Rice and paella

Spaniards can happily talk for hours about food. One never-ending topic of conversation is the “best” way to make almost any traditional dish, from fabada to cocido. This piece is about paella, or maybe rice.

For a few years, I have made a rice dish at home that I describe as paella to Maggie. I would never make the mistake of describing it as paella to any Spanish person. I would always describe it as rice with things. That’s because I added things that are “not allowed” – like pepper and onions – and I use pre-prepared caldo, a ready-made broth, to cook it in. However wrong my version was it was a quick and easy meal for me to cook that we both liked. The principal taste came from the broth prepared by a company called Fallera, who ruined the whole thing by discontinuing the broth. Since then, I have tried several other ready-prepared broths and I’ve liked none of them. Next, I worked my way through a couple of varieties of packets of powdered flavourings that can be added to the water as the rice cooks. The most commonly available packet flavouring is called Carmencita which is produced by a firm from the nearby town of Novelda. I don’t like Carmencita and I didn’t like the other flavourings I tried. So, I set out on a round of supermarkets, grocers and butchers looking for different brands of seasoning or any overlooked broths. In most shops, I was able to have a look at what they had, and skip out if they had nothing new to offer. But in one of the butchers the assistant engaged me in conversation. I explained that I was looking for something to add flavour to the water I was cooking my rice in. The woman recommended Carmencita and, when  I said I didn’t care for it, disdain flashed across her face. “It’s what we all use,” she said. My foreigner status was underlined.

Alright, I thought. If I can’t do it the easy way, let’s do it properly. If I can’t make my own bastardised version, how should I really cook an authentic Paella Valenciana? I should stress here that there are all sorts of rice dishes which are perfectly acceptable to even the most picky of Spaniards. That’s why most Spaniards order most rice dishes as exactly that – as arroz, not as paella. Pinoso, for instance, is very proud of the quality of the rice with snails and rabbit that are produced in some of its restaurants. So, as long as you don’t bump into a purist and try to pass it off as Paella Valenciana, you can put exactly what you want in your rice, and some varieties, like arroz a banda, arroz negro, arroz con costra, arroz al horno, arroz del senyoret, arroz de bogavante, arroz de coliflor y bacalao, are all, more or less, standardised. Other regions also produce traditional rice dishes like caldero in Cartagena or arroz meloso in Albacete, of which they are equally proud. But Paella Valenciana is different. This is the one that’s a paella, not a rice.

So, paella has been around since the fifteenth century. The general consensus is that it has its origins in the area around Albufera, the big lake just to the south of Valencia city, where it was a peasant dish made from ingredients readily to hand. It wasn’t until 2011, though, that the Agriculture Ministry of the Valencian Community designed a set of standards to help maintain the authenticity of this product so identified with the region. They set up a D.O., denominación de origen, a sort of quality mark recognised on many Spanish foodstuffs and dishes. The D.O. said that a real paella could only contain these ingredients: rice, chicken, rabbit, bajoqueta or ferradura (types of beans), garrofó (another sort of bean), olive oil, water, saffron, tomato, and salt. Apparently, this was backed up – well, with a couple of provisos – by some research in 266 towns in Valencia when over 400 cooks over the age of 50 were  interviewed. The slight discordance was because a lot of these cooks also included sweet paprika, rosemary and, when in season, artichokes in their recipes, but they were, even then, minor ingredients in comparison to the ten essentials. What was equally revealing was what they never put into a paella. The no-nos are seafood, fish, peas, chorizo and broth.

Bear in mind that all of this is about Paella Valenciana. There are, as I said, lots of other accepted variations and anyone cooking rice at home or using their granny's recipe may well add things that "shouldn't" be there. 

And, finally, here are  some of the list of tips/comments from one of the chef presenters of MasteChef Spain. 

Valencian paella is not cooked with broth, but with water.
The ideal rice for Valencian paella is short-grain, preferably bomba.
The layer of rice should be very thin; that’s why a big, wide pan is used in the first place.
Every good paella should have a bit of socarrat in the pan. Socarrat is dried out, nearly burned, rice that sticks to the bottom of the pan.
The very best paellas are cooked over fires fuelled by wood.
And the reason it’s called paella is that it’s cooked in a pan called a paella. The cook is called a paellera.

Where it's practical the paella is not plated but is eaten directly from the paella pan which is placed in the centre of the table. This is definitely one of the more "flexible" suggestions/commands.

So, first, catch your rabbit.

Eating to learn

One of the questions that Spaniards ask me, from time to time, is "Have you ever tried.......?" The dots represent some typical, local food. It's a question that makes me feel unloved. They obviously suspect that I sit at home listening to the BBC wearing my Union Flag socks and eating Chicken Tikka Masala.

It might, I suppose, be a reasonable question at times. Imagine we have a Spaniard who has lived in Notting Hill for fifteen years. I say, "Have you ever tried Parkin?" or "Have you ever tried bubble 'n' squeak?" They are not common foods. On the other hand were my question to be, "Have you ever tried roast beef and Yorkshire pudding?" the question verges on the insulting. I do understand where a Spaniard might get the BBC and socks idea though. The Spanish TV News has been full of Brexit the last couple of days and the cameras went in search of the British immigrant response. They went to places like San Fulgencio where they filmed immigrant Britons reading the Daily Mail as they tucked into a Full English at outside tables in the sun.

I don't eat in Spanish homes very often but the last twice that I have the food has been spectacular. It was Arroz al Horno, oven baked rice, in the first and Cocido in the second. Arroz al Horno translates easily but Cocido doesn't; the verb simply means cooked and the noun is a stew. Neither convey the complexity of Cocido.

I've had Cocido in restaurants only a couple of times in all the years that I've been here. On the plate it usually looks like a sort of half stew; lots of thin gravy with a selection of chickpeas, vegetables and potatoes that have been cooked until they are very soft alongside some cheap cuts of meat cooked for ages to make them tender. I thought that was what the real thing looked like and that I knew two factual things about Cocido. As it turns out both were wrong. The first was that it's a dish linked with Madrid. Our hosts were very firm that it is typical of Valencia too.  The second was that the home-made version produced two courses from one pot cooking. I had it in my head that the chickpeas, meat and other veg, were cooked inside a muslin bag, so that their flavours seeped into the water producing a broth which was then used to produce a noodle soup, whilst the meat and veg were served as the second course.

It's not that I was far off in my idea but it's a bit like making tea in a microwave. It might work but it's just not right. In fact, traditionally, the chickpeas go inside the muslin bag but not the meat. The veg, things like cabbage, potatoes, turnips and carrots are cooked apart. The broth is used to make the soup (photo at left) but some is kept back to serve with the meat. Then again I also suspect that originally Cocido was a dish designed to use up left overs and that there are as many versions of Cocido as there are people who make it. Google certainly presented me with a wide variety of recipes. The one we had yesterday had the pelotas -the meat balls I talked about when I went to the Cuadrillas in Patiño - and black pudding sausages and turkey legs as well as knee joints and ham-bone. To be fair it's not an attractive looking dish but it tasted great. The cook said that the whole lot had taken hours to prepare. Her effort was my gain both culturally and weight wise.

A couple of days after eating the Arroz al Horno I had a go at making one at home. I thought my effort was OK and Maggie didn't complain as she ate it all up. I don't think I'll be having a go at the Cocido though. Far too complicated.

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The photos are just from somewhere on the Internet.

It's just rice

I was going to say that we had a famous restaurant in Pinoso then I thought about it. Obama is famous and Shakira too but I don't think that even restaurants as well known as el Celler de Can Roca are really famous. Well known maybe?

So there's a restaurant in Pinoso that's quite famous and it's famous for the local rice dish. I worked for a couple of years in a street very close to the restaurant. Time after time some big Audi or Porsche or Bentley would pull up alongside me, roll down the window and ask politely for the restaurant. My reply was word perfect I'd done it so often

This well known Pinoso restaurant is renowned amongst the locals for the unpleasantness of its owner and the outrageous price of its food. After all it's just rice. I've heard that said by Britons and Spaniards alike. I've never been. Too expensive for my wallet.

I need to take a moment here to make sure you're OK on this rice/arroz concept. Paella and rice are virtually synonymous. The big flat pan that rice is cooked in is called a paella and so the food cooked in it came to be called paella. In reality though paella/rice can vary significantly from the original Vesta recipe. In Valencia paellas seem to have a lot of seafood, chicken and veg. There's a rice, traditionally for Fridays, to comply with the once common "no meat on Friday" of good Catholics. It's made with cod and cauliflower. The rice cooked in fish stock has lots of names - in Cartagena it's called caldero. Down in Elche I think arroz con costra has loads of sausages and maybe chickpeas as well as the rice and the whole is topped off with an egg crust. Arroz negro is coloured with cuttlefish or squid ink. In Albacete they seem to like quite gooey rice, arroz meloso. And so it goes on. And on.

So around Pinoso our rice is thin, quite dry and with rabbit and snails. With my mum being here we've been to a lot of restaurants. Most of them cheap and cheerful. She wanted something better when we were in Culebrón. I took her and her pal Sheila to a restaurant called Elías in Chinorlet village very close to our house. Our welcome was very iffy and we were finally given a terrible table but once we were under way the service was excellent and the food a revelation.

Good wine is wasted on me. I'm of the "I like what I like" school. It's normally the same with food. But as I tucked into the traditional all i oli and tomato paste on toast I wondered if I could ever eat the normal supermarket all i oli again. I'd seen the cooks preparing it (If you don't know what all i oli is think of it as garlic mayonnaise) in the glass fronted kitchen as we waited for a table and I thought the whole rigmarole of rice cooking over wooden twigs and garlic being ground in a pestle and mortar was a bit pretentious. I have to admit though that it tasted fabulous. When the rice came it looked just as usual - not like the stuff you get in a ten Euro menú place - like the stuff from a decent mid range restaurant. It didn't taste like it though. I could actually taste the wood smoke that they go on about, the mix of tastes was just right, the rabbit and the snails (hunted not reared - yes they breed snails too!) were, well, just right too. It was a taste experience, a revelation. I now understand all the fuss about paella being the pièce de résistance of Spanish cuisine. Even my mum, who had suddenly declared that she didn't like rice after we had ordered the food but before it came, was won over.

Pinoso featured on a TV programme about the rice and other local foods in a programme called "Cooks without Stars." The man talking about Fondillon wine is Roberto from Culebrón. What a media star.