The recipe for paella: the aroma of Spain in your home

Paella is a typical Mediterranean dish, spread mainly on the Iberian Peninsula. His homeland is supposedly the Spanish province of Catalonia, at least the name comes from the Catalan language, but to this day it is popular not only throughout Spain, but also far beyond its borders. For tourists arriving in Spain, paella is a kind of visiting card of Spanish cuisine. It is prepared from rice with spices, mixed with seafood, chicken or rabbit meat, sometimes with sausage, vegetables. There is not one recipe for paella - in fact, there are a lot of them, and it is difficult to determine which of them is original: in each Spanish region there is a paella recipe corresponding to the peculiarities of this region. The most typical paella is seafood and chicken, and it is this paella recipe that is considered classic.

Preparation of paella

In order to cook, you need to take 400 grams of rice, one chicken, about a kilogram of seafood (salted fish fillet, several large shrimps, large mussels, about half a kilogram of squid in small pieces, scallops - the more diverse, the better). If there are no fresh seafood, you can take frozen, even ready-mixes. Of vegetables, two bulbs, several (about 300 grams) of tomatoes, one or two pods of sweet pepper will be needed. From the green will be needed parsley, green onions and celery, and from spices - garlic (several denticles), saffron, pepper, nutmeg. You will also need a liter of any broth (the best thing to take is chicken or obtained when cooking seafood) and olive oil.

The chicken is cut into small pieces and fried in olive oil with constant stirring until golden brown. In the other pan, greens, onions and garlic are fried for 5 minutes. Tomatoes are peeled off, cut into small pieces and, together with chopped sweet peppers, are sent to the vegetables for another 5 minutes. In the same place, shrimps are fried, after which everything is combined in one pan, where the remaining seafood, salt and spices are added, except saffron. If they were frozen, then before you cook paella they need to be thawed, and drain excess liquid.

In a liter of broth, a small amount of saffron dissolves, rice is washed and poured into a common dish, where the broth is added. Everything is covered with a lid and placed in the oven for 20-30 minutes, or until the broth is completely absorbed, at 200C.

There is also such a recipe for paella, when rice is brewed separately from the rest of the dish and is simply added at the end and stewed with the rest of the ingredients in just a few minutes. It turns out also quite tasty, although not so aromatic - after all, rice, cooked on fragrant broth and on water are very different from each other. Some recipes also suggest feeding the paella in such a way that the rest of the ingredients are laid out on the separately cooked rice on top, and everything is poured in with the broth obtained during the quenching.

Since paella has a lot of cooking recipes, then the list of ingredients it contains is also quite extensive. For example, in some Spanish provinces, fragrant sausage or ham, previously roasted in a frying pan, can be added to it, and in some places seafood is not placed there - mostly agricultural regions far removed from the sea. Also paella is often prepared with olives, peas, and the list of spices and herbs that will be relevant in it is truly huge. Whichever recipe for paella is used, this fragrant dish with a rich taste deserves to be tried. Served paella with both red and white wines.