After living 2 years with my Spanish friend Roshni, I’ve made and tried to perfect so many paellas at home (been putting this paella pan that I got from a press event at Quique Dacosta’s Paella restaurant ArrosQD to very good use! 😆)
Paella is one of these crowd pleasing dishes that actually takes very little time to prepare, but will certainly impress! Sharing with you my easy home cook take on preparing the seafood version of this dish at home:
Seafood Paella
Ingredients
- Seafood of choice: Prawns Calamari, Mussels – about 100g of each
- 2 tomatoes finely minced I used a food processor for this
- 1 tsp Paella seasoning mainly for the colour, you can make the mix yourself from scratch with saffron but I find it not very cost effective. Look for brands like Carmencita for e.g
- 2 cups Paella rice
- 4 cups stock I used fumet / fish stock for this seafood one. If you don’t have fresh stock, you can use stock cubes and dissolve in hot water too
- Pinch of salt + pepper depending on how salty your stock already is, seafood stock tends to veer on the saltier side
- 1 tbsp Olive oil
Instructions
- In your paella pan, heat up some olive oil. Add in the minced tomatoes and the seafood, season with a bit of salt and pepper ~1tsp salt + 1/2 tsp pepper. Gently stir fry for 2 minutes then remove the seafood and put aside (leave the tomato bits in)
- Add the rice in and spread evenly across the surface of the pan.
- Pour in the stock and leave it to cook for ~10 minutes. It’s very important that you don’t move or touch the rice during the cooking.
- Place the seafood on the surface of the paella and leave it to cook for a further 5 minutes. Check that the rice is fully cooked and the stock is evaporated. Sometimes if your pan is too big for the stove, the rice at the border might not cook enough, you can add some more stock and leave it to cook until the grains are cooked throughout, they should be firm but not tough (and definitely not mushy either!)
- If you want that crispy ‘Socarrat’ bottom, I’d kick up the fire a notch at the end and let it cook for about 2 minutes 👌🏻
Did you make this recipe?
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