2023 Author: Cody Thornton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-24 11:20
We have already written that the Paella, a dish of proud peasant extraction as well as the most widespread Spanish recipe in the world, it is also the most monsterrified, where it is thrown into everything by now: a rice pie in which meat, fish and any vegetable are mixed.
To escape the nightmare of paella reduced to global food, practically pinched, we take you to where the best paella in the world is made.
Or rather, where according to Ferran Adrià, the sacred monster of Spanish cuisine and Joël Robuchon, French chef, with 28 Michelin stars on his chest, the best paella in the world.
We are near Alicante, from Paco Gandia.
Josefa Navarro, cook and indomitable owner of the restaurant, has been bending over the bubbling cauldrons of tasty broths for thirty years.
Josefa's paella works by subtraction: it is ancient, austere, always equal to itself. Offered in only three variants: paella with vegetables, paella with rabbit, paella with rabbit and snails. Stop.
It all began in 1985 in Pinoso, the village near Alicante where Josefa and her husband manage their tiny restaurant. At the time, the cook did not yet know how to cook Valencian rice (the original name of paella).
Not the pappa and escape version of today but not even the one that combined the rice with humble vegetables and only when you could chicken or rabbit meat.
So he takes his mother's recipe and cooks the pot with the rice over the wooden bundles of the local vines, the sarmiento: a way of saying that everything in his pan with 5 cm high edges comes from the area of Alicante.
Josefa begins his days at 5.30 in the morning. You have to go to the local market to personally choose vegetables, rabbit and snails. Cleaning and preparing everything takes time.
When he sets fire to the pyre of fagots the broth heats up quickly, then with an expert hand Josefa pours the rice of the Senia or Bahia type. When it is cooked, let it rest.
Making paella to the rhythm of the Pinoso cook is not a sport for ladies. The whole procedure is repeated about 15 times per day, for a total of almost 12 hours in the kitchen.
It will be for this reason that when they ask Josefa if she loves her paella she replies sincerely that at times she hates it.
With certain rhythms to maintain it is not difficult to believe her.