Seeking Paella Perfection
April 7, 2006 - Agence France Presse
BARCELONA, Spain (AFP) - Self-respecting Valencians may consider it blasphemous to eat paella anywhere but their home city, but across Spain most people just shrug and enjoy tucking into a dish which has become truly national.
In Barcelona, one of the many corners of the country that has long had its own take on paella perfection, Sunday afternoon paella has been a tradition for as long as most people can remember.
A Valencian by birth, Bego Sanchis, makes her living cooking the dish, even though her father refuses to eat anyone’s paella when he visits Barcelona.
As the head of the city’s Cook and Taste cooking school, Bego teaches hundreds of students a year how to make magnificent paella at home.
Situated just steps away from the city’s famous Boqueria market, she also has her pick of some of the best and freshest food in the world.
Bego switches from seafood—a market speciality—to chicken, beef or even vegetarian dishes depending on what looks good at the morning shopping.
“Paella’s origin comes from cooking what you have on hand or what’s cheap at the market,” she explained.
Whatever the preparation, she says the key is to extract as much flavor as possible from the ingredients and pass them on to the rice but, as she puts it, “No rice, no paella.”
She makes her paella using Bomba rice from the region around Valencia, but says Italian Arborio rice works well in a pinch.
For her, the other key ingredients are tomato, garlic and saffron (which she cleverly toasts by making a pouch out of aluminum foil and setting it next to a burner). “The rest,” she adds, “is completely up to you.”
Regardless of what it’s made from, the end result is deliciously primal: crunchy, earthy and fragrant, creating a deep, near-ethereal connection to what you’re eating.
Although Valencia had first rights to the dish, many Barcelonans have developed their own long-standing traditions.
Those who want to spoil themselves will head to the terraces of the nearby village of Sitges to eat paella just a stone’s throw from the ocean—a prerequisite connection with the sea for many a seafood paella aficionado.
Businessmen by day and Barcelona foodies at night, Andreas Sterba and Yago Cavanillas are no exception to the Sunday paella rule.
When the weather is nice, Cavanillas loves grabbing a friend, hopping on his motorcycle and driving the twisty roads along the coast for paella in Sitges.
He eats his seafood paella, “with a glass of white wine, for sure. And you must take a walk on the beach afterwards.”
Although he admits he’s not much of a cook and does most of his grocery shopping “at the gas station near my house,” Sterba has a shortlist of favorite places for “eating rice”—a Spanish simplification for “eating paella.”
Sterba’s list includes Restaurant 7 Portes, where hundreds of its trademark paella dishes are served up each day.
Though chef Carles Ruiz and manager Jesus Quilez both defer to Valencian paella’s place in the culinary annals, Quilez calls paella a “national dish.”
“It started in Valencia and went around the Mediterranean and all of Spain,” he said.
In his mind, Barcelona chefs have been making the dish long enough that it more a question of the chef’s capabilities than its point of origin.
“Are all hamburgers equal in the United States?” asked Ruiz with a smirk.
“They (the Valencians) have their own and we have our own,” said Quilez.
The key to good paella, agree Quilez and Ruiz, is the quality of the products. The better the quality, the better the dish.
Back in the kitchen, it all starts with the rice.
“The rice is not cooked until the order is placed,” said Ruiz. “If you want bad paella, then you cook it ahead of time,” a trick some hurried chefs use when they make risotto, generally with disappointing results.
So how did Sunday paella in Barcelona become such a well-loved tradition? “I don’t know,” said a grinning Quilez, “how do you explain things people have been doing for a hundred years?”
THIS STORY ALSO RAN WITH: Yahoo! News, Today OnLine.com, IOL.co.za.
