There’s nothing authentic or traditional about this rendering, hence the name; go elsewhere if you want to reproduce the experience of dining with shepherds in the Pyrenees.
This dish is for people who like saffron on rice in combination with chicken, seafood, and sausage. You can also think of this as a clam and mollusc-free paella; in restaurants, I found myself mostly pushing these aside and leaving them uneaten. So when I started making paella myself, I just left them out.
This is intended as a holiday meal, it takes more prep work than I could justify on a weekday or for having friends over to talk and catch up. I’ve still included a number of shortcuts to make my life easier.
Ingredients
| One or two jars | saffron threads (about $6 or $7 from my Trader Joe’s–much better value than I’ve seen elsewhere) |
| 1 ½ cups | Light brown rice (regular white rice doesn’t have enough body, and regular brown rice has too much for my taste). Texmati offers this mix |
| 3 cups | Chicken broth |
| 1 tsp | Best quality paprika |
| 1 tsp | turmeric |
| To taste | salt |
| To taste | Black pepper |
| ½ tsp | Cayenne-based spice rub–your favorite commercial product, or one you mix on your own |
| 12 oz | Haricot vert or other thin delicate green beans |
| 2 | Red peppers |
| 1 | Yellow onion |
| 8-10 | Asparagus tips for garnish |
| 1 lb | Fresh salmon. Look for the oily, moist kind. I’ve had better luck with TJ’s Norwegian farm raised salmon than with any of the Alaskan wild caught that TJs carries |
| 8 oz | Fresh halibut or other rich flavorful fish. Sea bass might do, or the right cod. Anything with enough flavor to hold its own against salmon and the other ingredients |
| 2 six inch long links | Spicy sausages. Adeles makes a nice habanero and chile chicken sausage. TJs andouille chicken sausage is acceptable. I use a chicken sausage because hey, I’m not getting any younger and neither are my arteries |
| 1 1b | Uncooked shrimp, cleaned, deveined, tails removed |
| 2 | Roasted chicken breasts. I have better luck buying a roasted chicken from the supermarket, removing the skin from and slicing out the breasts, and saving the rest as a treat for the dog (bones removed of course), than I have with buying uncooked chicken breasts and trying to get the same rich moistness from cooking them in the pan. |
| 6 strips | Prosciutto di parma This is the secret ingredient |
| 3 cloves | Garlic, finely chopped |
| ¼ cup | olive oil |
Preparation
- Boil (almost) a little pure, good tasting water in a tea kettle. Put the saffron threads in a small pyrex measuring cup and crush them with a spoon. Pour an oz or two of almost boiling water over the crushed saffron and let sit until step 16 below. (This is the only way to suffuse the dish with saffron flavor. Dumping the threads into the water used to boil the rice, without this prior treatment, just doesn’t cut it).
- Dice the onion into quite small pieces, it serves only as a flavor carrier in this dish
- Remove the tips of the green beans and cut into one to 1 ½ inch pieces
- Seed the peppers, remove the coarser parts by the stem and the base, and clean out any of the white seed support. Slice horizontally to create pieces 1 ½ to 2 inches long and about ¼ to 3/8 inches wide
- In a rice cooker, use about ¾ of the chicken broth you would normally use to get rice cooked the way you like it. We’re going to pull this rice out of the cooker when it’s not quite done.
- Slice the sausage diagonally, less than ¼ inch wide and then cut most of these in half. You want large pieces so that guest so inclined can easily avoid eating any.
- [at some point, depending on your tolerance for multi-tasking, do these next steps]. If you’ve bought the typical salmon fillet intended for grilling, it has skin on. I’m not very good cutting raw fish, so I use this workaround: oil a Teflon pan and heat at medium high. After a minute to heat up, put the salmon in skin down. Keep an eye on it; after one to two minutes you will see the thinnest edge begin to go pink as the flesh actually cooks. That’s not the goal, so turn the heat off, let it cool in the pan for a minute or two, spear the salmon and put it on a cutting board. Cooked fish offers no resistance to the knife, so now it is an easy matter to remove the skin (and all that yucky brown stuff next to it) by some combination of scraping and slicing. You end up with mostly uncooked salmon, which is what you want for best flavor. I like to essentially shred or tear the salmon into mostly large pieces, perhaps 2” x ¾”
- If your other fish has skin, treat it the same. Halibut or Ahi I would be inclined to cut into approximately 1 inch cubes.
- Shred the chicken breasts pretty much the same as the salmon. On any breast piece, there is an angle where, instead of slicing, you can cut in a bit and then push the knife sideways, tearing that piece from the remainder, and the next behind it, and so on. The more surface area exposed, the more area to soak up flavor.
- Sprinkle the spice rub over the chicken; apply lemon pepper and garlic salt to the fish and shrimp, to taste.
- Unless the shrimp are very large, they can be thawed and left in one piece for this dish
- [This is the ‘secret sauce’] Each strip of prosciutto has a white, all fat border and a red (less) fatty portion. Cut out the white portion from each of the six pieces. Take the red portions remaining and tear lengthwise into strips less than one inch wide. Roll each one up, and let them support one another staying rolled up.
- You can use a paella pan if you have one, but this works perfectly well in my 12 inch diameter, three inch deep Teflon coated everyday pan. Put heat on medium high. Put the six fatty strips out in the pan flat side by side. Put the rolled up red portions in to one side. Turn them over after about 90 seconds. After another 60-90 seconds, turn the heat down to medium and push the six crinkled strips all around the pan and over to one side. They aren’t going to be part of the dish; their purpose was to coat the pan with essence of unami/prosciutto oil. Leave the strips on the side.
- Saute the onions and the green beans and the sausage in the pan that’s been prepared with prosciutto. Add garlic, paprika, salt, pepper to taste (onion is great flavor vehicle). Turn off the heat and add the chicken and the red pepper at the end to warm. Remove the fatty white prosciutto pieces but leave the rolled up red pieces.
- When the rice is ready (i.e., all the insufficient liquid has been absorbed), in the big pan where you’ve just sautéed the onions etc., add in the part cooked rice, and mix the rice with everything that’s already in the pan. Then pat and smooth the surface.
- Add the saffron liquid mixture and the turmeric to the remaining chicken broth (the turmeric is key to getting the color yellow). Pour the broth mix in to the pan, spreading it around.
- Stud the surface of the rice mix with the fish, shrimp, and asparagus spears. I like to arrange the spear tips pointing out in a circle. Like I was a chef or something.
- Cover the pan with a tight fitting lid, and keep the heat at medium low or a little more. The goal here is to create a hot steamy interior which will complete the cooking of the rice and simultaneously gently cook the fish and shrimp and asparagus spear tips on top. The red pepper will get cooked too. The roast chicken won’t get overcooked, either. The salmon and halibut will be just barely done, and the shrimp likewise, so, not dried out—which is the goal. Note; if you had fully cooked the rice, this additiuonal step would leave it mushy, which we don’t want.
- Monitor for done-ness. Add small amounts of water if the fish isn’t fully cooked but the rice has absorbed everything (I don’t favor a crusty bottom layer).
- Serve with a salad, and et voila, a holiday meal for the non-turkey eaters.
Notes
Because my spouse eats fish but doesn’t eat meat, I generally use two pans and make two versions, one of which has neither the prosciutto, the sausage, nor the chicken.
If it’s a special holiday and you’ve added lobster as well as shrimp, lobster pieces can steam on top in step 18.
PS: it’s called jungle paella because an inauthentic but convenient mix of ingredients has been tossed together. Thai restaurants do the same thing with a dish called jungle curry.