Quick & Easy Paella - Oven Baked Sausage & Shrimp Paella Recipe

hello this is chef john from food wishes calm with Paia that's right i'm going to show you a quick and easy method for making a delicious sausage and shrimp paia or as my friend Gordon Ramsay might call it paella although actually he would say it more like paella but anyway the point is some people pronounce the L L and speaking of l l ladies love paella as does almost everybody else and this is my quick and easy take on this iconic Spanish dish so last things first eventually you're going to need two cups of hot stock you could absolutely just heat up some chicken broth but if you want it to be extra special we're going to take the shells we reserved from our shrimp and we're going to throw those in a saucepan with a little bit of olive oil and we're going to put that on medium heat and we're going to saute that until those shells turn a nice pinky orange color and they start to smell like awesome grilled shrimp and when it gets to that point we are ready to add a big pinch of saffron and what is Safran that is saffron and believe it or not those are the reproductive organs from a crocus plant that's right this is the world's kinkiest spice and there's only like three of those little threads per plant so it takes a tremendous amount of plants to make a little bit of saffron which is why it's so crazy expensive and a little bit goes a long way we're only going throw in about a half a teaspoon we're going to give that a quick mix with this spoon and this is going to give your pius such a unique color and flavor and aroma which by the way is almost impossible to describe but i will try on the blog post and then we're going to add two and a quarter cups of chicken broth and mine was already fully seasoned if yours isn't make it so alright give that a stir we're going to bring that up to simmer and we're going to let that simmer for 20 minutes just down low and like I said we're going to need two cups of hot broth to make our paella with so that extra quarter cup of stock just accounts for evaporation and then after simmering for 20 minutes all we have to do is strain and reserve and like I said you can just heat up some plain chicken stock and use that but I highly highly suggest you do it with the shrimp and the saffron it really will make a tremendous difference and is that broth simmers it's going to extract that beautiful color from the saffron and it's going to look kind of rusty Brown at this stage but when it gets absorbed into that rice it's going to turn it into this gorgeous pale yellow color and by the way the stock should be hot when it goes in so if you are going to make that part ahead you want to make sure you heat it up before proceed with the recipe okay so our saffron broth has been taken care of and it's on to building the rest of the paella so we're going to place a large shallow heavy bottomed skillet on medium heat make sure you're using something that can go in the oven we're throwing some olive oil to which we're going to add a big handful of sliced sausage I usually use trees Oh this time I'm using land we say I've used n Dewey before I've actually used how to tell you sausage before you can even use saucy song okay I've never actually tried that but I just felt like saying so I'll see you song and we're going to cook that sausage for about two minutes on each side and once our sausage looks like that we're going to go ahead and throw in some diced onion and we'll cook that on medium for a few minutes until it kind of gets translucent you know the drill now at this point you can turn the heat down to medium-low and we're going to go ahead and toss in our garlic give that about a one-minute stir and then it's time for one of the stars of the show the rice and what we're going to use is the same rice we use for risotto which is called arborio rice and while it's not exactly like what they use in Spain it is closer than long grain rice for sure all right in Spain they use somebody called bomba rice so if you can get bomba use bomba but if you can't get bomba use this and we're going to stir that around until every grain of rice has been coated with that amazing oil so give it a thorough mixing and when all that rice is coated we're going to go ahead and throw in some peas that'll provide some nice color and sweetness and this would be the point if you want to add some extra spices you could add some regular or smoked paprika now I didn't because I had plenty of that flavor from the rendered sausage fat but you'll need to play that by ear and decide yourself and we'll review that on the blog post and when all that's mixed in go ahead and take your spatula and kind of even everything out tamp it down a little bit with the back of the spatula make sure you have even sausage distribution and at that point we're ready to cover with the shrimp so I have a pound of jumbo shrimp you saw the shells earlier of course those have been deveined who the heck wants yvaine to shrimp not me and we're going to place those in a single layer over the top and what happens is you'll start doing a design and then by the end you'll give up and just start putting them wherever you have an open spot all right so it's just how it's going to work and then last but not least I had a sweet red bell pepper that I sliced thinly and we're going to lay those strips in between the shrimp will also go around the outside around the outside around the outside which will look pretty cool and then at this point even though our stock is seasoned going to sprinkle a little bit of salt and cayenne over the top of the shrimp it just feels right and by the way you're doing this make sure your oven has been preheated to 425 it is critical that the ovens ready when this is ready and then I want you to crank your heat to high and when you hear it sizzling it's kind of hard to hear with the family you can hear it when you hear it sizzling you're going to go ahead and pour in that hot saffron broth and you really should hear some serious sizzling when you pour that in and then all you need to do is turn off the heat give it the old shake of sheikha carefully and then place that in the center of a 425-degree oven for exactly 20 minutes and when you pull it out it should look something like this and at this point you may be done everything could be perfect although it probably will not be the rice is probably only going to be like 90% cooked it'll almost be tender but not quite and it should just appear a hair wet so it will probably look something like that so the last step is you turning the heat to medium-high and simply cooking that until the rice is perfect now because we use very specific amounts of broth there really shouldn't be a big danger in this getting all soft and mushy and overcooked so you're going to turn on that heat and the rest that liquid is going to boil up from the bottom steam the rest of the rice and in my case about three minutes the rice was perfect it should just be barely tender it should definitely have some firmness to it the grain should be separate but a little sticky and you can see that gorgeous light yellow color the saffron gives just a beautiful-looking dish so whenever you decide your rice is perfect you're going to go ahead and turn off the heat and then we're going to finish with just a little drizzle of olive oil and a generous sprinkling of freshly chopped parsley and that's it quick and easy Paia and let me be perfectly clear this is a very very simple stripped-down version traditional pie a general is going to have way more ingredients in it it's also cooked all the way on top of the flame not in the oven which ideally results in some nice crusty rice on the bottom of the pan and around the edges and while I will do a classic version in the future basically the mission here was to make it possible for someone that's never made this before to be a total pea playa so despite this being sort of a training wheels version it still came out fantastic and incredibly delicious I mean you can't go wrong with spicy smoky sausage we've already talked about that gorgeous saffron CIN did and colored rice and you would think those shrimp would be overcooked but you'd be wrong and in fact roasting them on top of the rice like that they've actually dried out just a hair which actually makes them sweeter all right so I really do hope you give this a try head over to food wishes comm for all the ingredient amounts and more info as usual and as always enjoy

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 2,464,129

Rating: 4.8782225 out of 5

Keywords: Paella (Dish), Sausage (Type Of Dish), Oven (Culinary Tool), Baking (Culinary Technique), Shrimp, Spanish, rice, chef, john, foodwishes, Food, Cooking, Kitchen, Recipe, Restaurant, Recipes, Dinner, entree

Id: tiJMJznAi0Y

Length: 7min 14sec (434 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 09 2013