Italian Paella Recipe

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.

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.

Best Paella Ever · I Am A Food Blog

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.

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.

Vegetable Paella, Italian Style Recipe

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).

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.

Try Our Easy Weeknight Paella Recipe

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.

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

Veggie Paella Recipe

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.

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.

Italian Seafood Paella

. 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.

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

Seafood Paella Recipe (step By Step), Saffron Infused Rice With Giant Head Prawn, Mussles And Blue Crab

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.

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.

Chicken & Chorizo Paella

When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests. You can find out more about our use, change your default settings, and withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future by visiting Cookies Settings, which can also be found in the footer of the site. I make no claims to be an expert in paella making, in fact I’ve only attempted to make an authentic version once, and it turned out just ok. I much prefer to put an Italian twist on my own version of paella. You see I’m not such a big fan of saffron, which so happens to be one of the star ingredients in traditional paella. It’s not that I dislike it, I just hardly ever cook with it, so it’s not really a “go to” spice for me.

So instead of flavoring my rice with saffron which by the way produces a beautiful color and unique flavor, I like to flavor my rice with a roasted red pepper puree. Not conventional, but it does taste amazing and it creates a beautiful golden red color to the rice.

 In the past I’ve made and posted here on my blog, an all Vegetable Paella, a great party dish, main course or side. This time I wanted to change it up and do something different by adding a mix of Italian sausage and chicken, some red and yellow peppers and broccolini.

Easy Seafood Paella Recipe (full Tutorial)

 After you saute your onions and garlic you add in your rice with red pepper puree and then spread and flatten the rice to cover the bottom of your pan. I use a wide 14″ paella pan with a hard anodized bottom. Now have some fun and place and arrange creatively all your colorful ingredients around the pan.  The last thing you do is carefully ladle warm broth on top of everything.

 The end result is a spectacular pinwheel of color, delicious rice, a one pan meal that has a WOW factor with really not much effort at all, providing you do a little prep work beforehand.

 Paella is the perfect party dish, put it in the middle of your table and everybody digs in! I can’t wait until the snow melts because the next one I make will be out on my grill. maybe with some seafood.

Weeknight Paella Recipe