By Steve Goeringer
Cooking fantastic paella over an open fire is a great way to spend time entertaining friends and family. We've developed an approach to cooking on our patio that is perfect to share with friends. We have several favorite paella recipes, but we know that seafood paella is what must people expect. The secret to great paella is the best ingredients cooked in a shallow pan. The key ingredients are great bomba rice, Spanish olive oil, and authentic saffron threads. We've experimented with many items and this is a case where using gourmet quality items is worth the expense.
Cooking paella outside on an open fire is great fun. All you need is a way to safely (and legally) have a nice wood fire that allows you to put a paella pan over the heat. The approach we used is inexpensive -- we use an inexpensive fire pit. We used two pairs of gardening bricks to add some height and direct heat towards the pan. Over this we put a large grill grate like you might use camping. It would have been nice to have a heavier grate -- the paella pan can be quite heavy and we worry about the paella pan bending the grate and falling over!
We use a variety of wood -- pine, cotton wood, oak, mesquite, cherry, apple. These all work very well, though we tend towards liking the flavor of the oak and mesquite most. Note that the smoke is almost not detectable in the paella -- the flavoring is very subtle. We usually start the fire with pine because it is inexpensive and then move towards hardwood as we get a good bed of cooking coals going.
Making paella on an open fire isn't much different than cooking on a gas range. Once you've let the fire burn down to coals and added a few small pieces to keep the fire going and hot, you put the pan on your grate. You let it warm and then add your olive oil. Once that's hot enough to cook an onion, you start following your paella recipe. This will usually start with cooking any of your slower cooking items like chicken, squid, and fish. Once these are done, you reserve them to a warm bowl. You may need to add a bit more olive oil. Then you add your aromatics (onions and garlic) and then other vegetables like bell peppers.
At some point, you're going to need to add rice. We usually push the vegetables and things already in the pan to one side, then add the rice and brown it just a bit. It doesn't really get brown, but it seems to make it a bit firmer and crisper when the dish is done. Then you add your stock and stir it all together. The saffron will be one of the last things you cook.
Once the liquid starts to cook in, you really don't want to stir the paella any more. You want the liquid to slowly cook in until completely absorbed. If done right, you'll get a little bit of carmelization of the rice touching the pan -- this is called socarrat. This should be crispy, golden brown rice. Not burnt. However, even the nearly burnt tastes good to me. Getting good socarrat is where art meets cooking with paella. It may take me a few more years to get that part of making paella mastered!
For us, cooking paella is a social event that should be shared with friends snacking on a variety of tapas over a few hours.
Steve Goeringer is a web publisher and author with a wide range of interests. He writes about cooking, entertaining, technology, war games, shooting, and more. One of his favorite blogs is: http://goeringer.posterous.com/. For more details on cooking paella, including some good video and pictures, see: http://www.squidoo.com/paellarecipes.
0 comments:
Post a Comment