Sometimes, and with that I really mean very extremely rarely, I’m happy that summer is over. When I see demons like this “paella kit”, animated by the “spirit of summer”, for example!
It took me by surprise. I was looking for something else, when suddenly the word “paella” popped up, straight into my eyes. Did I really read paella?
I paid a closer look. I started trembling at the sight of “seasoned rice” and “paella sauce”. The what? Why do you season your rice for the paella…? … and… wait—paella sauce? What have they smoked, I wondered?
Turning the box around, the answers were even more dreadful than I imagined.
If you showed up in Valencia with this, they’d put a permanent ban on you entering the country ever again. I mean, look at how different this is from the ingredients in a real paella recipe:
Allow me to comment on each of these profanities individually:
The sauce:
- Onions: this one is quite bad to start with, as one of the essential aspects of traditional paella cooking is that you don’t add onions.
- Roasted tomatoes: bad, for the same reason you don’t add smoked paprika.
- Cornflour: what the freaking freak were they thinking? this isn’t meant to be thick, in fact if it gets starchy you’ve been stirring and should not be allowed to cook paella again in 20 years minimum.
- Rapeseed oil: EEEEEEKKKS. Or as we’d say in Spanish: ¡PUAJ! Be civilised and use olive oil, you barbarians!
- Roasted garlic purée: see point about roasted tomatoes. Also, use actual garlic, you lazy bums.
- Concentrated lemon juice: WHAT FOR?
- Salt: noting the position in the ingredient list. There’s more salt than the rest of other ingredients that come later.
- Concentrated vegetables: none of which you should add to a paella… carrot (NO), onions (again, NO), leeks (NO-WAY)
- Sherry: next time, drink it, instead of adding it to the paella.
- Dried parsley: Gross.
- Ground spices: OK, but white pepper?! No!
- Sugar: W H Y ? nooooo!
- Coarse black pepper: NO! NO! It’s not a peppery dish! NO!!!!! (see remark on white pepper, too).
And on to the “seasoned rice blend”:
- medium grain rice: instafail; you should use short rice.
- dried tomatoes: this is insulting, and superfluous.
- dried red pepper: ditto.
- ground smoked paprika: as I mentioned before, don’t do it.
- dried parsley: nope, ever.
And the “recipe suggestion” is the final nail in the coffin:
Chicken! Chorizo! Prawns! All together and garnished with parsley! At least it’s fresh parsley, I guess. Disgusting, in any case. Some things should not be mixed. Chorizo with paella is one of them. Meat and seafood is another one. No. Just no ??
I’m very glad that the summer is coming to an end, so this kind of horrible inventions disappear from the shelves.
- Grossness level: 9/10. Just thinking about it still gives me the creeps.
- Offense amount: 9/10. I took three pictures and wrote more than 500 words to express how much I disagree about this, so I reckon you can imagine how fundamentally offensive it is.
- Would I give it a go?: NO! I want to be allowed to visit Valencia again!