I thought I knew what paella was.

 

Rice.

Seafood.

A big shallow pan.

Something colorful, impressive, and vaguely Spanish.

Then I came to Valencia.

And discovered that paella is not really just a dish.

It is geography.

It is history.

It is agriculture.

It is family.

It is competition.

And, perhaps most of all, it is a social event.

Alexis and I have spent the last few weeks in southeastern Spain, close enough to Valencia to begin understanding that paella here is not simply something you order in a restaurant.

It is part of the culture.

Our education began in Valencia itself, where we went to an international paella competition.

Then we drove south through the Albufera region and into El Palmar.

That may have been the moment when paella began to make sense.

There were rice fields everywhere.

Miles of them.

Flat, green, wet, stretching in every direction.

The rice used in Valencia’s famous paella is grown right there.

And driving through those fields was an experience all by itself.

The roads are narrow.

Very narrow.

Often one lane.

No shoulder.

And a sharp drop immediately beside you into the fields or irrigation channels.

Then, just as you begin thinking you have mastered the road, you round a corner and discover a giant combine or tractor coming directly toward you, taking up virtually the entire lane.

Somehow everyone figures it out.

We did too.

Eventually.

El Palmar sits in the middle of all of this and is closely associated with the origins of paella.

This is rice country.

And that matters because the more we learned, the more we discovered that good paella begins long before the pan ever goes over the flame.

Yesterday we took the next step.

A private paella cooking lesson.

Three hours.

I had imagined that making paella was basically a 30- or 40-minute cooking exercise.

Not even close.

The preparation alone took about two hours.

The actual cooking took roughly another half hour.

And by the end, I understood why people here can get very opinionated about whether a paella has been made properly.

The first thing our instructor taught us was that paella is not primarily considered a restaurant meal.

It is a social event.

Traditionally, it is often prepared in homes on Thursdays and Sundays.

Families gather around it.

People talk.

People wait.

People argue about how it should be made.

And, apparently, people also argue about whose paella is superior.

Valencia and Alicante, for example, have somewhat different traditions.

One of the major differences is something called salmorreta, common in Alicante-style preparations.

It is a concentrated mixture of garlic, tomato, parsley, and paprika that creates a deeply flavored base.

That alone was something I had never heard of before.

Then came the rules.

Some of them are absolute.

Once the rice goes into the pan, do not stir it.

Not a little.

Not occasionally.

Do not stir it.

This is not risotto.

The pan itself matters enormously.

Not simply because it is wide and shallow.

The key is that the entire bottom of the pan must receive even heat.

Not just the center.

The entire pan.

That means the ordinary kitchen stovetop many of us have at home may not do the job properly.

You need a burner or heat source large enough to distribute heat beneath the whole pan.

That was one of my biggest lessons.

I had always thought the pan was mostly about shape.

It is really about heat.

Then there is the stock.

For seafood paella, this may be the most important ingredient of all.

Our instructor was emphatic about that.

A great seafood paella requires a great fish stock.

And great fish stock does not come out of a carton.

We made ours from roasted fish — often something like monkfish or rockfish — including the head, but not the guts.

Apparently the head contains gelatin that gives the stock body.

Another option here is a local eel called morena.

And even stock has rules.

Twenty to twenty-five minutes.

Exactly.

Not an hour.

Not “the longer the better.”

Too long and you can actually make it bitter.

Paprika goes in near the end of the roasting part of the stock-making process, prior to adding the liquid.

About one minute.

No more.

Burn the paprika and you ruin the flavor.

That was another surprise.

Then there is the rice.

Not just any rice.

Our instructor insisted on rice from the Valencia region.

Bomba was one choice.

Another was Albufera rice.

What matters is the structure of the grain.

It has to absorb the stock and all of those flavors without breaking down.

That is part of the magic.

The rice becomes saturated with everything you have spent the previous two hours building.

And still, it holds together.

So if I had to reduce our three-hour lesson to three things that distinguish an excellent paella, they would be these:

The stock.

The rice.

And time.

Good stock takes time.

Good preparation takes time.

And the paella itself cannot be rushed.

You are not making this in 15 minutes on a Tuesday night because everyone is hungry.

At least not if you want to make it properly.

And that brought me back to something our instructor had said near the beginning.  “If you don’t have the time, do not prepare paella.”

Paella is not really a meal.

It is an event.

That makes more sense to me now.

The preparation itself is part of the experience.

Someone is cleaning fish.

Someone is chopping.

Someone is making stock.

Someone is tending the pan.

People are talking.

People are waiting.

And eventually everyone gathers around this enormous pan of rice that has absorbed everything that came before it.

That is a very different idea from simply ordering “seafood paella” from a menu.

I think that is what has surprised me most during this whole experience.

We started by eating paella.

Then we went to a competition celebrating it.

Then we drove through the rice fields that make it possible.

We visited El Palmar, where the dish is woven into the landscape.

And finally, we spent three hours learning how to make one.

Somewhere along the way, paella stopped being a Spanish dish.

It became a Valencian story.

A story about a particular rice grown in a particular place.

A particular pan.

A particular kind of heat.

A particular stock.

A particular way of gathering people together.

Maybe that is why Valencians can be so passionate about it.

To an outsider, paella looks like rice with ingredients in it.

To someone from here, apparently, that misses the point completely.

The point is not simply what ends up in the pan.

It is everything that happened before it got there.