Weeknight 'fun size' paella | streamlined Valencian-style, with green beans and chicken wings

this video is sponsored by squarespace so what i'm trying to do here is get as close as possible to a traditional valencian paella while at the same time i'm keeping everything super fast and quick and small it's a weeknight paella with a manageable ingredient list for a typically small contemporary household spain's national dish here was originally invented to feed massive teams of farm hands which is why paella is traditionally cooked in these giant specialized paella pans which is technically redundant because paella means pan and valencian but anyway i'm just using a 10 inch or 25 centimeter diameter saute pan that'll feed mom and dad and two little kids but if you need more food you could double my quantities and use a 12 12-inch pan the defining spice and coloring of course is saffron the painstakingly harvested stigma and styles of certain crocus flowers quite expensive but you only need a pinch that sachet was an eighth of a gram and honestly i could have used half of it for this much food lots of the recipes i've read from spain tell you to toast the saffron sometimes in a dry pan like i'm doing here sometimes they do it in the hot oil later on i'm not sure this intensifies the flavor as much as promised but it's easy to do so let's go with it out it goes into my microwave safe measuring jug and while some recipes tell you to bash it up in a mortar and pestle i'm just gonna do as much as i can with my finger i'm using two total cups of liquid just under half a liter and half of that is gonna be plain water check how powerful that pigment is already saffron will stain your clothes your countertops be careful with it the other half of my liquid is gonna be white wine because it's me but i've read lots of spanish recipes that do use some wine so of course you could use stock instead and i'm just going to heat this for a couple of minutes in the microwave again tradition has it that steeping the saffron in hot liquid will help you extract more out of it eventually it's going into hot liquid anyway in the pan so i'm not convinced this makes a big difference but again it's easy especially if you use the microwave so sure pan is already hot in goes some olive oil and really if you're using anything other than a real paella pan you are making a mini paella fun size therefore it helps to think small with all of your ingredients hence chicken wings traditional valencian paella has big whole chunks of chicken maybe thighs chopped in half plus bone-in chunks of rabbit and or pork you don't have to use any meat at all if you don't want to but six or eight chicken wings will give you that traditional vibe of bone-in skin-on chicken pieces but they'll cook much faster and they won't take up too much space in such a little pan i seasoned them heavily and now i'm going to get them basically fully cooked while i prep my vegetables traditional recipes often call for a grated onion i'm using a shallot because i'm making a small quantity and i don't need a whole big onion and i'm just finely mincing it because that's easier than grating it and minced shallot cooks in seconds i'm mincing it up with my garlic a few cloves as fine as reasonably possible skin on chicken pieces are ready to flip when they release pretty easily from the pan very nice color on those again i want these pretty much done before everything else goes in because they're really not going to stew for very long with the rice and everything by the way if i was doing a vegan version i might fry some butter beans in the oil instead lima beans canned and then drain limas are definitely traditional in paella even though i'm skipping them today for the sake of simplicity i'm also skipping the artichoke hearts which i'd probably make time for if i wasn't also using meat at my store they sell these little sweet peppers in bulk so that's what i'm using a hot pepper would not be traditional and would overwhelm the saffron so maybe dice up half a small bell pepper if you can't use one of these or some of those little bottled diced pimentos would be good instead and then my main veg is going to be a big handful of green beans that i bought bulk at the store very traditional in valencia and paella i'm just cutting them in half to make them a little easier to eat and stir around again butter beans and artichoke hearts would be traditional as well frozen peas work great put them in straight out of the freezer just when you're putting the rice in awesome and now that my chicken pieces are almost cooked through i'm just softening up my sofrito in the pan spanish sofrito is onion garlic and sweet peppers generally with tomato traditionally you might grate some fresh whole tomatoes discard the skins and then cook that down with the other veg until it forms a thick dark sauce a paste of tomato if you will which is why i'm just using a squeeze of tomato paste and i think it's going to taste pretty similar traditionally you might brown the green beans a little bit in the hot oil to do a good job of that i would really have to dump out the chicken and everything else first lots of paella recipes involve frying things in stages in batches taking them out and putting them back in again i'm going for simplicity here so i'm just giving the green beans like a two minute head start before i pour in my liquid if you can't get saffron by the way just use like a teaspoon of sweet paprika lots of people use paprika in addition to the saffron if i'm gonna spring for the saffron i want to taste it and the taste is kind of subtle so i'm just doing the saffron and nothing else salt i'm going to add salt to this broth until it tastes almost twice as salty as i want it why because it's going to donate tons of salt to the rice unwashed rice we need the free starch coat clinging to the rice to bind this dish any short grain rice could work like risotto rice this is purportedly a real spanish paella rice it'll tell you on the bag how much liquid it can absorb some varieties absorb way more water than others i'd say just follow whatever ratio is recommended on the package i'm doing a cup of rice to two cups liquid you really don't have to nail the ratio because we're going to have ample opportunity to either add water or boil it away later once you get the rice stirred in some people cover it some people don't but either way you just let it simmer and you never stir it again this is the main difference between paella and risotto risotto you stir you let that freeze starch coat and the particular starch composition of short grain rice thicken up that liquid until you have a nice creamy stew paella is more like a casserole than a stew you just let it cook and set into one semi-solid mass that's also perhaps a reason to steep the saffron ahead of time you can't really stir it around and get it evenly distributed once the rice goes in when the rice grains have all plumped up a bit you can just reach in and taste them to assess their doneness if they're still kind of crunchy you can easily just drizzle some extra water wherever needed maybe season the water first just to be safe i still had some saffron lining that jug and i'll just drizzle some of that wherever i seem to have dry patches if on the other hand you seem to have put in too much water relative to the rice that's okay too because here's the last step when the rice is still a little undercooked you jack up the heat to boil out any excess water thus allowing you to create the sokarat i'm sure i'm not pronouncing that the way that you would in valencia but the sakurat is this layer of brown fried rice at the bottom of the paella on my stove which is not super powerful i find that i need to crank the burner all the way up and then just use my nose you can smell when the browning happens and then i might pull it off the heat when i just start to smell burning i use that same trick when i'm making pan pizza on the stovetop off it comes and then like any casserole you really got to let it rest for at least 15 minutes before scooping give that starch matrix time to cool and solidify a bit if you need to keep it warm for a long time apparently it's traditional to cover this with a damp towel though i'm sure a lid would be fine when it's time to scoop i recommend something wide and rigid that will allow you to really scrape that sakurat off the bottom for my taste i think i could have left that on the high heat for even longer that brown layer on the bottom is widely regarded as the best bit of the paella you might be wondering where's the seafood well apparently seafood is not very traditional in valencian paella which in valencia they would say is the traditional paella again i'm going for simple here so i'm happy to leave out ingredients though i'm definitely doing the traditional lemon wedge served on the side you squeeze that over to your liking see heterogeneity in food is not just something ragusia made up it's part of so many great traditional foods for example the use of bone-in meat chunks or bivalves still in their shells that makes it so that you're not just scooping porridge into your face there's little bits within the dish that you pick up and you eat in a very different way little dishes within the dish i like that in a paella and one more time i know this is not traditional paella nobody in spain needs to lose their mind about this i'm just saying this is pretty close to the traditional while still being as quick and as user-friendly as squarespace the paella of website builders it's a one-pan marvel absolutely everything you could possibly need to create and manage an online presence something for your business your event your band your podcast or maybe just your resume the number of cool functions that squarespace has added since they started supporting my channel here blows my mind you can accept payments on your site of course but also donations you can pay wall off your content you can embed whatever media you need you can accept appointments or reservations for your business on your site you can even make videos for your site with squarespace no editing software needed it's great and of course they host your site for you when you're ready you can build one for free but when you're ready to publish save ten percent by using my code regucia at checkout thank you squarespace and thanks in advance to all the people of spain for not getting angry with me i feel like i covered my bases with this one in terms of identifying which elements are traditional and which ones are not but let's just go check the comments shall we oh

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 724,418

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Id: WfYjmrH9gSw

Length: 9min 27sec (567 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 20 2022