About

This is a personal project of Juan, a Spanish amateur cook who has seen, over the years, how non-Spanish people don’t have easy access to authentic paellas.

That’s me. I was born and raised in a small city between Alicante and Valencia, the nest of paella and Spanish rice dishes. My grand-mum and mum are excellent traditional cooks, and my dad masters open-fire paellas. It is logical I love good food and I ended up loving cooking, too. Then, it makes sense I turned out being demanding with food in general and paella and Spanish rice dishes in particular.

Besides that, I love traveling and I consider trying local food as key in order to know the local culture of a country. Tourism without trying proper local food is seeing, not knowing.

Soon I realized that paellas that Spanish restaurants were generally offering to tourists weren’t honest. E.g. Sol, in Madrid or Las Ramblas in Barcelona. Even in some places of La Malvarosa in Valencia, where you are supposed to find proper authentic paellas due to being the land of paella.

Furthermore, when I traveled abroad I was shocked by the “paellas” offered in Spanish restaurants, or what they called “paella” in street food places.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the “paella recipe” (I should add several inverted commas more) that chef Jamie Oliver presented to the world. OMG!! Then, the whole world of fake “real-authentic-traditional paella recipes” flooding the web showed up to me.

I’ve lived abroad for many years and can assure proper paellas can be cooked at home. You can definitely find almost everything you need to enjoy the real taste of Spanish rice dishes. Maybe it won’t be 100% the same, but I assure you that, following my recipes, guidance, and recommendations, it can be way better than most of what you can find online and offline.

I don’t ask restaurants, cooks or recipe publishers to master what they do, just to be honest. Don’t call “authentic” or “traditional” to what it is not.

I’m sharing paellas on Instagram – Follow me!

My favourite paella recipes:

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