The Hilton Hotel Los Cabos 8th Annual Paella Festival will be held on Saturday, May 24th, with all proceeds to benefit the Los Cabos Rotary Scholarship Program, supporting education in our community.
This is a yearly opportunity to savor an impressive variety of over 20 unique paellas, each masterfully prepared by top hotel chefs from around the region. It’s a perfect chance to experience the rich flavors and creativity that define this iconic Spanish dish, all while enjoying the beautiful backdrop of the hotel grounds. With an entry cost of $66 US, the festivities take place from 2:00 to 7:00 pm. , featuring live music.
Paella is one of the best-known dishes in Spanish cuisine. The dish takes its name from the wide, shallow traditional pan used to cook the dish on an open fire, paella being the word for frying pan in the Valencian/Catalan language. As a dish, it may have ancient roots, but in its modern form, it is traced back to the mid-19th century, in the rural area around the Albufera lagoon adjacent to the city of Valencia, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain.
Paella consists of rice, olive oil, rabbit, chicken, saffron or a substitute, tomato, ferradura or flat green bean, lima beans, salt and water. The Paella de Marisco is a seafood paella that replaces meat with seafood and omits beans and green vegetables while still being cooked with traditional rice.
Spanish food historian Lourdes March notes that the dish “symbolizes the union and heritage of two important cultures, the Roman, which gave us the utensil and the Arab, which brought us the basic food of humanity for centuries – rice.”
Originally, paella made in Valencia was a lunchtime meal for farmers and farm laborers. Workers would gather what was available to them around the rice fields, which often included tomatoes, onions, snails, rabbit, duck or chicken. When living standards rose with the sociological changes of the late 19th century, it gave rise to gatherings and outings in the countryside. This led to a change in paella’s ingredients as well. The dish became so popular that in 1840, a local Spanish newspaper first used the word paella to refer to the recipe rather than the pan, according to food historian Lynne Olver.
On the Mediterranean coast, Valencian fishermen used seafood instead of meat and beans to make paella. In this recipe, the seafood is served in the shell. Later, Spaniards living outside of Valencia combined seafood with meat and the mixed paella was born.