I consider myself, for the most part, to be an above-average home cook. I can braise and make a perfect bearnaise and most of the time, I don’t even burn the food that I serve. But sometimes, even the most well-established home cook can have a colossal screw-up, and they generally present themselves as deceptively easy tasks that go terribly awry, like setting a pot of boiling pasta on fire (done it) or turning a grilled cheese sandwich into straight-up carbon (yup, that too).
But those at-home screw-ups are infinitely worse when you’re following a very specific set of directions and using pre-measured ingredients. Over the past few weeks, I have been testing food delivery services, the companies that send you a box of pre-selected meals and all the ingredients you need to make them. On the surface, these recipes are completely idiot-proof, the culinary equivalent of putting together a jigsaw puzzle meant for kindergarteners.
Which probably means that I entered into this grand experience a little too cocky. After writing my own recipes and executing those written by others pretty damn well since my early 20s, I assumed that there was nothing in these boxes, seemingly cultivated for people who don’t have a lot of culinary knowledge, that could stump me. When I first opened that neatly-wrapped little box of prepared ingredients, I just knew that I was going to make the best box dinner that anyone had ever made in the history of on-demand, organically-minded meal delivery services.
The recipe I had chosen was paella, a dish that is deceptively difficult. The ingredients included dry-cured chorizo, plump fresh shrimp, green peas, and arborio rice. I cast aside the tiny packet of sodium-filled stock concentrate in favor of my own rich, homemade chicken stock, assuming that it would be the key to making this paella much more interesting. Of course, as any meddling home cook would, I couldn’t resist adding in a few ingredients of my own—a few more strands of saffron infused into the chicken stock, a little fresh serrano pepper for heat.
If you’ve ever made paella before, you know the most crucial part of the dish is that delicious, golden-crispy-brown crust that forms on the bottom, known as soccarat. It is at once rich, infused with the flavor of the stock and spices, and crispy-crunchy. Without that soccarat, you’ve only got a pile of rice with some protein and veg, a sort of Spanish fried rice, if you will. As such, I aggressively pursued that crisp crust, to disastrous results.
Once the liquid had rendered away from the skillet that I’d used—who the hell owns a paella pan these days?—I started to see the little indications that the soccarat was forming. Around the edges of the pan, the rice had begun to crisp to that perfect golden brown, but a quick stir indicated that the middle of the pan hadn’t quite gotten there yet. I added a little more of my rich, saffron-infused stock, and cranked up the heat. My crappy apartment range isn’t particularly reliable to heat evenly through the middle, which means that higher heating temperatures are pretty much par for the course.
And still, that soccarat refused to form. I cranked up the heat a little higher, still just above medium-high, and waited. Within a matter of seconds, the undercooked, still soupy rice had turned directly into a blackened, burned mess. The perfume of burning rice filled the apartment, but I assured myself that it would just add a little smokiness to my dish. I pulled the skillet off of the flame, set it aside to cool for a moment, and prepared the rest of my dinner.