Martha’s paella recipe is great, but there’s absolutely no reason to use two teaspoons of saffron in it
Next week, Martha Stewart will publish her 100th cookbook. Titled Martha: The Cookbook, it is a charmingly personal compendium of Stewart’s 100 favorite recipes, about five percent of which, I couldn’t help but notice, call for caviar. But I’d like to talk about her paella recipe. I was especially drawn to it because while it’s always a dish of golden rice and delicious add-ins, Martha’s recipe goes full opulence with chicken, two kinds of pork, three kinds of shellfish, and even a cephalopod. She airily writes that it’s the dish she serves at her birthday party if she happens to be celebrating at Skylands, her home in Maine, and notes that it always receives accolades from her friends.
The first thing that struck me about the recipe is that it serves 12 and you need an 18-to-22-inch paella pan and a hardwood grill to cook it. I don’t own a paella pan, let alone an 18- or 22-inch one. Nor can I think of 12 friends I like well enough to blow my entire weekly grocery budget on for the purpose of making just one dish. So when I decided to adapt the recipe, I halved it so that it would fit (barely, as it turned out) into my largest saucepan, a 12-inch All-Clad. And since I don’t have a hardwood grill, I did all of my testing on my gas stove.
Martha’s recipe 21-item ingredients list starts with 12 chicken thighs that you marinate with sweet paprika for four hours or longer. After browning the thighs and then simmering them in a very crowded pan, I found that the chicken was still rare at the bone in the finished dish. So when I retooled the recipe, I used chicken thighs on the small side and browned them longer. And as you’ll see, I include a reminder to use an instant-read thermometer before serving to make damn sure the meat is done.
Next, Martha’s recipe has you spend a ton of time blanching tomatoes and chopping them, a French technique called concasse. But you could also just grate the tomatoes like the Spanish do or use canned tomatoes if fresh are out of season, as they have more flavor.
After this, Martha instructs you to go wild with one of the world’s most expensive spices: You grind a whopping 2 teaspoons of saffron in a mortar and pestle with salt. All other paella recipes ask you to crumble saffron, not grind it to a powder. And more importantly, 2 teaspoons (1 gram) of saffron is a ton, even for 12 people. When I used the recipe’s required amount, the saffron was so strong that it made the rice taste vaguely metallic.
I consulted Alex Wilkens, vice president of product at the Spice House, for a saffron sanity check. He was with me on the “less is more” approach. “High-quality saffron can easily overpower a dish,” Wilkens told me. “Even in very small amounts, excellent quality saffron will produce that vibrant golden color and distinct floral fragrance.” Since the saffron threads are difficult to fit into a teaspoon neatly, Wilkens recommends measuring in pinches, not teaspoons. “For a dish that serves 12, we recommend using 2 small pinches of saffron at most,” he said.
Martha has you bloom the saffron with chicken broth (homemade, natch) and ⅓ cup of cognac. I don’t know where the idea of mixing fine French brandy into a Spanish dish comes from, but it didn’t add anything to the dish. Bafflingly, Martha also recommends in the sidebar note “a flaming of good quality brandy or Armagnac at the end of cooking!” but doesn’t include instructions for this in the recipe. I’m fond of not burning off my eyebrows while entertaining, so I skipped the fireworks.
Moving on, Martha calls for two kinds of pork in addition to the chicken — tenderloin and fresh Spanish chorizo. The tenderloin ended up being overcooked and added nothing but cost to the already crowded pan, so I nixed it in my subsequent attempts. As for the “fresh Spanish chorizo (not dried), sliced” I have no idea what she’s talking about, as Spanish chorizo is typically dried. There’s soft Mexican chorizo, but it’s squishy and not sliceable. After hunting at four different stores including a Spanish specialty market, I gave up. In my adapted recipe, I opt for easier-to-find Spanish dried chorizo sausage, which cooks up to chewy little garlicky nubbins that add a nice smoky note to the rice.
Speaking of rice, Martha calls for “short-grain rice, such as Bomba.” Bomba rice is a special imported short-grain rice that’s traditionally used for paella because it holds a lot of liquid and therefore is reputed to be more flavorful. It’s also $23 per 35-ounce bag. I used a cloth bag of plain old “paella rice” from the Spanish company Matiz that cost less than half that much and it turned out splendidly — there’s no need to go in for the really pricey stuff unless you’re serving Spanish friends who would note the difference, I suppose.
After you add the broth, Martha instructs you to continue to stir the rice. But according to the celebrated Spanish chef José Andrés and many others, stirring paella at this point is very wrong. When you do so, you disturb the socarrat, the crusty, caramelized rice that forms on the bottom of the pan. For many paella lovers, the socarrat is the best part of a paella — the textural difference between the moist bits and the crunchy bits of rice are as much a part of paella as are all the fancy stir-ins.
On to the seafood. Martha has you add shrimp and a huge amount (1¼ pounds) of raw calamari at the very beginning of the cooking process, while you’re adding the tomatoes and broth. Wouldn’t simmering squid and shrimp for a total of 35 minutes turn them to rubber? As I’m still chewing on a forkful of that squid days later, I’m going to go ahead and nod in the affirmative. So in my adapted version of the recipe I forgo the squid altogether — it’s hard to find, plus I’m personally not all that fond of it. I also add the shrimp later in the process, along with the shellfish, to avoid cooking the poor things to dust.
After 15 minutes of simmering the meat, shrimp, rice, and squid over high heat, Martha’s recipe tells you to add the clams and mussels and simmer “until the shells of the shellfish have opened, and nearly all the liquid has evaporated from the pan, about 20 minutes.” I was perplexed since my shellfish started to open almost immediately and it took just 8 minutes for all of them to fully blossom. I wasn’t sure if the 20 minutes was in addition to the 15 minutes from before, or if the total simmer time was to be 20 minutes. A little light editing would have made this passage a lot clearer.
In the end, Martha’s recipe gave me a very expensive, very yellow, very crowded pan of rice with some undercooked ingredients and some that were well past done. The top of the rice was perfect, but the bottom of the pan, the much anticipated soccarat? It was blackened, not quite what I was after. I’ve made some notes in my adapted recipe below, including one to lower the heat a bit and another to hold off stirring after the broth is added. One more I’ll add is to take everything Martha says with a bit of salt. The woman is clearly living in her own reality.
Paella Recipe
Adapted loosely from Martha: The Cookbook
Serves 6
Ingredients:
4 cups Aneto seafood paella broth or chicken broth, divided
1 pinch saffron
4 small (4-ounce) bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 red bell pepper, cut into ¼-inch strips
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
¾ cup grated fresh tomato or canned diced tomatoes without juice
1 tablespoon finely chopped garlic (about 3 cloves)
1½ cups uncooked paella rice
6 ounces Spanish dried chorizo, sliced
6 to 8 small mussels, rinsed well and beards removed (discard any with cracked shells or open mussels that don’t close when pinched)
8 to 12 Manila clams, rinsed (discard any with cracked shells)
½ pound large (21/25) shrimp, peeled and deveined
¼ cup finely chopped Italian parsley
Lemon wedges
Instructions:
Step 1: Microwave 1 cup of the broth until it’s steaming hot. Crumble the saffron into the broth and set aside.
Step 2: Season the chicken all over with salt and pepper. Heat the oil in a 12-to-14-inch skillet with at least 2-inch-high sides over medium-high heat. Add the chicken to the pan skin side down and cook until golden brown, 6 to 8 minutes. Flip with tongs and cook on the second side until well browned, 5 minutes. Transfer the chicken to a plate and set aside.
Step 3: Add the onions and bell peppers to the pan and cook, stirring occasionally until softened, 5 minutes. Add the tomatoes and garlic and cook, stirring constantly until fragrant, 1 minute.
Step 4: Add the rice to the pan and cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Add the broth-saffron mixture plus 2 more cups of the broth. Nestle the chicken (skin side up) and the chorizo into the rice. Reduce heat to a gentle simmer (medium heat) and cook without stirring until small holes appear in the rice and most of the broth has been absorbed, 15 minutes. Rotate the pan over the heat occasionally so that the rice cooks evenly all over.
Step 5: Add the shrimp to the pan, pushing them gently into the rice. Do the same with the mussels and clams, making sure they are hinge-end down. Continue to simmer uncovered, adding some of the remaining cup of broth to any areas that look dry; you may not need all the remaining broth. Cook until the shrimp are curled and opaque throughout, the shellfish have opened, and the chicken registers 170 degrees when tested with an instant-read thermometer. This will take about 8 to 10 minutes. Taste the rice; it should be tender with a hint of chew, but no chalkiness. Discard any shellfish that have not opened.
Step 6: Increase the heat to medium-high and cook until you can hear a slight crackle emanating from the bottom of the pan, 1 to 3 minutes — this is a sign that the rice is crisping on the bottom of the pan. Remove the paella from heat and let it stand for 5 minutes before serving. Sprinkle with parsley and serve with lemon wedges to five of your dearest friends.
Ivy Manning is a Portland, Oregon-based award-winning food writer and author of 10 cookbooks, including Tacos A to Z: A Delicious Guide to Nontraditional Tacos. She is a regular recipe tester and editor for Eater as well as for restaurants and appliance brands.
Dina Ávila is a photographer living in Portland, Oregon.
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