Rice with pork and vegetables: an Alicante recipe

This rice from Alicante Turismo is one of those that finish in the oven: it is prepared in the paella pan, boils for a few minutes and finishes cooking without you touching it. The recipe is the one published on the city’s tourism page, for four people, and here you follow it step by step.

A two-phase rice and a rest

The method gives three times with minutes: 6 of boiling over a high heat, 13 in the convection oven preheated to 170 °C and 3 of rest. Added up, that is 22 minutes from when you pour in the boiling stock until it is served. Everything that comes before, the chopping of the vegetables and the sautéing of the pork, carries no figure in the source.

That matters for organising yourself. If you count only those 22 minutes you will fall short: the rib stock has to be made and boiling before you start, and the vegetables have to be washed and cut finely. Think of the 22 minutes as the final stretch, not as the total time of the recipe.

The order of the method

The method opens with the stock coming to the boil and then moves on to the vegetables, washed and finely chopped. Next the pork is sautéed, in small pieces, in the same paella pan the rice will go into later. The source says the vegetables are set aside; in this recipe the pork and the vegetables are both set aside and go back into the paella pan together after 6 minutes of boiling. The source does not specify that detail, so it is settled here by cook’s judgement.

With the paella pan free, the chickpeas go in, the rice is added and the boiling stock is poured in. From there the 6 minutes over a high heat begin to count.

The paella pan has to be oven-safe

The recipe takes the paella pan from the hob to the oven, so you need one that can take the heat. Check before you start that yours fits in the oven and that its handles will not suffer. The source calls for a convection oven; if yours has that function, it is the one to use, and it should be preheated to 170 °C before the paella pan is ready to go in.

The rice is bomba rice with Calasparra designation of origin. If you want to know what sets this grain apart in a dry rice, there is the entry on bomba rice.

The rib stock and double the stock

The list takes for granted a ready-made pork rib stock, with red pepper, garlic, saffron, fried tomato and water. It comes with no quantities or times, so you will have to prepare it in advance. Take your time over it: it is the flavour base of the whole rice.

On how much to pour in, the source is brief: double the quantity of stock as of rice, and always boiling. It does not clarify whether it is measured by weight or by volume, so here the rice is not translated into a figure for stock. What matters is to respect the proportion of one to two and for the stock to go in very hot so that the boil is not interrupted.

Pork, vegetables and chickpeas

The lean Iberian pork is the meat of the dish and is sautéed in garlic oil, listed by the source in decilitres, without a preparation method or an assigned step; using it to sauté the pork is a cooking decision. The vegetables are artichoke, green and red pepper, cauliflower and flat green beans, all finely chopped. The chickpeas go in already cooked.

The sautéing of the pork carries no minutes in the source, so judge by eye when the meat is ready before setting it aside. The salt is adjusted when the pork and the vegetables go back into the paella pan, after the 6 minutes of boiling, just before putting the rice in the oven.

How to organise the kitchen

Before lighting the stove, have ready what you will need: the pork in small pieces, the vegetables already chopped, the chickpeas drained and the rice measured. That way the sautéing is done in one go and the boil does not catch you with something still to cut. The stock made and hot, and the oven on at 170 °C on convection.

If you are looking for other rice dishes from our recipes to compare, there are the rice with veal trotter and the baked rice.

If the rice is for many

A rice cooked in a paella pan is planned table by table. If the meal is for a group, see how we organise the service in local fiestas and ask for a quote with the number of guests.