Traditional Valencian paella recipe

Valencian paella is cooked in a paella pan with rice, chicken, rabbit, flat green beans and garrofó, and you can spot it at a glance: loose grains, a thin layer, a saffron colour and a toasted crust on the bottom. What goes in it, where it comes from and what changes from one district to the next is covered in what Valencian paella is. Here you get the practical side: how to make it properly. The long story, from Moorish rice to the beach restaurant, is in our history of paella and rice in Spain.

What Decree 176/2021 says and what it leaves open

Decree 176/2021 of 29 October, of the Consell, declared “Valencian paella, ‘the art of uniting and sharing’” an intangible asset of cultural interest; the BOE (Spain’s official gazette) published it on 15 March 2022. It helps to know what it protects. The decree sets neither a recipe nor a closed list of ingredients: it says that its preparation “has several variants across the territory of the Comunitat Valenciana” and that the recipe “has never been free from controversy”. Only one ingredient is beyond dispute: “there is no doubt about the essential ingredient: rice”.

What it does record are practices: scattering the rice over the stock “drawing a cross”, in a thin layer if the number of guests allows it, and the recommendation not to stir it. And it makes clear that, whether you cook over wood or not, “the decisive and most delicate moment is the point at which the rice is cooked”.

That is why this page doesn’t present itself as the official recipe, because there isn’t one. It is the traditional recipe of Turisme Comunitat Valenciana, checked against the Turespaña one and against the regional variants that have a source.

The water: the mark method

The Turisme Comunitat Valenciana recipe doesn’t measure the water in glasses. When the tomato is fried, you pour in water up to three times the volume of the rice and note the height it reaches in the pan. Then you top up to the total and add the salt and the garrofó. While it reduces, it boils over a medium heat “so that a flavour-packed stock forms”, as the recipe says. When it reaches the mark, it is time for the rice.

Other sources measure differently, and no figure is official:

The differences make sense: the water first cooks the meat and the vegetables, and a good part evaporates before the grain goes in. To work out how much rice to use when there are a lot of you, there is how much rice per person.

The ingredients that matter and the optional ones

The base is short: chicken, rabbit, flat green beans, garrofó, tomato, oil, paprika, saffron and round-grain rice from the D.O. València; bomba rice is one of the round-grain varieties. In this recipe the sofrito is made in the paella pan itself: well-sealed meat, then the beans, the paprika for an instant and the grated tomato. You can find the technique in more detail in the paella sofrito.

Turisme Comunitat Valenciana leaves the tavella beans, the rosemary and the snails up to you; Turespaña also marks the pepper and the garlic as optional. According to Wikipaella, in the province of Castellón artichoke is always included and, in some towns, pork rib normally replaces the rabbit. Among other Alicante paellas, the decree also mentions a “paella with duck” from Catral, recorded by Seijo Alonso: it is a different dish, not an optional extra for this one. If you like snails, they have their own page: the rice with rabbit and snails; and if you want it eaten with a spoon, with the same meat, there is the brothy rice with chicken and rabbit. What doesn’t appear in any of these sources is seafood or chorizo.

Getting the rice right, and the socarrat

Turisme Comunitat Valenciana splits it into three stages: high heat, medium heat and very low heat, for 15 to 18 minutes in total. Visit València gives the signal to turn it off: the water has evaporated, but the grain is not completely dry. If you leave it a little longer over a low heat, the socarrat appears. The recipe gives one hour in total: the cooking time on this page is approximate, that hour minus the rest.

The usual mistakes are avoided with simple gestures:

• Stirring the rice once it is spread: the decree advises exactly the opposite.
• Burning the paprika: lower the heat first and add the tomato straight away.
• Adding the rice with too much stock: wait until it has dropped to the mark.
• Skipping the rest: 5 minutes with the heat off lets the grain finish.

Pan, heat and table

For 4 servings, Turisme Comunitat Valenciana recommends a paella pan of between 42 and 55 cm: wide and shallow, so the grain ends up in a single layer. If it is too small, the rice piles up and cooks unevenly. Over wood or gas, what counts is that the heat reaches the whole paella equally and that you can turn it up and down quickly.

The paella is brought to the table in the pan itself and eaten from it, each person from their own portion. If you prefer a fish rice, look at the arroz a banda or the seafood paella. To organise a big meal, there is the guide to paella for 100 people. And if there are 40 or more of you, we cook rice for groups live: see paella and show cooking.