Albufera, Valencia
Paella Valenciana
Chicken, rabbit, two beans, saffron — the rice dish that Valencia wrote and the rest of the world misquoted.
In repertoire since Jan 2026
Paella is a rice dish, not a stew.
The whole technique is built around a thin, even layer of rice in a wide pan, cooked at high heat, never stirred, with just enough liquid to hydrate it. Stir it and you get risotto. Add seafood and you get something Valencia doesn't recognise. The dish has rules and they are pedantic; the dish is also the best argument for those rules.
2 · Plant
Then, the plants.
Each ingredient held water and minerals, built sugar out of light over weeks or months, ripened, and was picked. A few ingredients (salt, water) came from a different elemental story.
- Ingredient
Bomba rice
300 g Bomba or Calasparra rice
Short-grain Spanish rice that absorbs 3× its volume in liquid without going gluey. Don't substitute Arborio.
Albufera Bomba rice paddy - Ingredient
Chicken
500 g chicken thighs, bone-in, cut into 5 cm pieces
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Rabbit
500 g rabbit, cut into 5 cm pieces (or another 500 g chicken if you can't find rabbit)
Real paella valenciana is chicken plus rabbit. If you swap, just don't add seafood or chorizo — both are sins in Valencia.
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Ferraúra beans
200 g flat green beans (ferraúra, or Romano beans), topped
Flat broad beans, not French green beans. They survive the 18-minute cook.
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Garrofó beans
100 g fresh garrofó (lima beans), or 75 g dried, soaked
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Saffron
Generous pinch (about 0.5 g) saffron threads
Toasted in a dry corner of the pan for 20 seconds, then crumbled.
La Mancha saffron co-op - Ingredient
Pimentón dulce
1 tbsp sweet pimentón (smoked Spanish paprika)
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Rosemary
1 sprig fresh rosemary
Origin not yet authored
- Ingredient
Chicken stock
900 ml hot chicken stock
Three times the rice volume. Get the volume right and the rice does the rest.
Origin not yet authored
3 · Cook
Then, the kitchen.
Heat, time, salt, fat, acid — the recipe that turns the ingredients into something more than their sum.
4 · Plate
Albufera, Valencia
Paella Valenciana
Chicken, rabbit, two beans, saffron — the rice dish that Valencia wrote and the rest of the world misquoted.
The dish that has suffered most at the hands of international restaurants. A paella with chorizo is not paella; a paella mixta with seafood and meat is acceptable but not Valencian; a paella stirred is risotto with delusions. Valencia is very, very precise about all of this, and most of the precision is justified once you taste a paella made the right way.
What’s left, after the rules: a dish that’s about rice, fire, time. The Albufera rice paddies south of Valencia have grown Bomba for centuries; the dish is a farmer’s lunch, eaten in the field, cooked over a wood fire of orange-wood prunings.
Fight for the socarrat.
The caramelised crust on the bottom of the pan — the *socarrat* — is the whole point. Scrape it with a wooden spoon. Make sure everyone at the table gets a piece. A paella without socarrat is a soup that ran out of liquid.