How not to eat paella in its home city of Valencia, and the rise of the Spanish speciality

To order a seafood paella for dinner in Valencia, Spain, is to make two mistakes at once in the eyes of locals, who are ever conscious of tradition. First, neither seafood nor fish belongs in a paella. Second, paella is traditionally only served here at lunchtime, preferably on Sundays. Everyone eats together, using wooden spoons straight from the large pan. Paella is more than just a meal; it is a social event and an occasion. Only a tourist would consider such a thing as eating paella in the evening. It sits heavy in your stomach, so it could disrupt a good night’s sleep, especially as people rarely eat here before 9pm. No, in the evening, Valencians prefer to have tapas, maybe at Bar X in the Mercado de Colon, a market hall that ought to be on the itinerary for any visit to Valencia. All about rice Valencians have a particularly close relationship with paella. After all, this is the home of the popular rice dish, though strictly speaking, its origins lie a few kilometres further south, in the Albufera. The Albufera is a nature reserve with a freshwater lake, whose water feeds the surrounding rice fields. “The first place was here,” says Mauro Ponsoda, an agricultural scientist and curator of the Rice Museum in Valencia. Ponsoda knows the Albufera well, and its rice fields that provide a lush green backdrop from late May right through to August. Not all rice is the same, Ponsoda says. There are primarily three round-grain varieties from the Albufera that make for a successful paella. The most expensive variety is Bomba rice, which grows up to 1.2 metres (3ft 11in) tall and is harvested first in September, provided it has withstood the wind. Senia rice is smaller and more productive. Finally, Albufera rice, the third in the trio, is a cross between the first two varieties. The most important thing about rice is that it should absorb the flavours of the ingredients without sticking together, unlike sushi rice. From a poor man’s meal to Michelin-starred cuisine El Palmar lies amid the rice fields. Almost two dozen restaurants line the streets of the long, narrow village with its 800 inhabitants, including the Bon Aire. It is situated a little off the beaten track, on the edge of the rice fields. Bon Aire serves paella in its original form, with rabbit, chicken and, on request, snails, which you remove from their shells with a toothpick. These are precisely the ingredients that farmers used to have to hand – paella was a poor man’s meal. Now, though, this popular rice dish has long since found its way into Michelin-starred cuisine. The Llisa Negra restaurant in Valencia is one of several establishments run by Quique Dacosta, who started as a dishwasher and is now one of the few chefs in Spain to boast three Michelin stars, which he does at his eponymous restaurant about 100km (62 miles) south of Valencia in Denia. In his Llisa Negra kitchen, his team uses products sourced almost exclusively within a 75km radius. That also applies to most of the ingredients in the paellas. They are cooked over an open fire, with a chef constantly adding wooden logs – a sweat-inducing task that guests can watch through a glass pane. Once the work is done, the layer of rice in the pan is barely a centimetre thick. The rice has absorbed all the liquid; you have to scrape a little to loosen it from the bottom of the pan. This socarrat – the crispy, slightly caramelised layer at the bottom – is, for many Valencians, the hallmark of a truly good paella. World Paella Day Valencia celebrates paella in a major way. In March 1992, locals made a paella here for 100,000 people, earning themselves a place in the Guinness World Records. They used a pan with a diameter of 20 metres. By comparison, the largest pan available at the stall outside Valencia’s central market hall seems downright tiny. It measures 1.3 metres, which is enough for 200 diners, the vendor assures us. The market hall itself, a magnificent building constructed in the Valencian art nouveau style, is the place to go for every paella chef. Naturally, this is also where Miguel Angel Perez buys his ingredients when he wants to cook paella at home. In his professional capacity as the deputy director of Visit Valencia, his responsibilities include running World Paella Day. The contest, whose final is held every September in Valencia, attracts participants from far and wide, even from South America and Asia. They must follow only one rule: the rice must come from Valencia. Otherwise, anything the cuisine of the respective country has to offer can go into the pan, even insects. A past winner, Chabe Soler, heads Villa Indiano, a restaurant in an old country house with high, stucco-decorated ceilings on the edge of the Huerta, the garden and vegetable-growing region surrounding Valencia. Soler is dedicated to traditional cuisine and works with local farmers who, depending on the season, supply her with just about everything she needs for her rice-based dishes, from aubergines to onions. This lively woman, a true child of the Huerta, has even had a rice ear tattooed on her upper arm. Villa Indiano is one of the places where you can learn how to prepare a genuine Valencian paella if you sign up for a workshop. Time to grab your chef’s hat.

How not to eat paella in its home city of Valencia, and the rise of the Spanish speciality

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Paella is very important in Valencia, where the dish is communally consumed and the city’s World Paella Day attracts chefs the world over

All about rice

Paella is very important in Valencia, where the dish is communally consumed and the city’s World Paella Day attracts chefs the world over