So this is not quite paella but it’s basically in shouting distance of it. The difference is really that in Keller’s approach, the rice is broth-cooked and soft, without the crust that paella (properly made) has.
That’s ok. What I wasn’t as fond of was the fussiness of many of the steps in preparation. I entirely understand the logic of what Keller is calling for in those steps. It goes back to Julia Child, who wanted home cooks in the United States to learn some of the more exacting technical moves of haute French cuisine in a reasonable fashion and to use them to elevate their family meals.
So there’s no question that brining the chicken for this prep and then brining the shrimp too will make the results more flavorful. At the same time, every step of that kind adds time to the recipe (ok, fine, I am a home chef who does sometimes marinate overnight and make his own corned beef and gravlax and so on, I am not intimidated) but I think more problematically, makes more mess.
I think that’s the budget that “home-cooked” should impose on any cookbook of this kind. Yes, try to be sensible about the cost of ingredients. Don’t insist that people get the absolute best or only ingredient of a particular type when all of them are basically the same. But more importantly, count up the pans, dishes, pots, and casseroles you are asking for as if they are the bodies of the honored dead on the battlefield. The more I have to switch from this to that, let this ingredient sit on its own plate, prepare multiple components of a finished dish on their own and let them sit on their own, the more chaos I am leaving behind and the more I have to attend to every single step and its timing instead of sitting down and joining others or reading or doing my own thing while one step is cooking away. I think often top-flight executive chefs are so far from that kind of labor that they don’t really see it when they’re translating a dish into a cookbook, home-cooking or otherwise.
Anyway, that said, this was a lovely, layered version of a classic kind of dish. I made a few small adjustments. I dropped the buttered farro once I fully grasped that this was paella; it needs the saffron rice. (Down to one use of the saffron left after this, so once again I will have to face a check-out clerk who thinks I’m insane for buying it.) I used some not-fully-ripe Jimmy Nardello peppers from the garden rather than the piquillo peppers that Keller calls for. I didn’t put green beans on top because the beans I had weren’t that great in quality—I picked through them to find the best and got rid of the almost-kind-of-rotting rest. Unfortunately I’d used all the fresh string beans from the garden yesterday, just about.
I tried to minimize a few of the in-this-dish do this steps, but there wasn’t all that much I could cut. I should probably have stopped with the saffron rice earlier than his recipe calls for so that it could finish cooking in the final bake. I wouldn’t have minded it having a bit of dryness/crispiness around the edges, despite this not being a paella per se. This is also the kind of dish where I wouldn’t even consider making it if I didn’t have some of the dried Spanish chorizo around—it absolutely requires that.
Mussels are a blessed thing and I actually love them in these kinds of smaller amounts—and here Keller is right, they need to be prepped separately from everything else, for multiple reasons.
So yes, a very good dish. But on the other hand, I found myself warily thinking that maybe I don’t love this book because it’s “home-cooking” in “fine-dining” guise—that it is too fussy and demanding on dishes and kitchens and time than the label implies. I feel as if at the least in every recipe that you ask for brining and many stages of cooking and removing and reserving and so on that you make a claim: this is why this will be better. Keller does do that in this recipe in exhorting the home chef not to try and turn the chicken too early, which is completely correct (along with reminding you to pat it dry after brining, also) but not so much otherwise. Where you can cut a pot or a plate or a plastic storage bowl out, in making a cookbook, maybe you should.