrimp, peeled
• 2 teaspoons sweet pimentón de la Vera (Spanish smoked paprika)
• Kosher salt
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 1½ pounds chicken thighs, preferably boneless and skinless
• ¼ teaspoon saffron threads
• 4½ cups chicken stock
• ½ cup dry sherry
• 2 cups Calrose rice
• 2 red peppers, roasted, peeled, and cut into 1/4-inch strips, then cut in half lengthwise
• About 1 bottle beer (lager works well)
• 1 cup frozen peas

Place the mussels in a bowl of very cold water and place the bowl in the fridge. Every 30-40 minutes or so, change the water (for a total of at least 2 water changes). Slice tomatoes in half, and grate each on a box grater over a bowl. Discard skins; set pulp aside. In a food processor or mortar, puree parsley, garlic and almonds with a tablespoon or two of water until smooth.

Heat 1/2 tablespoon olive oil in a large pan over high heat. Add chorizo pieces to pan and cook until lightly browned. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside. Season shrimp with salt and 1/2 teaspoon paprika. Sear the shrimp in the hot pan until golden brown and almost cooked through.

With a slotted spoon, remove shrimp. Season chicken pieces with salt and pepper, add to same pan, and brown on one side until deep golden. Remove chicken from pan and set aside.

Set 18-inch paella pan over two burners at high heat on the stove top, and heat 1/3 cup olive oil. Add tomato pulp and cook until darkened, about 5 minutes. Add 1 1/2 teaspoons paprika and 1/4 teaspoon saffron, and cook for about 1 minute. Add chicken pieces and sherry and cook until sherry is evaporated (you'll have liquid in the pan, but no longer be able to smell the sherry). Add chicken stock; bring to a boil.

Stir garlic, almond and parsley puree into the pan. Sprinkle rice across the pan and stir until the grains are submerged, then don't stir again. Add red peppers. Cook on high heat for 10 minutes, rotating the pan on the two burners to distribute heat. Using a small spoon, test rice and stock and add salt as needed.

Reduce heat to medium-low and continue cooking for 10 minutes. Test rice again. If the rice is drying out but still needs some more cooking time in order for it to tenderize, add some beer (or water or chicken stock) to the dry spots. The amount of beer needed will vary greatly depending on your rice, heat, etc., but we used about a bottle of beer.

If the rice is still hard, turn the heat down to low and continue to cook the rice until all parts of the dish are tender. You might need to intermittently cover the pan with a big sheet of tin foil. I wish that I could give you more specific directions, but I think that this is one of those dishes that you have to watch and play with, at least until you're practiced with it. We found that our total cooking time for the rice was about 50 minutes, about 10 of which were covered.

When all of the rice is tender but a little bit of extra liquid remains in the pan, scatter the mussels over the top, scatter the shrimp and peas around. Cover with tin foil and cook for about 5-7 more minutes, until the mussels are open.

In this last little part, listen for a crackling sound to ensure the bottom is toasting but not burning. It might be necessary to increase the heat to medium-high, but again, listen and pay attention to the dish. Remove from heat, leave the foil cover in place, and let sit for 5 minutes.

Use a metal spoon to scrape toasted rice from bottom of pan and serve.

Deconstructed Paella, or Paella-Inspired Risotto, and Chicken Picatta with Preserved Lemon Risotto

I mentioned in one of the previous posts that I was planning to make something with the saffron that I thought I would have left over from another dinner, but didn't because I burnt the first batch while toasting it. I also mentioned that I was doing something top secret.

Well, the time has come for me to reveal my under-cover project. There's a group of bloggers who call themselves the Daring Cooks. There's also a group of Daring Bakers, but they're kind of out of my league, and I've mentioned that I'm not especially keen on having baked goods around the house, so I joined the Daring Cooks.

This is how it works--every month, someone is elected to pick a recipe of the month, which they post on the 17th. You then have until the 14th to make the recipe, per the specifications, and make a blog posting about it.

My first month's challenge was risotto. I was totally stoked about this, as I love risotto, and I recently found a large stash of Arborio rice in my spiffy kitchen drawer thingy. I've mentioned the zombie hoarding issues, but I haven't yet mentioned the moth issue.

Yeah, there were moths breeding in my spiffy drawer thing. It was really gross, and I probably shouldn't mention it in any kind of public arena, but I can assure you that the offending breeding ground was thoroughly eradicated. Anything that was not very tightly sealed was thrown out. I hate to be wasteful, but a lot of this stuff was a legacy of the hoarding days and was really old.

The Arborio rice, however, was tightly sealed and begging to be cooked. As Nick said, it was like they had read my mind.

In this Daring Cook's challenge, you can make a base recipe and elaborate from there, and you can also make the authors' recipe for Pumpkin Risotto or Preserved Lemon Risotto. Because of my Meyer lemon kick, Nick and I had actually recently discussed making preserved lemons. We talked about how it sounds pretty cool, but we weren't sure what to do with the lemons. Again, it was like they were reading my mind.

I mentioned the preserved lemon option to Nick, and we got to talking about what we would make with the preserved lemon risotto. One of us mentioned chicken cutlets, and Nick mentioned chicken Marsala. "Yeah, chicken piccata," I said, because I had been thinking the same thing. (That's what he meant, and I knew what he meant.)

Fortuitously, the risotto challenge also coincided with the arrival of Sunday Suppers at Lucques, which just happens to have a recipe for chicken piccata.

First, however, I had decided to do a paella-inspired risotto, partially because my Dad loves paella. And what do you know, Suzanne Goin has a recipe for saffron risotto in her book; it's really too bad I didn't follow it.

I meant to follow the recipe, but as I mentioned, I burned the saffron that was intended for this recipe. I also meant to buy more when we went to Wegman's to shop for dinner, but by the time we got to the saffron, Nick and I were totally hypoglycemic, so we had a very full shopping cart, so we decided that we didn't want to spend the $16 on the saffron. Plus, Nick was still a bit traumatized by the intensity of the saffron in the last dinner, and I was not too excited about a plasticky-tasting spice. So we left it out.

In retrospect, though, I think that the dish could have used it, and I also wish that I had added fresh thyme and a crushed chile de arbol like Suzanne Goin suggested. If I ever make this again, I probably really will use her saffron risotto recipe the way I had initially intended, and I'll probably throw in some paprika somewhere. I somehow forgot that it's a key component in paella.

I decided that this would be called "deconstructed" paella because paella and risotto take antithetical approaches to the cooking of rice. Risotto is cooked slowly and incrementally, with more liquid continually added as the previous portion of liquid is absorbed. Paella, however, gets liquid added to the rice, it's all covered, and it all (meat and seafood included) goes into the oven to cook undisturbed. It wouldn't really be possible to cook risotto in the same manner because it would then not be risotto, so it was all cooked separately and combined at the end. Hence, "deconstructed" paella.

We started by pan-searing some dried chorizo in an attempt to get some tasty fat in which to cook the rest of the ingredients. Surprisingly little fat was rendered, so we added some olive oil and sauteed a chopped onion. Then the rice was added, and it was toasted until it was glossy and only a little spot of white remained in the middle. White wine was then poured in and simmered away.

At this point, hot chicken stock was added a cup at a time, and the mixture was stirred frequently until it had reached the point where the rice was tender without being mushy, and the rice was kind of coated with a sauce-like liquid, but was not gloopy and gelatinous.

In the meantime, we caramelized some sliced shallots and roasted a red pepper. The red pepper was eventually peeled, thinly sliced, and added to the onions. We called this a shallot roasted red pepper confit.

We also peeled some shrimp, tossed them with garlic and salt, let them marinate, and pan seared them.

The mussels were steamed with garlic, onion, and beer. Unfortunately, I decided to see if it would work to throw everything in the pot and steam the mussels that way, partially because we had no butter available, and we had used the last of the olive oil. Now I know, though, that you really need to saute some aromatics before adding the mussels. The mussels weren't terrible, but they could have been more flavorful.

To put it all together, some peas and the sliced chorizo were stirred into the rice, and this was plated in a pile. The mussels went around the rice in a ring, and the red pepper shallot confit was placed on top of the rice. The shrimp went on top of the confit, and it was all garnished with chopped parsley.

The risotto was a bit under-seasoned both salt and herb-wise, and I've mentioned that the mussels weren't the most flavorful batch ever. Overall, though, it was a nice meal.

The confit was actually Nick's idea, and it was quite lovely added a note of freshness and flavor to the dish. We discussed ways in which, if we were to make it again, we could do much better, but none of us were sure if it is worth doing again.

We also discussed the fact that I managed to burn myself on the toaster oven. I wasn't even doing anything interesting. I was making toast, which is really quite lame. As Nick said, I can make 'deconstructed paella,' but can't make toast without giving myself a second degree burn.

I don't know if you can tell from this picture, but it went through the epidermis into the dermis. This picture is after a few days of healing; it actually looked bigger, and you could clearly see the two layers of skin.

So, while my Dad liked the paella, it just can't compare to the paella that he used to get in New York. That paella was the pinnacle of paella, and it is never to be duplicated. Paella is like that, though. There are a million different ways to make it, and everyone ends up with an ideal version in their minds, and no other paella will ever live up to that standard. It might be their grandmother's version, the version they had while sitting in a town square in Spain, or the one they had 30 years ago in New York.

I guess I'll never really get it right. Especially if I leave out the saffron and paprika. It's not really paella at all, then, is it?

So after the semi-successful paella, it was time for some preserved lemon risotto with chicken piccata, or, what Suzanne Goin calls Chicken Paillards with Parmesan Breadcrumbs. Before making the risotto, however, I had to make some more stock because the Daring Cooks stipulate that you must make your own stock.

There are a lot of approaches to making chicken stock, and they include using a whole chicken, a lot of chicken wings, chicken carcasses, and various other combinations of poultry parts. The stock suggested by the Daring Cooks uses a whole chicken, and they tell you to use the chicken meat for other purposes. I'm sorry guys, but for a multitude of reasons, I just didn't like that idea.

I used to make a recipe from Epicurious, but I've been finding it bland, so I decided to try Mario Batali's Brown Chicken Stock recipe because I like to freeze the bodies of the chickens that we've roasted and use them for stock.

This recipe involved browning the chicken carcasses, removing them to a plate, and sauteing the vegetables until they're soft and brown.

Per Suzanne Goin's brilliant suggestions, I substituted fennel for celery.

Water and herbs were added, and the mixture was simmered for a couple hours.

It turns out that heat was the element previously lacking in my stock-making procedure. Because the chicken and vegetables were seared, this stock was way more flavorful than any other I've made before, and I've decided that it is now my go-to stock recipe. Thanks, Mario.

Now that I had restocked my stock supply, it was time to make the risotto. As usual, an onion was sauteed, rice was cooked until it had a nice sheen, the pan was deglazed with white wine, and stock was added bit by bit.

Toward the end, some chopped preserved lemon peel was stirred in.

In the meantime, chicken breasts were pounded thin (which makes the bunnies really mad), and they were coated with flour, egg, and a panko breadcrumb, Parmesan, and parsley mixture.

They were then pan-seared until golden and just cooked through.

The chicken were removed, and garlic and a broken up chile de arbol were sauteed until aromatic, and the previously steamed broccolini was cooked. This step was supposed to involve sauteing escarole, and it was supposed to include rosemary. I decided, however, that we would prefer broccolini and rosemary wouldn't be so great with the broccolini.

When the broccolini was finished, butter was browned, poured into a little dish that we got in Mexico, and capers and parsley were stirred in. The recipe calls for lemon to be added to the brown butter, but it was already in the risotto so I didn't want to overwhelm the dish with lemon.

So how was it? Delicious. The risotto could have been salted more and cooked a bit longer, but it was still yummy. Also, we were cautious with the preserved lemon, but once the risotto was combined with the chicken, the lemon got a bit lost.

Nick said that his chicken was overcooked, but mine was perfect--tender and juicy, and the breadcrumb topping was deliciously crisp.

What really made the dish, though, was the caper sauce. I'm not always a fan of capers, but they're growing on me. The nuttiness of the brown butter, the freshness of the parsley, and the salty pungent element from the capers perfectly tied all of the other flavors together, and I just couldn't stop eating this meal.

Once again, this recipe made me really excited to try more of Suzanne Goin's recipes. So far, her recipes add up to more than the sum of their parts, which equals deliciousness.