Taking Stock (2)

Next up from my stock cupboard...the chicken stock.

Once again I forgot to shake the tin before opening it, as I immediately realised when seeing all the fat floating on the surface and coating the lid. But no matter: that simply meant it was much easier to remove - for use elsewhere, not to throw away. Waste not, want not and all.

While the fish stock had quite a subtle flavour, this was a bit more punchy and very chickeny, but again without being too salty. Add a few vegetables and you'd have a basic but more than decent soup. I was looking for a somewhat more interesting use for it though. Alongside my ageing bag of risotto rice in the cupboard, I had found an even older bag of paella rice, so this seemed the perfect opportunity to get rid of that. But what tins to add? There, it seems, I was opening a can of (proverbial) worms.

You see, the Spanish are very particular about their paella - particularly the Valencians, from whose region the dish hails. I used to have a flatmate from Valencia, who I once saw react with outrage when, flicking through one of my cookbooks (by a British food writer), he stumbled upon a recipe for paella which he claimed was so far away from the real thing as to be "an insult". Similarly, Jamie Oliver angered a sizeable number of Spanish people a few years back by including chorizo in one of his recipes, which apparently is not the done thing. Those who berated him on Twitter were not quite as polite as that.

A classic paella Valenciana, originally cooked as a lunchtime meal for farm labourers out in the fields, should apparently only include a combination of chicken, rabbit, butter beans, green beans, tomatoes, paprika, saffron and sometimes duck and snails - the last of those coming as quite a surprise to me - I had only ever seen snails being used in French cuisine. So, is seafood banned too? Well, no - Valencians on the Mediterranean coast naturally did use seafood instead of meat, and so paella de marisco is also considered traditional. But mix seafood and meat together in a paella and you risk the wrath of my old flatmate, among many others.

I must say I find all these arguments about authenticity when it comes to traditional food and recipes a little wearing at times. Yes, food is a hugely significant part of peoples' cultures, and we should respect that. I can see why Jamie Oliver adding a random Spanish ingredient to his paella could be seen as insensitive. But is it worth getting angry about an ingredient being added or substituted if the essence of the dish is still there, and no claims about authenticity are being made? I can't believe that over the years, people from Valencia haven't, on occasion, just added an ingredient to their paella that they happen to have to hand if they were missing something else. Is that inauthentic too? Wikipedia informs me that many early paella recipes also included water vole. Weirdly, that's one ingredient that doesn't seem to have stayed on the approved list.

With paella there is, however, a way not to upset the purists: add in what you like, but instead call it "arroz con ... ", or "rice with [insert ingredients]". It should be noted though that the Spanish sometimes slightly mockingly call this arroz con sosas, or "rice with things". 

So that's what I decided to do, because using tinned ingredients, my version was never going to be particularly authentic. I was fairly sure I couldn't get rabbit in a tin without having to resort to cat food, and while it is possible to buy canned snails, I've yet to find a tin for sale here in the UK. Some of the classic ingredients I could manage though - in a way. I present to you, therefore, arroz con tin of Tesco Chicken, Spanish Chorizo and Butterbean Stew.

This was a great find a while back among Tesco's selection of canned meats. While well within date at the time, its shelf label was marked 'reduced to clear', which is often a sign that a product is being discontinued and they want to get rid of old stock. Indeed, from Tesco's website, it no longer seems to be available.

There seemed to be a good amount of chicken at the top of the tin, in a thick red sauce with an immediately noticeable kick of paprika. The flattish lumps of chicken were unfortunately somewhat dry and chalky-textured. Delving further in, the smaller (and far more elusive) chunks of chorizo were also somewhat chewy, but the butterbeans had seemed to have survived the canning process fairly well.

I was keen to use the sauce along with the chicken stock as the cooking liquid for the rice, but didn't want to cook the chicken in particular for too long to avoid making it any drier. So I strained the sauce into my pan (avoiding the hole in my plastic sieve, where it got too close to the hob once and melted), saving the sosas to add later.

The pan is what actually gives the traditional dish its name - paella literally means 'frying pan' in Valencian dialect. These days paella pans tend to have a round handle on each side; obviously I don't have one of those, so I used the largest frying pan I own, which I thought would do the job. It has one round handle, at least! The key is having a wide, shallow pan so that the rice cooks evenly in as thin a layer as possible. Once the stock and sauce were simmering, in went the rice.

Unlike a risotto, it's not then a case of standing there and constantly stirring - a paella must be left to do its own thing, slowly simmering as the rice absorbs all that lovely stock and, umm, juices from the tin. Being somewhat ancient, my rice was particularly thirsty, and so required some extra water to get nice and tender once it had absorbed all the other liquid. After a while I added the chorizo and butterbeans, and then the chicken once the rice was pretty much ready, just to heat it through.

It occurred to me during the cooking that I had another Spanish(ish) tin in my cupboard - this tin of Pimientos rellenos de bacalao, or stuffed red peppers with cod, which I had bought quite recently in Lidl, part of one of their frequent short-term promotions where they stock lots of products from a particular country or region.

At least, I thought I'd bought stuffed red peppers with cod. The curious thing about these was that while that's what it said on the lid that formed the front of the tin, the back (i.e. the main part of the tin) listed the ingredients for peppers stuffed with hake and prawns - which I recall was one of the other varieties on sale at the time. Either they'd put the wrong lid on the hake and prawn peppers, or the cod ones had been put into the wrong tin. So, which did I actually have? No doubt it would become obvious on opening the tin...

...or maybe not. Peppers, certainly, but as to what they were stuffed with, I had no idea. It was just a sort of pale yellowish puree of something, which seemed to fill the rest of the tin as well. Could have been cod, could have been hake and prawns; it wasn't noticeably fishy smelling or tasting, so could have been anything really. The peppers certainly didn't look much like the pert, well-stuffed specimens in the picture on the front. Anyway, as I wasn't making any attempt at authenticity, I prised a few from their surrounding goo, and chucked them on top at the end.

Traditionally, a paella is eaten straight from the pan by everyone, rather than being served onto plates. I guess I could have done that, seeing as it was just me on my own, but I probably would have ended up eating three times as much that way. So, I took a sensible helping. And then went back for seconds.

One of the advantages of just leaving the rice to cook undisturbed is that you get a delicious crisp crust on the bottom of the pan. Valencians call this the soccarat and it is highly prized.

The precious soccarat. Accompanying veg in the background 
(where would I have put those if I was eating directly from the pan?)

Pepper with miscellaneous stuffing

Chorizo, butterbean, chicken

So, while the chicken may have been somewhat dry, the peppers still refusing to reveal what their stuffing was, and the whole thing wildly inauthentic, it was absolutely delicious - which should, after all, be what it is all about.

As for the leftovers, I had been considering really angering the traditional brigade and adding beaten eggs as a kind of arroz con sosas/tortilla mash-up. But then looking through a Spanish cookery book, I discovered that it is actual thing: "Paella con costra is an unusual paella from Alicante with an egg crust that is finished in the oven." I'm not sure if this would still be done in the traditional paella pan; not knowing for certain if my frying pan was oven-safe, I transferred the leftovers into a suitable dish. I added a bit of that black pudding too - my justification being that they have a similar blood sausage in Spain called morcilla (plus I had tons of the stuff, so I needed to get rid of it somewhere).

Pour on a couple of beaten eggs, whack in the oven...

...and 10 minutes later you've got a meal that's even more filling than the original dish.

I still went back for seconds though.