Moveover paella.
A couple of weeks into straight continental food, the mind starts playing games of “this would be good with rice” for any stew or meat dish with gravy. Spuds and bread are great but rice hits different.
Valencia is not a bad place to be when longing for rice. As the home of paella, there is no shortage of restaurants serving the traditional with rabbit, chicken, green beans, lima beans, snails. The stock is usually what makes or breaks the dish, though you can’t really go wrong anywhere you try. Especially coming from Australia where Spanish food is scarce.
At Alqueria del Pou, we came for the paella and found something even better. Fideuà is seafood paella but with fideo, not rice. Sitting between a spaghetti no.5 and spaghettoni no.7, fideo is a short pasta that is cooked a little beyond al dente in this dish. Like the rice in paella, the fideo in fideuà co-exists with the proteins not as a base carb, but as a peer.
The fish stock weaves all sorts of dark arts into the shallow paella (pan). Without being overly salty, it soaks the noodles, calamari, prawns and scampi with glutamic gold. With significant aid from pounds of garlic, cooked down tomatoes and onion, the stock brings the best out of the sea and the earth’s bounty. Using just simple flavours and spices, it’s a dish that could be enjoyed universally. Located on farm land, Alqueria del Pou has direct access to fantastic produce - the in season artichokes were stunning, doused in foie.
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