Spanish Seafood Rice 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.

Spanish

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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

Easy

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.

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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.

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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.

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*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.

Spanish Seafood Rice

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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Comforting, healthy, and full of flavor, paella might just be the ultimate seafood dish. Originating in Valencia, Spain, it’s a very old peasant dish that can be made in many different ways depending on the meats and veggies that are in season. But, no matter how you make it, paella almost always features fragrant saffron and tender, short-grain rice, cooked to perfection with plenty of spices and seasonings.

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Seafood paella is especially popular stateside, with a medley of delicate favorites like scallops, shrimp, chopped fish, calamari…all-the-yum! My easy at-home version uses shrimp, mussels, and clams, but for substitution ideas, please see the “Tips for Success” section below.

If you feel a little intimidated by making paella, don’t be! This dish is actually pretty simple to make, and comes together all in one skillet (or paella pan, if you have one). But before we begin, let me warn you – you might just be blown away by the absolute deliciousness of this recipe! Let’s dive in – quick, before my mouth starts watering again.

Seafood

Great question! Well, there are a few dominant flavors in paella, including the seafood and seafood stock, which add a nice ocean-y freshness; white wine, which gives a bit of depth; saffron, which has a golden, earthy, slightly sweet taste; and of course, the sausage and garlic, for a meaty and robust flavor. In other words? Devastatingly delicious.

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So just what goes into this simple version of paella? Let’s take a closer look! Here’s the full list of ingredients in detail. (For the amounts and nutrition info, see the recipe card at the end of this post. It’s printable!)

This recipe is so rewarding to make! There are a few steps and processes involved, but the overall cooking method is easy. Try this one for a fancy occasion or favorite holiday.

When it’s time to clean and purge the clams, this basically amounts to two easy steps, but be aware that the purging step takes over an hour. Scrubbing just means using a brush, a clean kitchen towel, or even a sturdy paper towel to rub away any dirt from the clam shells under cold, running water. Don’t use hot water. Purging means soaking the clams in salted water (one gallon of cold water with ⅓ cup salt dissolved in it) for half an hour. You have to repeat this step with a new batch of salted water two or three times to get all the grit and sand out of the clams. This is why I just go straight to the seafood counter and ask them to gimme the cleaned and ready to go mussels and clams. I suggest you do the same. 😊

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Cleaning mussels is a bit easier than cleaning clams – all you have to