Catalaunian black Paella or in its original name Arròs negre (literally meaning “black rice”) is the cousin from Barcelona of the paella from Valencia (Paella valenciana). The paella dish got its name from the two handled wide pan (Paella or today Paellera) in which the farmers in the fields cooked this rice dish, tossing in everything that came to hand. This included mainly vegetables and snails, but sometimes also the hunter’s loot and nowadays farm animals and saffron flowers that give the dish a yellow-orange color. The black rice of Catalonia on the other hand is a variation in which the land animals were replaced by marine animals as ingredients for the dish, including the squid that colored this dish with its dark black ink.

The paella dish traditionally does not require a lot of effort and it was originally intended to provide a resting break from the tedious labor in the fields, therefore every paella is inherently lazy – not our fault! In our vegan version we took a further step and replaced the round rice and marine animals of the Catalaunian recipe with black rice for the black color, chunks of Yuba (made of soybeans) which get a squid-like texture when cooked, seaweed, capers and a bunch of leaves that give the dish marine flavors.

Ingredients

Preparation

1. Put all of the ingredients in a wide pot and bring the stew to a boil on a high stove heat.

2. Lower the heat of the stove and continue to cook on low heat for 40-60 minutes (depending on the type of rice), until the rice softens a bit but it still chewy (al dente). It is important to stir the stew from the bottom of the pot every 5-10 minutes and turn off the stove when the rice has absorbed all the stew liquids.
3. Garnish with freshly chopped parsley and serve the dish directly shared from the paella cooking pan as the traditional Spanish custom or in single serving plates as the Instagram custom.

Gluten Free Buckwheat Bread Ginger Lemon Cake Moutabbal – Palestinian Baba Ghanoush – smoked eggplant salad Lemon Rice