Cooking The Best Rice Dish in the World

Join me on a family holiday tradition as we make a stunning seafood paella from scratch! Crispy chicken thighs, sweet leeks and peppers, aged bomba rice, and the freshest spider crab and lobster straight from the Cornish coast.
In this video, I walk you through every step — from building deep layers of flavour with a rich homemade stock, to developing the perfect socarrat (that incredible crispy rice crust everyone fights over!). Whether cooking at home or dreaming of a Spanish getaway, this is the ultimate guide to mastering authentic seafood paella.

i’m on holiday family tradition seafood paella a preheated paella pan it’s not raging hot because we can control the heat a little bit as we go and then we’ve got lots of beautiful aromatic Spanish olive oil don’t be shy traditionally the the Valencian paella was always with rabbit and these sort of local beans but none of my family like rabbit i guess you see it on like billboards when you walk through Spain and it’s always got seafood in and people are always surprised that seafood pa isn’t actually the traditional one chicken thigh here all skin down we’re going to get this really nice and crispy the pan’s pretty pretty warm like I’ve got it on a fairly low heat it’ll take a long time it’s it’s going to be an hour and a half commitment a lot of work in the initial bit when you’re trying to get the basically before you put the rice in and then there’s very little work after that you don’t touch it you don’t stare at famously it’s a little bit nerve-wracking to be honest the name Pella actually comes from this so pella is the pan and then the rice is the arrows you’ll get to know like your pan and where where it’s hotter and where it’s colder um and then you just use the the shape of the pan to your uh advantage traditionally you’d have something like spring onion or um some little bailey onions sorry Valencians i always think you can kind of use a lot of different veg and it still tastes damn good um here I’m just adding leaks just cuz they’re going to add a bit of sweetness to it and they taste really good when they’re slowly cooked and braised and then we’re going to go in there with some red peppers as well just a pointed Spanish style red peppers that’s just going to cook away more olive oil just choose a vegetable that uh that tastes better as it cooks for longer so onions are perfect for that leaks are perfect for that peppers are great for that i think it’ like break the mask if I smoke a cigar down so this has been cooking now for about 10 minutes we’ve got a nice color on the peppers the chicken’s brown caramelized the rice that I’m using is uh is a bombber rice and the thing about the the rice is super super important [Music] um and it’s because basically like it’s it’s an ultraabsorbent variety of rice so it soaks of liquid like nothing else and that’s why this dish is so good so the basic principle of a pella is have some really really good stock and this is actually an aged pile of rice and the trick is you need a lot less rice than you think um so I’m just going to flip my chicken over now i think traditionally you add the stock in first i always add the rice in first because I’m about to add the saffron in and toast it as well about uh 400 g of rice and then I’m just spreading it around just making sure there’s a nice even layer around the outside but that there’s a nice amount in the middle as well the best thing that we’re trying to develop as we cook this is something called um Socrat so uh Socrat is the crust i always find it fascinating that so many different cultures have a different name for how crispy rice is is different name in Korean different name in Jamaican but effectively people fight over that sarat so I’m adding saffron i’m just releasing some of the fragrance of that rice when you toast rice it breaks up the outside layer it releases a different flavor and honestly it’s smell coming off it is incredible so that’s all of our base ingredients in now we’ve got our really beautiful stock here i’m just going to add that in so for 500 g of rice I’m adding approximately 4 L of stock pile is one of those things I always make it every time I’m down in uh in Cornwall so like going getting the fish is just always my favorite part they’re spider crabs they’re big aren’t they they look amazing all right then which spider crab should we get that one that massive one lobster and I’ll take a spider crab as well so this is from the spider this is There’s some good usable meat inside here but I’m going to use it for stock [Music] these are little lobster legs as well so I’m using this as a base cuz I’ve obviously got lobsters but this recipe is super versatile essentially you you what you want to do is just get a good chicken stock or you can go to your local fish monger and get some crab bodies crab bones crab claws do this with crab and then you’ve got loads of different stuff rosemary and tomato puree a splash of white wine some nice chicken stock to be clear if you just have this chicken stock and maybe a little bit of sauteed garlic some shallots it would still be delicious but just use a nice nice quality chicken stock you don’t want to reduce it in any way because we’re going to reduce it inside the pot to cook the rice so this is just going to cook for about probably about an hour cornwall is like right on the tip of the South Coast most of the shellfish and most of the fish that we get in London as chefs the best dayboat stuff all gets caught in cornal just ensure that nothing has raw rice and any of the ingredients doesn’t have raw rice on the top once you’ve moved and sort of positioned this it’s pretty much not going to move again you’re almost like finishing the dish or you’re thinking about how it’s going to be finished now especially with a pan this big it’ll take a while a long time to cook evenly if you’ve got a a very large flat pan you can easily recreate this um you can recreate something similar at home the principles remain the same invest in good rice invest in a good Spanish olive oil just turn all four hobbs on and then you get even more control over it i’m just going to add my final little layer of stock now everything’s nicely arranged i’m just going to leave that it’ll cook for about 35 minutes then I’m going to add my shellfish and arrange it one final time so this so far 20 minutes so super simple getting everything caramelized stock on rice in the right place 20 minutes and then and now you can have a seesa have a sangria enjoy the sunshine so this has been cooking for 27 minutes so these grains here are are almost fully translucent and they they look like they’re they’re cooked and starting to break away and then these ones on the outside just still got tiny flexcks of white on on the inside so that means we just need to shift the position of the heat slightly ideally get a spirit level you can get one on your phone as well um just to make sure that wherever you’ve you’re making it is completely flat and that’ll mean that you’ll get a nice even cook all over the whole dish we’re 30 minutes into it now and to be honest they always say with pa never ever to touch it the reason that they they talk about that is because the sockat is is the most important thing that you’re always looking for so what happens when this rice is going to be cooked is then the crust is going to start to develop and because you’ve got so much starch inside the rice which has come out essentially the the fats that have come out during cooking and the olive oil that we started with and all of that starch is going to make an insane crispy rice base and that’s what bas basically that’s what people fight for in Spain the sarat so we’ve got our lobster and our spider crab which we went out and got this morning this is just a little bit of the juice from the head which I’m whacking in for me this is some of the best shellfish that you can possibly get to be honest i’m going to say it in the world it gets exported normally all around the world and we’ve got the head this beautiful spider crab so I’m just going to build this back up so it looks like a nice whole crab so these are spider crabs so these are a massively uh kind of they’ve always been in British waters but they’re all quite an invasive species of uh of crab that come and blanket the sea they’ve got a beautiful flavor try and remember where the legs went came from so yeah we used all of the spare bits of the crab for stock as well just to make sure that it cooks nice and evenly it’s just tin foil the whole thing the crab is just going to steam in the broth that’s uh evaporating so this is the most important stage so you you’re finishing the cooking of the crab and lobster all that juice from the lobster and the crab is going to go in and it’ll be like almost like the last sort of little bit of stock steaming just guarantees that it cooks really evenly the whole way and then I’m going to turn the heat right right down so that’s been 40 minutes cooking total so not a huge amount of time rice is perfectly is is basically now fully cooked but what we we’re trying to build now is the sakrat so the crust of the bottom and we’ve got our shellfish on there which is just delicately steaming in all that beautiful chicken spider crab head juice been in about another 10 15 minutes just checking now how we’re getting on it’s almost like a caramelized smell to come and then you know that the srat’s forming really nicely on the bottom of the pan but gentle heat at this stage shellfish will probably be cooked now so it’s just that last little bit of heat just to give it this perfect crunch so this is what we’re looking for i can hear now it sounds almost like a fire crackling look and it’s still We’re still steaming away i can hear the soccer forming i can hear the crust rice crispy sound super comforting it’s like It sounds like you’re crunching through fresh snow if you’re worried about it burning just stay here and smell it and as soon as you smell anything that isn’t golden caramelized like goodness then cut it the whole process now has only taken an hour so it it is actually a relatively quick thing to do and while it’s it’s an amazing thing if you’ve got like a proper like free afternoon you know it does take care and attention it’s it’s almost like doing a risotto like all rice takes proper care and attention so right let’s open her up wow look at that did you make that i made it wow oh thank you does it look yummy how did you make that rice how did I make the rice well you’ll have to like and subscribe and find out total cooking time an hour and 10 you can You can tell that all the spider crabs cooked cuz it’s leaked out all of that beautiful juice that’s it you can see it frying in there and that is the crunch and the crisp that we’re looking for that is a sakurat sit around the table open a beautiful bottle of Spanish wine crack open a couple of crab claws look at that seafood paella the best in the world