One thing we often get asked is how you cook the perfect Paella?
There are of course many tips and tricks, many detailed in this blog. But how do you instantly tell if the Paella chef knows what they are doing?
For us, the main question is “Has the Paella been garnished with FRESH LEMONS?”
We believe you should NEVER serve fresh lemon wedges with your Paella as the expensive flavour of the saffron will be ambushed. Grilled lemon wedges are however an option. Many recipes say garnish with lemons, but we believe this to be bad advice.
So… if you see a Paella with Fresh Lemon wedges the chances are:-
- They have may not used Saffron, so don’t care about ambushing the flavour.
- They may have no idea about how to cook Paella authentically.
Paella NZ 
I tptally agree Jose, but you know as well as I do that more often than not for a family paella in Spain, colourante is used to colour the rice, and yes if we were cooking a paella in the best of all possible worlds, I agree! with saffroon flavour…and good quality saffron… lemons just kill it.. But it is sooo expensive if you are regularly cooking paella and want to use good quality saffron. More importantly using garlic and onions in the paella is as bad as using lemons. Incidentally n I have been able to grow this year the flat beans authentic to paella and there is a grower in Nelson who grows them as well I think what offends me the most is seeing peas garnish a paella. Edrick
Good day! This is my 1st comment here so I just wanted to give
a quick shout out and tell you I genuinely enjoy reading through your posts.
Can you suggest any other blogs/websites/forums that go over the same subjects?
Many thanks!
sorry, I am not ware of other blogs