Veggie Paella by CARME RUSCALLEDA

Interpreted for use from Harvard Science and Cooking on Line class.  Clarifying notes in italics.  Quantities below and from pictures looks like it will serve 1-2 people.

Ingredients:

Mineral water: about 2 cups

Nyora Pulp substitute large red peppers such as dried ancho chiles: 3/4 handful

onion: 1/3 handful after browning, maybe a whole onion

green pepper: 1/3 handful

snow peas: 1/3 handful

salt

pepper

rice: 80 grams

leek: 1/3 handful

green garlic: 1/3 handful

tomatoe: about 3 oz

sweet cherry wine: about 2 oz

saffron threads

olive oil

Video Instructions

Broth made of browned onions, mineral water and nyora pulp. Nyora is a pepper.  Put the Nyoras in a heatproof bowl and cover with 2 cups boiling water. Set a small plate on top to keep the peppers submerged and let sit until softened, about 20 minutes. Discard the soaking liquid. Set the peppers aside.

Here we'll do another Maillard effect, with a paella, in which the Maillard effect, occurs on the bottom side of the rice. This is a toasted paella. It needs to be very thin and be browned underneath. This is a very quick and very easy veggie paella with very few ingredients. For the paella broth we need mineral water, which we mix with nyora pulp and onion, an onion which again presents a very strong Maillard effect, highly toasted and concentrated, with those elements of nyora pulp and browned onions, mixed with the water, we obtain our broth. A broth that will give this veggie paella its personality. 

Browned onions on left, pepper pulp and water
Let's now begin preparing the paella, we have the pan on the cooker. We always use materials with a neutral taste but that help us achieve the browning effect. We'll start by adding a julienne of green peppers, sliced very thin without the skin together with a julienne of snow peas. 

Sautéed in oil.

Peas and Green Pepper

We'll add them and look for this browning effect. Actually in paella, those Maillard effects that caramelize during the cooking process are those that will later be expressed in the paella, and mostly in that toasted bottom part. 

The cooking time is very short. It takes longer to cook the rice itself, than to prepare the rest. We'll let it golden a little bit. We'll carefully add some salt. Let's also add some pepper. And since those parts release more water, we'll now add leek, and green garlic which cooks much faster and would burn much faster, which is why we add it later. 

Leeks and Green Garlic

Everything is cut very thin, Which is precisely what makes that paella so fast. In a few moments, when this is more golden, we'll add the tomato... 

But as you can see this paella is much faster than, they usually are. This is so much faster. We can see how the product, that thinly sliced vegetable product, gets even thinner as it gets dehydrated and toasted, we'll try to get to the limit...a little bit more... to add a little bit of tomato--a tomato that apart from the color will add humidity and clean, the parts that have gotten toasted. There's not a lot of tomato, but it will add some humidity to the paella which we'll have to reduce. Let's add some more salt, still carefully. I like to add the salt at every step. It's a matter of personal preference. 


We want the broth to be warm but we don't want it to reduce since we measured the right amount.

You can see how the tomato has reduced already, and now would be the moment, once the tomato has reduced, to add some, sweet cherry wine which will both clean again and add some dark color which is what we want to achieve. 

We'll then wait for that little bit of wine to reduce. It's very easy to know when the wine has reduced because the sound of, 
of the oil...now it starts to fry again... 

The liquid has disappeared and we have again the oil and the vegetables, and now is the moment to 

leave fried vegetable mixture from above in the pan and add the rice

fry the rice...In this case we have 80g of rice, we'll also add two toasted safron threads and we also need to fry this rice. As you can see it's a big paella for little rice, obviously, since what we're looking for...is a very, very thin amount in order to obtain that toasting effect. Again we start to hear that sound, that sound of the rice being fried...The rice is almost ready and now we incorporate the broth made with nyora, onion and water. 

Mineral water...It's important to increase...the heat, and we'll do four minutes at a high temperature... 

We'll add a little bit more salt and we won't stir the rice any more. What we will do is to shake it a little bit, for the rice to be really very flat in the paella. Very evenly spread. So let's start and do those four first minutes at high temperature...we'll now do four minutes at a lower temperature and we'll then do 10 minutes at a minimal, minimal temperature. Now we'll do the final ten minutes at a minimal minimal minimal temperature! We'll need two more minutes because now we need to remove it from the fire. Add a little bit of olive oil...

and wait for two minutes because rice always needs to sit for a little bit. It's ringing and now is the time to see if we've really achieved that browning effect we were looking for...