A sun-drenched dish that tastes like the Spanish coast—this Market Day Paella is a golden tapestry of tender chicken, ocean-kissed seafood, and veggies cooked with saffron-infused short-grain rice. Each bite is rich with smoky paprika, slow-simmered sofrito, and the soul of the pan, where the rice crisps gently into a perfect socarrat — that delicious layer of pan scrapings under all of these delicious ingredients. Commonly cooked over an open fire, paella is now considered a delicacy, but originally it was a common meal for field laborers, and since shellfish sightings are rare in the fields, it was usually made with chicken, rabbit, duck, or snails.
Use your imagination when selecting ingredients …
Paella is one of those dishes that has no exact formula, but instead is an evolving recipe — one that changes according to the cook’s whim and the availability of ingredients at your market. Making paella is as much an event as a meal!
This dish is my husband’s specialty, and it’s always fun to see what he brings home from the market when he’s getting ready to make his paella. You can use whatever combination of seafood, chicken, sausage, and veggies you like for this dish, but bright, vibrant colors are great for aesthetics. We love to use chicken, sausage, clams or mussels, fish, scallops, shrimp, brightly colored bell peppers, onions, tomatoes, artichoke hearts, and garbanzo beans, but you can always make a paella with only chicken, or fish, or seafood, or even vegetarian, too. Many recipes call for peas, but we all like garbanzo beans better, so that’s what we do!
Paella is often cooked over an open fire … but you can always do it on top of the stove or on your barbecue, too!
To make paella, you need a very large pan, some good friends, a large fire pit, barbecue grill, or stove top, and some time to kill! It is a great reason to gather friends and family to spend the day in the park or at home. Paella pans are fairly easy to find, but if you can’t find one, you can always use an extra-large skillet. We normally make our paella over the stove, because we can more easily keep an eye on it, rather than having it out on the grill, and we don’t have a fire pit in the backyard!
While traditional paella is cooked all in one pan, adding ingredients as you go, we like to make ours in stages, so that each component can be cooked the way we like it. So, for example, we have found that if we make it the traditional way, it’s sometimes hard to get the rice cooked perfectly. So, we like to brown all of the ingredients separately, and cook the rice using the pan drippings from browning all of the other ingredients, and then, we start adding ingredients back to the rice and finish it off in the oven, once the dish is fully assembled.
Market Day Paella
Equipment
- 1 Paella Pan for cooking chicken and seafood
- 1 pot for cooking rice
Ingredients
Rice
- 1 cup Bomba Rice
- 2 tbsp. butter
- 1 tbsp. olive oil
- 1/4 tsp. saffron
- 2 cups chicken broth
Veggies
- 2-3 tbsp. olive oil
- 1 medium yellow onion (chopped)
- 2 cloves garlic (minced)
- 1/2 tsp. salt
- 1/2 tsp. black pepper
- 2 tsp. Spanish paprika
- 1 tsp. dried oregano
- 1 green bell pepper, sliced into 3/4-inch wide strips (stem removed, seeded, and chopped)
- 1 red bell pepper, sliced into 3/4-inch wide strips (stem removed, seeded and chopped)
- 1 orange bell pepper, sliced into 3/4-inch wide strips (stem removed, seeded and chopped)
- 4 Roma tomatoes (chopped)
- 1 15-oz. can artichoke hearts
- 1 cup garbanzo beans
- 1/4 cup dry white wine
Seafood, Chicken & Sausage
- 4 boneless-skinless chicken thighs (cut into bite-sized pieces)
- 1/2 lb. fresh wild swordfish (skin removed and cut into bite-sized cubes
- 2 chicken-cheddar jalapeño sausages (the uncooked kind – or your favorite spicy sausage)
- 8 jumbo shrimp (shelled and deveined)
- 4 large sea scallops (large = 1 per person, medium =2 per person)
- 12 clams in the shell (steam the clams about 15 minutes before serving the paella. See instructions below.)
- 1/4 cup reserved fish and meat juices (pan scrapings and juices from browning the fish and chicken)
Garnishes
- 4 lemon wedges
- 4 cilantro sprigs
Instructions
Browning Chicken, Seafood and Sausage
- Heat 3 tbsp. olive oil in the paella pan. Brown chicken on both sides over medium heat. Remove from the pan and set aside. Repeat the process with the swordfish, sausage, shrimp, and scallops. All chicken and seafood should be about 80-90% cooked. Set all aside. Reserve the pan juices from each batch to add to the veggies you are going to cook in the paella pan in the next step. Note* The seafood and meat will finish cooking in the oven.
- Add a little more olive oil and saute onions with garlic until translucent. Add oregano, paprika, salt, and pepper. Mix well. Add bell peppers and continue to cook over a medium-low heat for 5 minutes, to allow peppers to simmer and soften a bit. Add tomatoes and the reserved pan drippings and cook for another 5 minutes.
- Stir in garbanzo beans and artichoke hearts and continue to simmer for 10 minutes longer. Remove from the heat and place everything into a large bowl. Set aside. Do not clean the paella pan, since you will be using it again soon and you want to retain any residual scrapings and flavor in the pan for the final cooking.
Cooking the Rice – this can be done ahead of time and set aside until ready to assemble paella.
- Heat olive oil and butter in a saucepan. Add rice and saffron, and brown rice over medium-low heat for about 5 minutes, to coat the rice so it is glossy. Add chicken broth, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cook for 20-25 minutes, or until rice is done. Set aside. Turn rice into the paella pan and spread it out evenly in the bottom of the pan.
Steaming the Clams – 15 minutes before you’r ready to serve
- Place clams in a steamer over water. Season clams with garlic powder, black pepper and drizzle 1 tbsp. red or white wine vinegar over clams. Bring to a boil and steam until the clams open up. Discard any clams that don’t open. Arrange clams on top of paella and continue to bake for another 5 minutes.
Assembling the Paella
- Preheat oven to 350℉.
- Spread the rice evenly over the bottom of the paella pan. Arrange the seafood, chicken, sausage and veggies over the rice. Drizzle 1/4 cup water evenly over everything. Bring the pan back to a simmer. Remove from the stovetop and place in the oven, uncovered, for 30 minutes. Arrange steamed clams on top of the paella and continue to cook for another 5 minutes.
- Serve immediately and garnish with lemon wedges and cilantro sprigs. We love to servie this paella with a lightly dressed salad of mixed greens, bites of fresh oranges, Kalamata olives, heart of palm and avocado.