PAELLA, THE SPANISH EQUIVALENT TO PILAU, ONLY SWEETER

 CELEBRATE WITH ‘SPANISH PILAU’ KNOWN AS PAELLA

By Margaretta wa Gacheru

What better way to celebration the opening of a new photographic exhibition of African Ceremonies at Strathmore University than to have a celebration of one’s own.

Sarah Mehrgut, head of Languages in Strathmore’s School of Humanities and Social Science had, from the outset, been involved with the exhibition of photographs donated to the university by Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith, authors of 17 books on Africa, including their latest on African Ceremonies. So it seemed fitting that she would provide the most essential feature of the celebrations. And that was the food, a very special food, indigenous to her homeland of Spain.

Paella (prounced ‘pay-ee’-ah’) could be described as a Spanish pilau since it’s a rice dish made with special flavorful spices. But there are major differences between the making of paella and pilau.

“There are many different ways to make paella, depending on which part of Spain you come from,” says Sara as she pulls out a huge skillet-like pan fit for cooking a dish meant to serve a minimum of ten.

She suggests that paella originally came from Valencia, Spain. But it has taken root as a national food all over the land. Her cooking friend and fellow Spaniard Deyanira adds that the variations include cooking it mainly with seafoods, especially prawns and calamari, or mixing chicken and fish, or making this marvelous dish primarily with rabbit or pork.

“Many Spaniards like to make paella with pork, but then they do not include fish since the tastes clash with one another,” Deyanira says.

The meat variations are not the only differences in the way people cook this delightful dish. The choice of oils in which to cook the meat and a wide range of fresh vegetables is also a key difference in the cooking.

“In my [Spanish] home, we only made paella with olive oil, but the [official] recipe often uses both olive oil and sunflower oil,” says Sara. Meanwhile, in Deyanira’s family, paella was only made with sunflower oil.

But what’s most impressive about paella is the precision with which it is made. Sara says she rarely cooks paella in Kenya. But she remembers well what her grandmother taught her about how to heat the oil and then first cook the chicken breasts and drum sticks (“Any part of the chicken will serve the purpose,” she says.). Once they are nearly fully cooked, she removes them, and then brings out the king prawns. She places them in the same oil used to fry to chicken. “That’s because the flavor of the paella will blend all the ingredients to create the taste we love,” she adds.

As she watches the prawns cook, she tells BD Life that you can know when they are done because they change their shape into the curled letter ‘c’. “When they are overcooked, their shape turns into a zero,” she adds.

Now is the time for all the vegetables to get a quick fry. They include everything from onions, garlic and bell peppers to cucumbers, French beans, and peas. And while those are cooking, Sara pulls out 2.5 liters of fish stock which she had prepared the night before.

“I cook the stock with bones from tilapia and sometimes with the fish heads,” she says. But today, as there will be nearly 20 people at the celebration, she will make two batches of paella.

Before she starts cooking the first kilo of rice with the fish stock, Sara adds the precious ingredient, the paella spice which she says she cannot find locally. “I get it from friends whenever they go and come back from Spain,” she says..

“Saffron is one of the key ingredients of the paella spice. It’s the ingredient that gives the rice its warm yellow color,” says Sara. “There is also some paprika,” adds Deyanira who explains how this spice is not hot, only flavorful. “Most Spaniards are not big on hot spicy food,” she says.

Then after the rice cooks for ten minutes, Sara adds all the meat, fish (apart from the prawns) and vegetables into the rice and mixes them all together so they can cook evenly.

Letting this mix simmer for ten more minutes, Sara then lets the savory mixture cool before she pours this colorful blend into a sizeable bowl.

“We will decorate the top of the paella with the king prawns and sliced half a red bell pepper. They will add to the beauty of our national dish,” says Sara who graciously shares the recipe with me.