Paella

The finished Paella looks awesome!

Probably the biggest challenge to make a good Paella is picking the right ingredients. It's probably one of the harder dishes to shop for. But once you figure out where to get the ingredients, Paella is both easy to make and amazingly delicious.

There are some tricks to picking easy ingredients, but when you find them, they make preparation very quick; for example, pre-sliced mushrooms, canned diced tomatos, and olive & garlic mix are pre prepared ingredients you can buy that shorten the cooking time dramatically. And Saffron. The liquid base is flavored throughout with Saffron.

Basically here are all the ingredients

There are only a few tricks to getting this dish right, but once you have it down, it is actually very easy and can have amazingly savory flavors.

Paella goes really well with any wine - it's not at all finicky. It is good with cabernets, pinot noirs, sangria, and champagne. It is also great with beer and a Caipirinha.

Ingredients:
- linguica, pre-cooked is preferable, about 4 inch piece
- olive oil
- diced tomatos (canned diced tomatoes or fresh)
- about 4-5 chicken thighs with the bone in, skinned
- mushrooms (pre-sliced or whole)
- Paella rice, about 1 1/4 cup
- 1 onion
- a few cloves of garlic chopped coarsely
- olives, garlic, pimento, caper mixture (also called alcaparrado, see notes on this below)
- shellfish; shrimp and/or mussels are nice, about 1/2 lb each
- chicken broth about 2 cups (or beef broth)
- anchovy
- cilantro
- saffron

Notes:
I'll write these notes first, because there are a few tricks to Paella. The right ingredients matter for this dish, and substitutions are not a good idea.
- Paella rice, do not substitute, it is an important ingredient. It is not too hard to find.
- Linguica can tricky. There are a lot of styles. Pre-cooked is preferred, and try to find one that is not too firm, not too soft. The important thing to remember is to buy one that you like, one that tastes fine all alone, and you'll be fine.

- You can find an olive mix in the deli section in jars, or make a mix yourself from the olive bars in a Safeway or Whole Foods. We made this mix ourselves by just going around the Whole Foods olive bar. It turned out awesome because we picked just the ingredients we

We made our own alcaparado from the
Whole Foods olive bar, it was delicious

- You can save a ton of time with canned or bottled ingredients. Diced tomatoes can be found in a can. Mushrooms are easy to find pre-slice now. All these little things can save a lot of time and make this dish more fun and easy.
- Shellfish can be mixed any way you like. Get 2 or 3 that you like. We usually use shrimp and mussels. Clams are fine. So are squid or scallops.
- The main trick in the technique is getting everything done at the same time; the chicken, the rice, the shellfish.
- The only cooking trick is that it is very easy to burn the bottom of the rice, so you have to be careful with the right heat.


Procedure:

Cooking the chicken and linguica

- This recipe goes fast, so it is very important to prep everything first; slice onion and garlic, skin off the chicken, slice linguica, peel shrimp, etc, etc
- Heat the broth to boiling in a separate pan
- In olive oil, brown the chicken thighs and slices of linguica
- After chicken is browned on both sides, toss in onions, garlic and mushrooms, cook a couple minutes
- Toss in paella rice, coat with oil and fat
- Toss in diced tomatoes, olive mixture
- Toss in a few crushed anchovies, you won't actually taste the anchovy, but they will impart a savory flavor to the dish.
- Add in hot broth
- Sprinkle saffron on top, it needs to infuse the broth

Adding the mushrooms and onion

- Turn the heat pretty far down - Cover and simmer 15-20 minutes. This is a tricky heat level, the broth needs to boil, but since you cannot stir the dish at this point, it is easy to burn the rice in the bottom of the pan, so get the heat as low as you can while still boiling gently.

Just added the broth and starting the simmer

- The rice should be near done in 15-20 minutes, put the shellfish in a layer on top, and toss on some cilantro (as much as you like)
- Cover and cook the whole thing another 5 minutes until the mussels open and/or the shrimp are done