I have a couple of thoughts and opinions on paella and am including some pics from this summer's trip to Spain where I enjoyed several of them.

Rice: La Preferida's Fancy Pearl Rice (arroz tipo valenciano) is just fine for making a paella. This is confirmed by several Spanish paella-makers (including MIL) who have visited Chicago. No need to search far and wide or spend an exorbitant amount on rice for no real discernible difference in flavor or performance.

Saffron: Don't bother with it (!?). I have never seen a Spanish home cook use real saffron in a paella, and would confidently bet that most restaurants don't either. They use "colorante" which is a flavorless coloring powder. You likely wouldn't be able to even taste saffron in a paella and you'd need to use so much of it to get the color of the rice right. My guess is that saffron was used in the rural olden days for color but now nobody bothers. Indeed, my visitors have been bewildered/outraged that "colorante" was not readily available in any Chicago supermarket for pennies. I have brought back from Spain and also it can be found online (colorante para paella). The saffron emperor wears no clothes.

Ingredients: Now that you've saved a bunch of money on rice and saffron, get the best other ingredients possible especially seafood. Alas, nothing tastes as good as in Spain but a nice paella can be made. MIL-approved (although always with the "not as good and so expensive!" asterisk) seafood markets include Fresh Farms and Seafood City. More than one shopping excursion with excited seafood paella dreams has ended with "hmm, maybe we should just have arroz con pollo instead".

Pics: In my experience most backyard paellas are cooked on a ring burner with a paella that goes with it. Broken down cardboard boxes are often used as a wind barrier and often catch fire which adds a lot of excitement and is fun for the kids.

Buen provecho!

I disagree with you. I absolutely can taste and think that 2 very important ingredients are saffron and smoked paprika.

MKL wrote:...In my experience most backyard paellas are cooked on a ring burner with a paella that goes with it. Broken down cardboard boxes are often used as a wind barrier and often catch fire which adds a lot of excitement and is fun for the kids.
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Thanks for your post. I was really hoping for pics of the kids enjoying the burning cardboard.

Made paella tonight for the second time. I’d give my effort a B-. I was happy with was the rice. I was at Sanabal Bakery this morning and they had several short grain, pearl shaped rice to choose from. I went with Duru Baldo Rice and thought it worked well.

Question - I usually rinse my rice and did again tonight. Any thoughts on whether thats a good practice here? I’ve seen some recipes that call for toasting the rice. Thoughts?

I used chicken thighs, shrimp and mussels. I haven’t cooked with mussels a lot and was leery of recipes that said to just put the mussels in towards the end. I steamed them first but then it took longer to cook off the liquid than I expected. Next time I would skip the steaming step and just trust that there will be time for the mussels to cook.

After I left Sanabal I went across the street to Cermak and they happened to have a wide low pan for sale. Not a paella pan per se but ended up being a great fit. It was big enough that it fit over two burners on my stove and I just rotated it every couple of minutes. I got a good but not great crust. I pulled it off earlier than I would have wanted but everything was done.

I think my biggest challenge was to cook the dish long enough to get a crust but not so long to over cook the rice and other ingredients. All and all it was pretty darn good.

I love that it’s one of those dishes you can just throw in what you have on hand. I think the challenge is in the timing to get everything cooked and not over cooked but still have the crust form.

Fresh Farms, Niles has a number of types of rice suitable for paella. Calasparra, Bomba. Plus Arborio, Carnaroli. Multiple brands of some types. I've used Calasparra to good effect.

There may be more, these are just the ones I noticed. I would have inspected further but there was a mom having a loud argument with an even louder 5-year-old, so I moved along.