How To Make Valencian Paella

Hi there, I'm Matt from the Underground Cookery School, and today, I'm going to do a cookery lesson for you. Well, the first thing you need is a paella. That is actually what this dish is called.

You know in Spain, they would say, "You're going to cook a big dish!", and everyone would know what that meant. Now, that pan was already on the hob for a moment, I've just wanted to bring it up to a really high temperature, so I can throw those chorizos on straight away. I'm going to throw on some diced pancetta, and I'm now going to put in some diced pepper.

Now, I'm going to put the onion in, quite a lot of that, and I'm going to give it a good old mix. Now, already the juices from the chorizo are adding flavour to the paella and whilst those onions are softening up, I'm going to add my paprika- in it goes. I'm just going to turn that down a little bit because I'm worried its going to be too hot, and in fact, what I'll do initially, that's just to stop anything from catching on the bottom, but it's going to add flavour- I'm going to add the garlic now.

I don't like to add garlic to a dish until I absolutely have to because I don't want it to burn. I'm going to add some thyme. I've got some dried chillies here which are really going to set this dish on fire.

And now I'm going to add my rice, it's called calasparra rice. It's a much thinner grain than you would normally get with regular basmati rice but it's perfect for this. If you can't find it, it's fine to use arborio or risotto.

You'll get a similar sort of result but we're going to try to keep this as authentic as we can. For that reason, I'm now going to add the wine in next, and the reason I put the wine in before the stock is that I just want to cook to wine down, so I can burn the alcohol off. At this point, I'm going to turn the heat down.

There we go, just get that going, and now, just for colour more than anything else, I'm going to add one of the key ingredients, which is the saffron. Now, it's not going to have an immediate effect but it will turn this dish a traditional Spanish crimson after the cooking time has developed. Right, most of the wine now has either been absorbed, or burnt, so now I'm going to add some chicken stock, and I'm going to put enough in here just to cover most, if not all of the rice.

What I'm going to do for the next 10 minutes is just keep working this dish so that all the rice is absorbed and where necessary adding the stock. So, you won't see anything for the next 10 minutes other than knowing I'm going to cook the rest of this dish down. Well, valencian paella traditionally will have rabbit, sometimes it will have beans, and also it will have snails.

Not really popular ingredients at the moment which is why I've not put them in. Now, that rice has been cooking down for about 10 minutes. Just before you came back on the scene, I added a bit more stock because I'm now going to add lots more ingredients as you can see.

You should keep turning the pan because different parts of the pan will get hot at different points. You want to make sure that you work tidy. I'm just going to get rid of that.

See this is how it really is, i.e. “not TV” cooking.

I've browned off some chicken thighs and I'm now going to add them to the dish. Just liberally like that. Here's the thing about cooking, you've got all these lovely juices in there, so use them! I've got some frozen peas, I'm going to add those, just dot those around.

I've got some concasse, sometimes known as "diced tomatoes", so those are going to go in. I've got some squid, pop those in like that. I've got some clams here, they can go in.

Lovely! And finally, I've got some prawns which I'm going to add. Nice big jumbo prawns. I'm going to cook this for about another 10 minutes by which time our paella should be absolutely fantastic.

The key now is to ensure that none of it burns, so just keep it moving. My favourite trick for this job is to just keep the pan moving round