The Ultimate Seafood Paella Recipe
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Paella has become somewhat of a house specialty.
Inspired by regular trips to Spain over the last year, it is the one thing we make over and over and it never gets old.
And it is always the first thing I think of when we are able to get our hands on some good fresh fish.
We recently discovered Pesky Fish, a fish purveyor working directly with local skippers that previously delivered to some of the top restaurants in town.
They are now delivering to homes, meaning the fish that arrives at your door was caught just the day before.
A wonderful way to support local fishermen.
Excited by the ability to have fresh fish delivered to our door, we ordered a native lobster, along with some mussels and cuttlefish.
And before we knew it, there was a knock on the door, and on the doorstep there was a box with a live lobster in it.
There was no question that paella was on the menu that night.
The first thing you might notice in the photos below, is that the color is not like your average paella.
This type of paella is a well-kept secret that rarely leaves southern Spain, and gets its magically intense, caramelized flavor from the salmoretta.
Here is our go-to recipe for the ultimate seafood paella.
Seafood Paella Recipe
Note: This recipe uses a 13.5 inch paella pan.
Ingredients
You will need two types of fish for the paella. One that is cut up into pieces and stirred in the rice, and another that is laid delicately on top of the rice. For the first type, we chose cuttlefish because it is nice when cut up into chunks and integrated into the rice—squid and monkfish also work well for this. For the second type of fish, we chose lobster—you can use any type of saltwater fish for this, shrimp is the most common option, but this also works nicely with pieces of hake or mackerel. You will need 250g of the first type of fish, and 400-500g of the second type of fish.
1 teaspoon paprika
2 cloves garlic, grated
2 tablespoons parsley, roughly chopped
1/4 cup olive oil
3 tablespoons salmoretta
2 liters of fish stock
Instructions
Heat up your fish stock in a small saucepan on the back burner so that it is warm and ready to go. Season your stock with salt to taste. The paella is not something you can taste while it is cooking, so you will want to season each of the components.
Sprinkle your fish evenly with salt and the paprika, grated garlic and chopped parsley.
Heat up your paella pan on low. You don’t want to get it too hot, to avoid burning your garlic or smoking your oil.
Pour 1/4 cup olive oil into the pan—with Spanish food you want to be generous with the olive oil.
Put your fish pieces—both type #1 (cuttlefish or other chosen fish) and type #2 (lobster or other chosen fish) in the pan to cook them through, and get them lightly golden. Take out fish type #2 and set aside.
Then add 3 tablespoons of the salmoretta to the pan. See photo below of this stage.
Then sprinkle in the rice.
Sauté for 2 minutes until the rice is hot and sizzling with everything else in the pan.
Pour in the fish stock.
For the next 10 minutes, turn up the heat to the highest heat you’ve got. The purpose of this stage is to get the rice grain to open up. You can tell this is happening when near the end of the 10 minutes you can see some of the starch bubbling up on the surface. The liquid should look thicker as it has reduced a bit, and the rice you can see should look puffier. See photo below.
Now, for the next 10 minutes, you want to turn the heat all the way down to low. From this point on, DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT STIRRING the rice! This is where the rice will continue to develop and soak in all the flavor. The goal with the rice is to get it tender but not mushy, and moist but not soupy. That’s what these pans and this technique provides you with. As the rice absorbs the liquid and releases its starch, this will gently combine with the olive oil, sugars from the tomato and garlic, and collagen from the stock to create a magical caramelized base in the bottom of the pan that gets crispy near the end (called “socarrat” in Catalan —this is the holy grail of a perfectly cooked paella; taken too far and it can become the charcoal section of your paella —this stuff goes from delicious to charred very quickly).
Place your second type of fish on top.
Keep a very close eye on it at this stage, and if at the end of the 10 minutes there is still liquid in the pan, you can gently rotate the pan around to make sure it doesn’t burn. What you are looking for here is that the rice is dry and starting to make crackling sounds. It should transition from sounding like a simmer to sounding like it is frying, with no pools of liquid at the bottom.
Paella tells you its done when you hear frying sounds instead of simmer sounds and there are no pools of liquid visible from the top. This will begin on the edges and you’ll see them pull back slightly from the pan and sizzle. Rotate your pan around to get more heat to the center and to the parts that still have pools of liquid. Make sure you smell constantly to ensure nothing burnt is emanating.
Once you’re there, remove it from the heat and serve immediately.
Serve with plenty of lemon wedges for squeezing on top. Enjoy!