Seafood Arroz Valenciana Recipe

This saffron-infused paella recipe is loaded with mussels, clams, and shrimp. Grill it in your biggest skillet for best flavor (no special pan required). Paella serves a crowd for your next cookout!

Sally is the author of four cookbooks and is a regular correspondent for the Boston Globe Wednesday Food Section. She also is a food photographer.

A festive occasion calls for a big statement, and this paella is just that: a colorful rice dish bursting with clams, mussels and shrimp along with smoky chorizo and saffron for tons of flavor. You don’t need much else to serve alongside it, but you could make a green salad if you feel inspired.

Spanish Paella Recipe

Set the whole pan of paella on your picnic table, and bring out some crusty bread and wine glasses. Summer is just too short not to celebrate it with friends.

The origins of paella are ancient, rooted in the area around Valencia, Spain near the Albufera Lagoon, where both fishing and rice growing dominated the region for centuries.

Paella was the food of farm workers who cooked dishes of rice over wood fires, embellished with whatever ingredients they could find.

Spanish Seafood Paella Recipe: How To Make Classic Paella At Home!

The dish is named for the wide, shallow pan in which the paella is cooked. The word paella is from a Valencian dialect meaning “pan, ” probably derived from the Latin word patella for pan.

While you can buy a paella pan and even a special outdoor paella grill for cooking it, it's easy enough to adapt the traditional paella method to our home kitchens without a lot of extra fuss.

Since I don’t possess a paella pan, I used the largest sturdy skillet in my collection of pans. A cast iron pan would be ideal but mine was not big enough and I found my heavy skillet worked just fine. Lacking a large skillet, you could also use a medium-size roasting pan (approximately 14x10 inches).

Seafood Paella In The Style Of Jorge

Although you can cook paella entirely indoors on top of the stove, when you consider paella’s wood-fired origins, it makes total sense to cook it outside on the grill. For this recipe, I started it on the stove indoors while the grill heated, and then finished it on the grill. Even, steady, medium heat is the goal.

Paella is the mother of all the one-pot meals, so it makes a supreme party dish. Improvisation rules the day, since even in Spain the issue of what ingredients should go in paella is hotly disputed, making it impossible for foreigners, let alone Spaniards, to dictate them strictly.

Paella is essentially a rice dish, and the type of rice does make a difference. Spanish bomba rice, a medium-grained stubby rice that absorbs liquid well but maintains some firmness when it cooks, is preferred.

Authentic Seafood Paella Recipe With Saffron • Hip Foodie Mom

The crispy bits! Once the stock comes to a simmer, don’t stir it. As the paella cooks, the rice stays on the bottom and forms a crusty golden bottom layer in the finished dish. This crust of rice is called

For this seafood paella, you can use fish or shellfish stock if you like and if you can find a good source for it, but I actually prefer chicken stock. It adds a depth of flavor, and as the shellfish cook, you get plenty of sweet, briny juices to flavor the rice. Be sure to taste the stock and season it with salt if necessary.

Saffron is a key ingredient, too. These orange-red threads are actually the dried stigmas of crocus flowers. Crumbled into a pot of hot stock, saffron adds an earthy, floral, and somewhat mysterious flavor to your paella. It imbues the rice with a gorgeous golden color, too.

Mixed Seafood Paella

Saffron is a fairly expensive spice, but thankfully you only need a few threads to season a whole dish of paella. It also keeps for a fairly long time as long if it's stored in an airtight container and kept out of direct sunlight, so you don't need to worry about using up your extra saffron right away.

. Sofrito lays the groundwork for all the flavors in the dish to mingle; think of it as priming a canvas before making a painting.

I chose shrimp, clams, and mussels for this seafood version of paella, and Spanish dry-cured chorizo for its smoky, meaty flavor. Chorizo can be a controversial add-in and not all Spanish cooks agree that it belongs in paella, so skip it if you like. You can also substitute other cooked sausages and add some smoked paprika to taste to achieve the desired flavor.

Seafood Paella (paella De Marisco)

If you have trouble finding Spanish chorizo, substitute another kind of cooked sausage along with 1 teaspoon of smoked paprika (for the smoky flavor).

No grill? Cook this inside! Cook the paella through step 6 on top of the stove. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Add the seafood (step 7), cover the pan tightly with foil and finish cooking in the oven for 6 to 10 minutes or until the rice and shrimp are both cooked through and the mussels and clams are open. Check to see if the bottom has browned and, if not, set the pan over medium heat for a minute or two to allow the bottom layer of rice to caramelize.

*The % Daily Value (DV) tells you how much a nutrient in a food serving contributes to a daily diet. 2, 000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice.

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Nutrition information is calculated using an ingredient database and should be considered an estimate. In cases where multiple ingredient alternatives are given, the first listed is calculated for nutrition. Garnishes and optional ingredients are not included.

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I love eating paella. And one of my favorite things about it is how many different ways there are to make it. Honestly, no two Paella Valenciana recipes will be alike, and I love that.

Easy Seafood Paella Recipe

Paella Valenciana is, simply put, paella from the Valencia region – it is generally considered to be the most authentic and traditional version of paella. Which begs the question, what is paella? Paella (meaning “frying pan”) is a Spanish rice dish made using a variety of ingredients. The rice is noticeably yellow due to the use of saffron in the recipe.

What ‘authentic’ paella Valenciana is comprised of has been a debated issue. As with many traditional rice dishes, every family has a separate way of preparing their “authentic” version of paella Valenciana.

The ingredients vary from household to household but the premise remains the same, a delicious Spanish rice dish filled with a variety of flavors. Many accounts of authentic Spanish paella Valenciana list chicken, rabbit, and varieties of Spanish green beans as the original ingredients.

Seafood Paella With Pork And Chicken Recipe

By that account, this paella recipe is probably not the most classical take as it involves a mixture of chicken and seafood (which is sometimes called

However, this version was shown to me and referred to as an authentic paella Valenciana by a lovely Spanish chef, and out of respect to her, I’m calling it a (Seafood) Paella Valenciana too.

Paellas use quite a few different ingredients (don’t skimp, or you risk losing that hearty paella feel!), but they come together wonderfully.

The Best Easy Seafood Paella

While there are several ingredients involved in making a paella, there are thankfully only a few steps required to make this delicious chicken and seafood paella.

Start by heating a paellera (or any large flat skillet) over a medium-high heat and adding olive oil. Once it’s hot, add the onion, garlic, red bell pepper and saffron (this is called the sofrito, and forms the base of your paella’s flavor).

Cook for around ten minutes, stirring frequently until the mixture becomes fragrant. Push the sofrito to one side (or, if your pan isn’t large enough, you can move the mixture to another bowl temporarily), add the chopped chicken and cook until golden brown. Set the chicken aside.

Valencian Seafood Paella

Add the rice to your paellera, and cook for two to three minutes, mixing with the paella sofrito already in the pan. Add the seafood stock, season to taste with salt and pepper. Once the stock begins to boil, add in the calamari, shrimp, mussels, roasted red peppers, and peas.

Cook at low to medium heat for approximately fifteen minutes, or until the rice is completely cooked through. (The fish often cooks quicker than the rice, but double-check your seafood is cooked too please!) Mix the cooked chicken