Cooking at Home: Paella
Paella is a weekly Sunday lunch-with-the-extended-family kind of meal. A lot of houses (and some parks!) in Valencia have little huts like this one where they can cook paella and keep the heat and oil out of the house.
This paella hut looks like it's set up for wood flames, but this particular paella is being cooked with a gas flame.
These gas implements also can be fitted onto stands to put directly on the floor.
Although traditionally paellas are made over fire. Here's the kitchen of El Famos restaurant in Valencia. Notice the different sizes of paella pans! Bigger for more people, smaller for fewer.
A paella bubbling away.
Even though I have neither a paella hut nor fireplace nor gas paella cooker, I still have made paella at home a couple times.
First the ingredients. For my favorite paella valenciana, I have the garrofón, which are the broad lima-like beans, bomba rice, flat green beans, some grated tomato, and chicken legs and rabbit cut up. I just went to the poultry butcher (they always have rabbit too), and asked for meat for paella for two. And they went and found the parts and cut them up for me. Plus rosemary for the end of the cooking process.
Close up of the garrofón.
You first fry the garlic and tomatoes, and then cook the meat in the pan, and add the vegetables. Then add water to make a broth. After simmering for a while, add the rice.
It's quite difficult to cook a paella at home, because the burner size is so much smaller than even a small-ish paella pan! You must rotate the pan so it eventually cooks the rice evenly. Add in the rosemary sprigs at the end. The steam activates the rosemary and brings a perfume to the whole dish.
Tada! Hopefully in the future, once I've got the technique and measurements down right, I can better share the steps to making paella.
