Fun day out in the sun. The paella party was on a 17-acre property east of Austin. Turns out the property has a rum distillery out back near the area where they were smoking and roasting pigs. I don't know about you, but playing with matches around flammables is not my idea of intelligence in action.
Anyway, I was judging nine non-traditional paellas, and that most of them were. There was one in which the rice was cooked in tamarind and Jamaica, or hibiscus flowers, with slabs of warm pineapple, clams and artichoke hearts. Very nice. It won third place.
There was a dessert paella (which I would tend to call rice pudding) with dried fruits, baked pears and rum in it. (It won nothing because they screwed up the rice).
The winner was a paella that put a taste of the South in your mouth. It was soul food paella with smoked ham hocks, ox tails, pig's feet, cippoline onions, sweet peppers and more over the rice, which had been made with a combination of chicken stock and pork stock. The rice was perfectly cooked, which the point and focus of paella, and the source of the most points in the grading. But it wasn't just the rice, but the way it all worked together that made it so beautiful.
All of the paellas were beautiful, so maybe I'll post a few pictures in a few days.
