Spanish Seafood Recipes

There is no dish more famous than this Spanish seafood paella. Fortunately, it’s easier than you might think to make this mouthwatering dish from scratch in under an hour!

If you love paella, you'll definitely want to try my recipes for black paella, vegetable paella, and prawn and chorizo paella (my mother-in-law's favorite).

Even though this big plate of fragrant, saffron-infused rice is one of the most famous Spanish dishes, a goodpaella is often hard to find! That answer always leads to confused stares, but it’s true.

Spanish Seafood Stew

. It became popular on the sunny beaches of Valencia and Barcelona with visitors from around the world. This variation of paella is packed with fresh fish, shrimp, squid, mussels, and clams, but

If you’d like to see the full ingredients and instructions, scroll to the bottom of the post for the printable recipe card.

8. There are different opinions on the best method here, but I like to mix it into the sauce and cook it for a minute or so.

Spanish Seafood Salad Recipe

9. Add the broth mixture to the pan, and don't stir! This is key: once the broth is in, no stirring is allowed.

12. In the meantime, steam the mussels in a pot. Simmer a little water or wine, then add the closed mussels and cover. After a few minutes, the mussels will open. If any stay shut, simply discard.

13. Place the cooked mussels on the paella in a decorative way. When the rice has cooked for 18-20 minutes total, it should be done.

Spanish Seafood And Chorizo Stew

To get the perfect crispy bottom (socarrat), put it back on medium-high heat after the 3-minute rest. As soon as you hear crackling (some say it sounds like rain), remove it from the heat. This means you'll have a crispy

The secret ingredients in a great paella are using homemade sofrito, using real saffron instead of food coloring, and using homemade seafood stock instead of plain water to add extra flavor. There's also a special cooking technique you can use to make the perfect

My recipe for seafood paella doesn't contain fish; I prefer to use squid (calamari) instead in addition to prawns and mussels. However, you can use any type of firm fish that you'd like, such as monkfish.

Spanish Paella Recipe

How many does this recipe serve? This seafood paella recipe serves 4 people as a main dish, or 6 as a starter. You can plate in advance, or (what I prefer) is bringing the whole pan to the table and serving it family style.

). We order a paella for the table (prices are usually per person) and a bunch of tapas to eat while we wait for the rice to be prepared.

If you order a menú del día (a fixed price lunch menu) during the week, paella is usually served as the first course, with either meat or fish to follow as the main. In this case, you get a small portion of a large paella they've made in the kitchen and not a whole pan at your table.

Delicious Seafood Recipes

What tapas go well with paella? Typical tapas served with paella include cold soups (gazpacho or salmorejo), fried foods (croquettes or patatas bravas), or salads (ensalada mixta or ensaladilla rusa). Check out my other tapas recipes for other ideas.

Make Ahead: You can prepare the sofrito for seafood paella in advance, but I don't recommend preparing the entire paella. If not eaten immediately, it is easy for the rice to become overcooked and soft.

Reheating: Heat up leftover paella on the stove or in the microwave. I recommend taking it out of the fridge about 30 minutes before reheating, then put some olive oil in a frying pan and gently stir fry the paella until warmed through.

Spanish Seafood Stew Recipe

This easy seafood paella recipe will get you a plate of rice every bit as delicious as the stuff served in tapas bars from Barcelona to Valencia! Just make sure to bring an empty stomach.

Calories: 620.73 kcal | Carbohydrates: 84.56 g | Protein: 14.35 g | Fat: 19.66 g | Saturated Fat: 2.84 g | Cholesterol: 53.38 mg | Sodium: 928.04 mg | Potassium: 452.35 mg | Fiber: 2.7 g | Sugar: 5.06 g | Vitamin A: 1297.2 IU | Vitamin C: 13.66 mg | Calcium: 81.03 mg | Iron: 2.76 mgSally 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.

Authentic 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.

Easy Seafood Paella Recipe (full Tutorial)

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).

Classic Spanish Seafood Stew

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.

Fideuà (spanish Seafood Noodle Paella)

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.

Caldereta (spanish Seafood Stew)

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.

Spanish Paella Recipe (seafood, Chicken, & Chorizo)

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