SPAIN / FOOD & CULTURE
Rice with Things: Everything You Need to Know About Paella
In October 2016, British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver posted a tweet. "Good Spanish food doesn't get much better than paella," it read cheerfully. "My version combines chicken thighs & chorizo." What followed was not a polite disagreement about culinary tradition. Furious replies came thick and fast: "Come to Valencia to try the real paella and stop making 'rice with whatever'", wrote Spanish journalist Vicent Marco. "Your dish is everything but paella." Others were less restrained. "Your paella is an abomination," wrote one. "An insult not only to our gastronomy but to our culture," said another. One Twitter user drew a comparison between Oliver's dish and the renowned botched fresco artwork Ecce Homo. Others satirically responded with British recipes rewritten with absurd Spanish twists: fish and chips made with aubergines and duck.
The chorizo tweet became briefly international news. That a rice dish could generate the diplomatic energy of a minor geopolitical incident tells you almost everything you need to know about what paella means to Spain — and, above all, to Valencia.
It is not food. It is identity. And you do not mess with it.
The Two Civilisations in the Pan
Paella is, in reality, a perfect union of two cultures in Spain: the Romans for the pan and the Arabs for the rice.
The Roman contribution was the patella — the wide, shallow iron pan that the Roman legions and farming communities used throughout the empire. The word moved from Latin into Old French as paelle, then into Old Valencian, where paella simply means any frying pan. The dish took the name of its vessel. This is not unusual — think of the way a wok refers to the pan, or how a tagine refers to the clay pot. But in paella's case, the name stuck so thoroughly that most people outside Spain assume it refers only to the specific rice preparation, not the pan itself. Valencian speakers still use the word paella for all pans, not just the traditional shallow one used for the rice dish.
The Arab contribution was the rice. Rice was brought to the Iberian Peninsula with the Muslim invasion in the 8th century. The Moors — cultivating the fertile marshland south of Valencia around the Albufera lagoon — found conditions almost identical to the Asian river deltas where rice had been farmed for millennia: warm climate, rich alluvial soil, abundant water from the mountains, and a lagoon environment that made irrigation natural. First grown by the Moors in the nearby Albufera wetlands in the eighth century, rice has been part of Valencia's history for over 1,000 years. The Spanish word arroz — rice — comes from Arabic. The grain and the word arrived together.
What came next was a millennium of cooking.
The Farmers of Albufera
One likely theory is that paella was invented by Albufera rice farmers in the 15th century. Farmers gathered in the paddies to cook a one-pot dish with ingredients that were readily available in the surrounding fields: rice, snails, aquatic birds, green beans, and water from the Albufera.
This is the origin that feels most true in terms of character, because it explains why paella is what it is. Farmers working the rice fields around the lagoon needed to eat lunch. They had a pan — the paella — and they had what surrounded them: the rice they were growing, the snails that lived in the paddies, the rabbits and ducks in the fields and reeds, the beans and tomatoes from the huerta. They made a fire from orange tree branches — oranges grow abundantly in Valencia and their wood burns fragrant and hot — and they cooked everything in a single layer in the pan. That was it. That was the dish.
The dish became so popular that in 1840, a local Spanish newspaper first used the word paella to refer to the recipe rather than the pan, according to food historian Lynne Olver. By this point the rice dish was already distinct enough from every other use of the pan to deserve its own name. Living standards rising in the late 19th century meant the dish evolved from pure subsistence cooking into something more intentional: this led to a change in paella's ingredients, using instead rabbit, chicken, duck, and sometimes snails.
The dish was now a cultural object, not just a meal. And then, of course, the world got involved.
The Anatomy of a Real Paella Valenciana
Let us be very clear about what authentic paella valenciana actually contains, because most people outside Spain have never eaten it.
There is no seafood in a paella valenciana. There is no chorizo. There are no peas. There is no pepper. There is no onion. This last point surprises people, but authentic Valencian paella is made without it. The dish's ingredients are: short-grain Valencian rice, chicken, rabbit, snails (optional but traditional), ferradura (flat green beans), garrofó (large butter beans, specific to the Valencia region), tomato, olive oil, sweet paprika, saffron, rosemary, water, and salt. That is the whole list.
The technique is as important as the ingredients. The sofregit — the chicken, rabbit, and vegetables browned in olive oil — is the flavour foundation. Stock builds from this, water is added, the proportions are precise. The rice goes in and must not be stirred after that point; stirring releases starch, creates a creamy texture, and produces something closer to risotto than paella. The rice must remain in a thin, even layer so that the pan's heat reaches every grain simultaneously. And then comes the thing that separates a real paella from an imitation: the socarrat.
One of the most important aspects of cooking paella is achieving the socarrat, that crispy layer of rice that forms at the bottom of the pan, which many consider the best part of the dish. Getting the perfect socarrat requires skill and experience, as it's a balance between letting the rice cook without burning. The socarrat tastes of caramelised rice and smoke and the concentrated residue of everything that cooked above it — the rabbit fat, the tomato, the beans, the saffron. It is the measure by which Valencians judge a paella cook. If the bottom is pale, the cook did not let it go far enough. If it is black and bitter, they went too far. The narrow band of deep, dark gold is what separates mastery from failure.
According to tradition in Valencia, paella is cooked over an open fire, fuelled by orange tree and pine branches and pine cones. This produces an aromatic smoke which infuses the paella. Also: dining guests traditionally eat directly out of the pan instead of serving in plates. This is not theatre. It is efficiency, warmth, and the oldest form of communal eating.
The Variants: A Field Guide
The Valencian canon is firm but it exists within a broader universe of rice dishes — arrossos, as they are known in the language — that Valencia and the surrounding regions have developed over centuries. Understanding them makes eating in the region immensely more navigable.
Paella de Marisco — the seafood paella that most of the world calls "paella" — is a coastal evolution. As Valencia grew and its beaches attracted visitors, the dish adapted to what the Mediterranean provided: prawns, mussels, clams, squid, cuttlefish, sometimes octopus or monkfish. This is delicious and legitimate, but Valencians will be happy to tell you it is a different dish from paella valenciana. Both are true. Both are worth eating.
Paella Mixta — the infamous combination of meat and seafood — is technically a heresy in Valencia but exists in much of the rest of Spain and is what most international restaurants mean when they write "paella" on the menu. The Valencian response to it is the phrase "arroz con cosas" — rice with things — delivered with a tone that suggests the speaker has seen something distressing.
Arròs Negre (arroz negro, black rice) turns the paella pan into something visually dramatic: the dish is made with cuttlefish or squid and rice, and its dark colour comes from squid ink, which also enhances its seafood flavour. The resulting plate is completely black, intensely flavoured, and typically served with allioli. It is not technically a paella in Valencia's strict taxonomy, but it is cooked in the same pan by the same logic. In addition to Valencia and Catalonia, the dish is popular in Cuba and Puerto Rico, where it is known as arroz con calamares.
Arròs a Banda is the fishermen's rice: rice cooked in a rich, deeply reduced fish stock, typically served with allioli on top. As the story goes, Valencian fishermen traditionally made a seafood stew using the fish they were unable to sell. Then they took the leftover liquid from that dish and used it to cook rice. That's how arròs a banda was born — from the rice dish served alongside the stew. The name means, literally, "rice on the side." It became the main event.
Fideuà replaces the rice with thin pasta noodles — fideos — and is prepared using the same technique as paella: in a flat pan, over high heat, with a similar sofregit base and seafood. As the story goes, it was invented after the crew of a fishing boat from Gandia ran out of rice while at sea. The ship's cook improvised by chopping up some pasta he had on board. The crew liked the end result, and fideuà was born. The socarrat equivalent in fideuà — the darkened, crisped noodles at the bottom — is equally prized and equally difficult to achieve.
Arroz al Horno (arròs al forn) is the landlocked, oven-baked version that developed as a way to use leftover cocido stew: chickpeas, morcilla, tomato, garlic, and whatever pork products the family had to hand, baked until a golden crust forms on top. It is winter food, substantial food, the food of the interior rather than the coast.
Arroz del Senyoret — "gentleman's rice" — is a seafood paella from Alicante where all the seafood is pre-shelled and pre-peeled before cooking, so the diner does not need to get their hands dirty extracting meat from shells. As the story goes, it was served to the eldest sons of wealthy families so they didn't have to get their hands messy while eating. The name carries a faint irony that the Spaniards who coined it certainly intended.
The Establishments: Where to Eat It in Valencia
The first rule of eating paella in Valencia is: do not eat it in the tourist centre of the city.
The best paella in Valencia is most certainly not in the Ciutat Vella restaurants, where most tourists stay. Generally, locals rave that the best paellas are around the L'Albufera region, and specifically at El Palmar. El Palmar is a small village twenty minutes from the city, set in the middle of the rice fields, surrounded by the same lagoon and paddies from which paella emerged five centuries ago. Every restaurant here serves the dish in its proper context. This is where it should be eaten first.
La Pepica (Avenida de Neptuno, Valencia, Est. 1898) La Pepica has seen many famous guests since first opening its doors in 1898. The Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla — whose sun-drenched canvases of the Malvarrosa beach practically invented the visual language of Valencia — ate here regularly. Ernest Hemingway came often enough that he was occasionally spotted helping out in the kitchen, which is exactly the kind of thing Hemingway did. "Dinner at Pepica's was wonderful… the seafood and the Valencian rice dishes were the best on the beach," he would later write in his memoir The Dangerous Summer. Queen Sofía of Spain has dined here. Locals insist the kitchen has maintained the quality of its dishes over the years despite its rise to fame. La Pepica still cooks over a wood fire, which matters. The seafood paella is the house speciality, and the terrace faces the Mediterranean.
Casa Carmela (Paseo Neptuno, Valencia, Est. 1922) A family-run restaurant that has been delighting customers for nearly 100 years, Casa Carmela has humble roots: it originally started as a small shack near the beach where swimmers could change their clothes and rest. Before long, the family began serving paella to hungry swimmers, and a Valencian icon was born. Casa Carmela cooks paella the traditional way, on an open wood fire, and has reached the ultimate level of mastery in doing so. The aroma of freshly cooked paella hanging in the air, mixed with the smokiness of burning orange wood, gives this paella its distinctive character. The dining experience here follows the oldest tradition: the paella is served in the middle of the table and everyone eats directly from the pan with wooden spoons, scraping for the socarrat.
Restaurante Levante (Benissanó, north of Valencia) If you ask Valencians where to go for the best paella, one name you'll hear again and again is Restaurante Levante. It's in Benissanó, a small town north of Valencia, where few tourists venture. The house speciality is paella valenciana in its most traditional form: chicken, rabbit, and the proper Valencian beans — ferradura and garrofó — cooked over an open flame. Guests can choose from among 10,000 bottles of Spanish wines kept in the restaurant's cellar to accompany their meal. The drive from Valencia takes about thirty minutes and passes through orange groves. This is, in every sense, the correct context.
Casa Roberto (Calle del Maestro Gozalbo, Valencia, Est. 1986) In the lively, bohemian Ruzafa district, Casa Roberto is one of the best-known and best-loved paella restaurants among Valencians. Casa Roberto's paella follows the classic recipe, although adding slightly more snails and a good portion of vegetables. The fact that it opened in 1986 and is already a Valencian institution rather than a tourist trap is a measure of how quickly a restaurant can earn the city's trust when it does the thing correctly. The clientele is local; the conversations around you are in Valencian.
Bon Aire, El Palmar (Albufera Natural Park) For the full ancestral experience, drive to El Palmar in the Albufera and eat at Bon Aire, which sits with views over the rice fields where the dish was born. The setting alone is worth the detour: flat green paddies stretching to the horizon, the lagoon gleaming in the distance, the smoke of an orange-wood fire. This is the landscape in the cooking pot.
The World Tour: Paella's Global Family
When a dish travels with colonisers, missionaries, and migrants, it transforms in ways that sometimes preserve the original idea more faithfully than the original country expects.
Arroz a la Valenciana — Philippines: Considered a part of Philippine cuisine and regarded as the Philippine version of paella, the Philippine version uses glutinous rice; otherwise, the ingredients are the same. In the Philippines, it refers to chicken and longganisa (chorizo) versions. Filipino paelya arrived with the Spanish colonial period and embedded itself so thoroughly in local celebration culture that it became a Christmas dish — served at Noche Buena (Christmas Eve feast) alongside lechon and bibingka. The Filipino version uses atsuete (annatto) for colour rather than saffron, a substitution both practical and poetic: the New World spice replacing the Old World one, each achieving the same golden warmth by different means. The Philippine version bringhe uses coconut milk and banana leaves — an entirely local transformation that retains the communal pan, the rice, and the festive purpose while reimagining everything else.
Arroz con Gandules — Puerto Rico and the Caribbean: The Puerto Rican adaptation uses pigeon peas (gandules), sofrito with recao (culantro), adobo, and various meats — often pork or chicken — with a sofrito base that traces directly back to the Valencian original but has absorbed two centuries of Caribbean flavour logic. It is a Sunday and holiday dish, cooked in large quantities, eaten communally. It is a Latin American (Caribbean) adaptation of the original.
Arroz con Pollo — Latin America broadly: The simplest and most widespread descendant of the paella family, found from Colombia to Cuba to Mexico with infinite regional variations. The logic is pure: chicken, rice, and whatever stock and aromatics the local culture provides. It is one of the most universally eaten dishes in the Spanish-speaking world, and its structure is unmistakably Valencian in its bones.
Arròs Negre — Cuba and Puerto Rico: In Cuba and Puerto Rico, the black squid-ink rice dish is known as arroz con calamares, and it has been part of the Afro-Spanish-Caribbean food culture for centuries, arriving with Spanish colonists and adapting to the local seafood of the Caribbean. In the Philippines it survives as paella negra.
The Ingredient That Must Not Be Named (Except It Must)
About the chorizo.
Jamie Oliver's 2016 tweet was not the first time this argument had been made. Gordon Ramsay's paella recipe also included chorizo, to comparable outrage. The Valencian response was, in both cases, swift and absolute: this is not paella, it is arroz con cosas.
As Josep Pla, the great Catalan gastronome and journalist, described it: "One of the most perverted, humiliated dishes of the national cuisine." And yet. In an article for El País, Spanish food writer Ana Vega 'Biscayenne', citing historical references, showed that traditional Valencian paella did indeed include chorizo, exclaiming: "Ah Jamie, we'll have to invite you to the Falles."
The historical record is genuinely complicated. Paella began as a peasant dish made from whatever was available. Chorizo — a cheap, flavourful pork sausage — was available in Valencian countryside kitchens for centuries. The strict prohibition on chorizo in paella is, it appears, a relatively recent purism rather than an ancient rule, and the purism is tied more to regional identity and pride than to an unbroken centuries-long prohibition. This does not mean you should add chorizo to your paella. The Valencian position remains firm, the cultural stakes remain high, and the flavour argument against chorizo is not negligible — the smoked paprika and pork fat from chorizo do dominate and change the dish in ways that obscure the saffron and the stock. But the history is more nuanced than the Twitter fury suggested.
The most diplomatically useful position is the one quietly adopted by serious cooks outside Valencia: make paella valenciana with the canonical ingredients when you want paella; make a rice dish with chorizo when you want a rice dish with chorizo; and do not call the second one the first one. Everyone can live with this arrangement.
Fascinating Trivia
There is a romantic theory that the dish was first prepared by a lover for his fiancée, with the word paella being a corruption of para ella — "for her" in Spanish. This is etymologically false and delightful, and Valencians will tell you both things in the same breath.
Paella is a Sunday dish and a lunchtime dish. In Spain it is almost never eaten for dinner — ordering it at dinner in Valencia will get you a look of mild concern from the waiter. The tradition of Sunday paella is so embedded that in Valencia the Sunday family lunch built around a shared pan is a weekly institution across generations, and the question of who gets to cook it — which implies knowledge of the correct technique and the right rice — is a matter of genuine family politics.
In 1896, French filmmaker Eugène Lix filmed the instructions for cooking a Valencian paella — making it one of the earliest food subjects ever committed to cinema. The film captures the outdoor fire, the flat pan, the precise gestures of the cook. Almost nothing about the technique has changed in the 130 years since.
Paella is traditionally a man's job in Spain, just like the barbecue in the UK and the USA. The outdoor cooking, the fire management, the theatrical scale of the pan — all of it has historically been considered masculine domain. Valencian women cook everything else. Paella on a Sunday is the man's performance. This is changing, unevenly, in the way all such conventions change.
The Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla — whose work hangs in the Prado in Madrid and in a dedicated museum in the capital, and whose sun-flooded canvases of Malvarrosa beach defined the visual image of Valencia for the world — was a devoted paella eater. He painted the sea, the light, the women in the water. He ate at La Pepica. These two facts feel inseparable: that the man who made Valencia's landscape beautiful in paint was also the man eating the rice that made that same landscape edible.
Today, paella is a generic term for around 200 distinct rice dishes from Valencia alone. The idea that "paella" refers to a single dish is, from Valencia's perspective, like saying "wine" refers to a single drink.
The Last Argument: Socarrat as Philosophy
There is a moment in cooking paella — and you can only feel it, not see it, because everything is happening underneath the rice — when the liquid has fully absorbed and the bottom of the pan begins to toast. The sound changes slightly: the gentle bubbling gives way to something quieter and drier. The smell shifts: saffron and chicken stock become something caramelised, darker, edged with smoke. This is the moment that separates the cook who knows from the cook who is guessing. The person who knows turns down the heat slightly, waits exactly the right amount of time, and lifts a corner of the rice with a spoon to check the colour of the socarrat. The person who is guessing either pulls the pan too early (pale, no crust) or too late (black, bitter, a tragedy).
The socarrat is a philosophy as much as a technique. It asks the cook to be present, attentive, confident without being reckless. It asks them to trust a process they cannot observe directly. It produces something that cannot be replicated by any other method: a crust that tastes simultaneously of everything in the dish — every gram of stock, every piece of chicken, every thread of saffron — compressed and caramelised into a single dark layer of irreproducible flavour.
This is why paella matters. Not because of the recipe, not because of the arguments about chorizo, not even because of Hemingway at La Pepica or Sorolla on the beach. It matters because it requires paying attention. Because the best version of it is made outdoors, over a wood fire, with people you know, from rice grown in the same fields where it was first cooked six hundred years ago. Because it cannot be rushed or approximated. Because the pan is named after itself. Because the landscape is inside it.
The day the socarrat is right, you feel it before you taste it.