If paella is the dish synonymous with Spain, Valencia is synonymous with paella. Rice has been part of Valencia’s history since the Moors first began growing it in the nearby Albufera wetlands in the eighth century. Valencian rice recipes could fill a small library of cookbooks, from the brothy arroz con bogavante, full of seafood and garden veg, to arròs negre, which uses squid ink to create its striking black hue. But no dish is as well-known, in Spain and around the world, as Valencian paella.
Paella is such a part of Valencian culture that every household has its own version—as befits a dish that started out as a way to combine whatever was available, from rabbit to snails to aquatic birds. The star of the dish, however, is always the rice.
Locals have three highly absorbent rice varieties to choose from, all grown in the Albufera Natural Park: senia, bomba and albufera. Bomba is the oldest of these (documents show that it was already in cultivation back around the year 1800) and also, in many people’s opinions, the very best paella rice. At the same time, bomba presents huge cultivation issues. It is fussy about fertilizer, prone to fungal diseases, and so tall (up to two metres, where other varieties only reach around 70 centimetres) that the stems break at the drop of a hat and a storm can destroy the entire crop. And even at the best of times, yields are low. At a time when Spain is importing more and more cheap rice, Valencian rice farmers are struggling to compete, not least because of the strict environmental and food quality standards they have to follow to keep the all-important Arroz de Valencia Denominación de Origen designation which guarantees the quality of their product.
Not only is local rice central to the culture, history, and economy of Valencia, however, it also plays a key role in protecting the natural environment. The Albufera Natural Park, which lies just outside the city of Valencia, is home to Spain’s largest freshwater lagoon, but the aquatic birds drawn to the park every year—up to 300 species—live not in the lagoon but in the surrounding 34,000-plus acres of rice fields. The birds need the rice growers to sustain their habitat.
And this is where albufera comes in. In 2007, the University of Valencia succeeded in engineering a ‘super-bomba’ rice—shorter and tougher, yet so close to bomba in all other respects that it’s hard to tell the two apart. For example, one major characteristic of bomba has been its particular amylose-amylopectin ratio. It’s thanks to this plant starch ratio that bomba can absorb and retains the flavours with which it is cooked but not overcook, instead shrinking slightly so that the grains separate. Albufera, remarkably, has almost the same ratio. And, critically, it produces the same delicious soccarat—the prized caramelization at the base of a paella—obtained with bomba.
Offering hope to the next generation of Valencian rice farmers and Valencian paella culture, not to mention the wildlife of the Albufera Natural Park, albufera is indeed the new paella kid!
