What’s in a real paella?

10 simple ingredients (and nothing else)

A real Valencian paella

What is paella?

At last, science has answered this long-running and very controversial question.

Controversial? I know some of you are shaking your heads and thinking, how controversial could it be? 

But yes, there is a lot of disagreement about what goes into paella!

Paella is technically the name of the shallow pan. But of course, it now means what’s cooked inside the pan. And that is harder to define than a round metal pan with two handles.

I myself have been told too many times–mostly by people from Valencia–why I am wrong about paella.

The people of Valencia are not quiet about these things.

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Cooking with my “paella whisperer” Rafael Vidal

A chef’s quest

Paella originated in and around Valencia sometime in the 19th century, with chicken, rabbit, saffron, beans, and tomatoes.

Never with seafood or chorizo, like you see in so many restaurants. 

It’s not that these ingredients don’t taste good simmered in stock and rice. I make them all the time. 

But they are not paella. Instead, we call them arroces con cosas, or rice with things.

The funny thing is, even in Valencia, there was no official definition of paella. That’s why my friend chef Rafael Vidal—who makes unbelievable paella!—decided to find out. 

He began visiting towns in the region and talking to other cooks. Soon, he had a list of 10 basic ingredients that, in his opinion, were always found in the dish. But he knew that would not be enough. And so, just before the pandemic hit, he connected with cultural anthropologist Pablo Vidal at the Universidad Católica de Valencia. (No, the two are not related!) But they did cook up a way to confirm Rafael’s hunch.

Left to right: Pablo Vidal with Rafael Vidal and his fellow paella researchers

Pablo and his team of researchers visited 266 villages in Valencia and spoke to 400 cooks over the age of 50. There was, surprisingly, a lot of agreement. Nine ingredients were used by more than 90 percent of the cooks surveyed: water, rice, olive oil, salt, chicken, garrofo beans (which are similar to a butter bean), ferradura beans (flat beans that are a specialty of Valencia), tomato, and saffron.

The tenth, rabbit, was used by 88.9%. So pretty close! (You can read all the details in Pablo’s paper, “A nightmare glocal discussion: What are the ingredients of Paella Valenciana,” published in the International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science.)

(Click above to can watch the paella press conference; the good stuff starts around 21 minutes.)

But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t variation. Many cooks—more than 60 percent—used paprika and more than half added rosemary to their paella. But my favorite story is one Pablo told me about a woman who said she always used chickpeas in her paella. He was surprised, but she insisted it was very common in her village. When he visited the next village, just 1.5 miles away, a cook he interviewed was scandalized by the very idea of putting chickpeas in paella!

I love when people are so passionate about food that they are outraged by different ways of making it. That’s how it is in Valencia. That is what makes paella an iconic dish, perhaps the most iconic Spanish dish of them all. Every citizen has an opinion, which is good. It shows it is a dish of the people. The very best food is food that tells the story of who we are and where we come from.