Paella is a typical Mediterranean dish distributed mainly on the Iberian Peninsula. His homeland is supposedly the Spanish province of Catalonia, at least the name comes from the Catalan language, but today it is popular not only throughout Spain, but also far beyond its borders. Paella is a visiting card of Spanish cuisine for tourists coming to Spain . It is prepared from rice with spices, mixed with seafood, chicken or rabbit meat, sometimes with sausage, vegetables. There is more than one paella recipe - in fact, there are a lot of them, and it is difficult to determine which one is the original: each Spanish region has its own paella recipe, corresponding to the features of this region. Paella with seafood and chicken is considered the most typical, and it is this recipe for paella that is considered to be classic.
Cooking paella
In order to cook, you need to take 400 g of rice, one chicken, about a kilogram of seafood (filet of oily sea fish, several large shrimps, large mussels, about half a kilogram of squid in small pieces, scallops - the more diverse, the better). If there is no fresh seafood, you can take frozen, even ready-made mixes are suitable. From vegetables, you need two onions, several (about 300 grams) tomatoes, one or two pods of sweet pepper. Parsley, chives and celery will be needed from greens, and garlic (several cloves), saffron, pepper, and nutmeg from spices. You will also need a liter of any broth (it is best to take chicken or seafood obtained during cooking) and olive oil.
The chicken is cut into small pieces and fried in olive oil with constant stirring until golden brown. In another pan, greens, onions and garlic are fried for 5 minutes. Tomatoes are peeled, cut into small pieces and, together with chopped sweet pepper, are sent to the vegetables for another 5 minutes. Shrimps are fried there, after which everything is combined in one pan, where the remaining seafood, salt and spices are added, except for saffron. If they were frozen, then before you cook the paella, you need to defrost them, and drain the excess liquid.
A small amount of saffron is dissolved in a liter of broth, rice is washed and poured into a common bowl, where the broth is added. Everything is closed with a lid and placed in the oven for 20-30 minutes, or until the broth is completely absorbed, at 200C.
There is such a paella recipe when rice is cooked separately from the rest of the dish and simply added at the end and stewed with the rest of the ingredients for only a few minutes. It turns out also quite tasty, although not so fragrant - still, rice cooked on fragrant broth and on water are very different from each other. Some recipes also suggest serving paella in such a way that the rest of the ingredients are laid out on top of separately cooked rice, and everything is poured into the broth obtained by stewing.
Since paella has many recipes for cooking, the list of ingredients included in it is also quite extensive. For example, in some Spanish provinces, they can add aromatic sausage or ham, previously fried in a pan, and in some places they don’t put seafood there - mainly agricultural regions, far removed from the sea. Paella is also often prepared using olives, peas, and the list of spices and herbs that will be appropriate in it is truly huge. Whatever paella recipe is used, this full-bodied aromatic dish deserves to be tasted. Paella is served with both red and white wines.