Chef John's Quick and Easy Paella

Brian's Paella

I am very, very proud to share that Brian and I have attempted--and succeeded if I might add--to make paella from scratch. Paella is a dish that we both love and have had a couple of times during our dates. I had always wanted to make it, and unbeknownst to me, so did Brian!

We decided to make it on the same day that I happened to be hosting a potluck two months ago. We used a recipe that my friend Cedric had recommended, which had one key differentiating step from other paella recipes--to use uncooked shrimp shells for the chicken broth. You can find the recipe here along with the complementary video here.

My Paella

Most of the ingredients were easy to find; however, I definitely recommend that you get to know your grocery stores and what they carry because it took me the longest time to find saffron and Arborio rice. Brian had the advantage (for once!) because he didn't have any trouble finding either ingredient. In fact his local grocery store even had rice marketed for paella. Lucky guy!

The recipe too was very straightforward: most of our cooking time was actually spent on preparing the ingredients. Once we had the broth ready, everything else happened in quick succession, and I personally found that you had to act fast to avoid burning anything (as I am apt to do being new to the cooking scene!).

Once everything was in the pan and ready to go, Brian and I assembled the shrimps and the peppers in our respective pans and popped them in the oven.

Second Attempt on a Paellera 

After twenty minutes of baking time, we took our paellas out of the oven and finished them up on the stove so that they could be crispy on the outside and soft on the inside.

Simply stated, our paellas were delicious. You can see Brian's version at the top, which he had modified to include yummy mussels, followed by my two attempts, which only had the shrimps and the chorizo. For my second attempt, I used an actual paella pan, which we had borrowed from Phil's mom, and made two recipes in one go. Admittedly it wasn't as good the second time around: it took a while longer to get the rice to cook, and I ended up burning part of it, as evidenced by the thin layer of blackened, burnt rice on the bottom of the paella pan... What can I say? I'm a rookie cook, and while I can't speak for Brian, I definitely still have some ways to go in making consistently good paella. I am dreaming of the day when I can make a massive paella on one of these:

Source: Reddit

Stay tuned for that. :D