Cooking With the French Chef: Paella Americaine

Welcome back to Cooking With the French Chef, in which I review episodes of Julia Child’s original show, cook out of the new edition of the French Chef Cookbook and share the results with you. Past posts can be found here.

It’s a little funny to see paella in what is supposedly a French cookbook, since paella is obviously Spanish, but here we are, and in this case the paella is made with ingredients that can typically be found at any American grocery store, hence the Americaine at the end. Julia was really covering all her bases here.

Paella always seems a little intimidating to me, maybe because there are lots of ingredients and it looks fancy. My husband and I used to make Vigo’s boxed version but it’s not the same. The peas in that stuff were a shade of green that’s more at home at an Army encampment, and the whole mixture had little chunks of what seemed to be seafood. Don’t ask me what kind, though.

The other thing is that saffron is usually so expensive. However, my local WinCo sells small amounts of saffron for about three dollars, which, believe me, I take advantage of when the fancy strikes. Yay, WinCo.

The other thing is that since I don’t have the money or space for a paella pan, a big skillet is going to have to do. Oh well. Purists everywhere may wince and shake their heads, but I think Julia would understand. I hope so, anyway.

Here’s Julia’s paella show, which was the twenty-fifth episode of Season 4 and originally aired on January 31, 1966:

OK. Seems pretty straightforward, but then again, Julia has a way of making these recipes look so easy. The only false note here, and it’s not the show’s fault, is that paella should be a riot of color and Season Four was in black and white.

Obviously I don’t have that problem, and when it came to my own paella adventure, the first thing to do was to gather my ingredients, and their name was Legion.

After a few eyebrow raises and a “Zoikes” or two, I decided to make things less overwhelming by doing all the prep work, starting with the veggies and then following that with the chicken and the bacon.

I was also going to have to boil tomatoes so I could peel and juice them, and boil shrimp because Julia said. Before…

And After…

These two seemingly simple ingredients would have bigger parts to play later, but for now, the tomatoes were peeled, seeded, juiced, and chopped. The shrimp were tossed with a marinade of lemon juice, olive oil, dried oregano, salt and pepper. Both would be set aside for later, along with garbanzos, peas, and the all-important arborio rice.

There’s a lot of “setting aside” with paella, apparently, which is somehow comforting. It makes all the ingredients and steps seem a bit less daunting.

I, however, chose to press on, and the next thing was to cook the chorizo and bacon together. Now, I’ve never cooked with chorizo before, and the brand I bought advised me to remove the casing.

Heh. It wasn’t so much a matter of removing the casing as it was extruding the chorizo from the casing. Sorry, I don’t usually go in for bathroom humor, but the chorizo looked like a turd sitting on top of my diced bacon, making for one weird visual. It was awfully liquid-y, too, which didn’t look promising. It did, however, smell insanely good, and it only got more insane when I added the veggies after draining the fat into my paella pan, er, skillet.

Browning the chicken in the fat was next, and while my pan was much more crowded than I would have liked, it didn’t matter because I didn’t want my chicken to fully cook anyway.

After the chicken was a bit less pink, it got combined with the chorizo mixture, plus salt, pepper, garlic, and saffron, followed by a mix of vermouth, chicken broth, and beef bouillon. Once it was bubbling merrily away, it all simmered for about fifteen minutes.

No, the bottle of Jarritos didn’t go into the paella, although it would have been interesting to try. 😉

The chorizo’s in there, Honest.

Next, of course, came the all-important arborio rice, which I sprinkled evenly around the bubbling mass. And here’s what sets the real paella apart from the Vigo boxed stuff (not that there’s anything wrong with that): In real paella, the rice must be pressed into the liquid, and under no circumstances is it to be stirred.

Unless, of course, one likes gummy rice, in which case, go nuts.

I was surprised at how fast the rice reached the al dente stage, probably because arborio rice normally takes about twenty minutes in risotto, but then again, the rice was submerged in liquid, so the total time was about eight minutes.

Either way, once the rice starts rising to the top, things get very interesting. From here I sprinkled on the garbanzos and peas, then added the tomatoes, and finally the shrimp.

Meanwhile, my clams boiled away in the water, which got a lot of use over the past couple of hours, and then the clams were stuck into the mixture with their hinges down per Julia’s instructions. Mussels would have been better, but I couldn’t find any with shells on. Clams would do fine.

The paella was done! And wow, I went a little crazy with the parsley. It didn’t matter, though, because this paella was so pretty, if I do say so myself. Oh my word, it was colorful, the rice was perfectly yellow, and it was a protein-lover’s dream. Chicken, chorizo, bacon, clams, shrimp, garbanzos, and peas.

How did it taste? Incredible. What’s interesting is any one of the ingredients would have tasted fine on their own, but all together there were so many layers of flavor. Not to seem corny or anything, but it was like hearing a full orchestra as opposed to a section or two. Except this orchestra played flamenco music.

Another winner, Julia! So making this one again. And maybe I’ll get a real paella pan someday.

A new post is coming out on Monday. Thanks for reading, everyone, and I hope to see you then…

The French Chef Cookbook, The French Chef, Volume One (DVD) and The French Chef, Volume 2 (DVD) are available to own from Amazon.

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