Chicken and Chorizo Rice
One pan, and everything cooks in the orange fat the chorizo gives up. Not a paella: the rice is long grain, there is no saffron, and nothing is chasing a crust.
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 55 min
- Resting
- 10 min
- Total
- 1 hr 20 min
- Serves
- 4
- Revisions
- 1
Ingredients
Serves
Method
Pat the chicken skin dry and season the thighs all over with half the salt. Damp skin will not crisp, and this is the only chance it gets.
Heat the olive oil in a wide shallow casserole over medium heat.
Lay the thighs in skin side down and cook for 8 to 10 minutes without moving them, until the skin is deep gold and releases from the pan on its own.
Turn them, cook for 3 minutes, and lift them onto a plate.
Add the chorizo to the fat and cook for 4 minutes, until the edges crisp and the fat runs bright orange. That fat is the seasoning of the whole dish, so do not pour it away.
Lift the chorizo out with a slotted spoon and pour off all but about 3 tablespoons of the fat.
Add the onion and red pepper and cook for 8 minutes, until soft.
Add the garlic, smoked paprika and oregano and cook for 1 minute, keeping everything moving. Smoked paprika scorches within seconds and turns acrid, so take the pan off the heat if it is running hot.
Stir in the rice and turn it in the fat for 2 minutes, until the grains look glassy at the edges and are coated in orange.
Pour in the hot stock, add the bay leaf and the rest of the salt, and stir once.
Return the chorizo, then settle the thighs on top skin side up, sitting clear of the liquid so the skin stays crisp.
Bring it to a simmer, cover, and cook on the lowest heat for 20 minutes without stirring or lifting the lid. Stirring long-grain rice drags the starch out of it and you end up with a claggy pan instead of separate grains.
Scatter the frozen peas over the surface, replace the lid and cook for 5 minutes more.
Check for 74C/165F at the thickest part of a thigh, next to the bone but not touching it.
Take the pan off the heat and leave it covered for 10 minutes. The last of the stock is absorbed here, off the heat, rather than by cooking the rice further.
Scatter with parsley and serve with lemon wedges.
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What to expect
- Taste
Smoked paprika runs through everything and is the flavour people identify first: sweet, deep and faintly bacon-like, and it is coming from both the chorizo and the spoonfuls added separately. Under it the chicken fat and chorizo fat give a savoury richness that the rice has absorbed completely, so the rice tastes seasoned rather than plain rice sitting next to something seasoned. Garlic is present as background sweetness. Peas add pops of sugar. Salt is noticeable and needs to be, because a pan of rice absorbs a great deal of it. Lemon squeezed over at the table is the only sharp thing and it changes the dish considerably.
- Aroma
Rendering chorizo, which is one of the strongest smells in Spanish cooking and is mostly paprika and pork fat. When the lid comes off after twenty minutes the smell that comes out is steam, bay and smoked paprika together, and it is worth waiting for that moment rather than lifting the lid early.
- Texture
Separate grains rather than creamy, which is the entire reason the pan is not stirred. Crisp chicken skin over soft meat. Chorizo goes slightly chewy at the edges where it has crisped. The peas are the only soft-bursting texture in it.
- Sound
The skin going into the pan and the long steady render that follows, which lasts eight or ten minutes and should stay steady rather than roaring. After the lid goes on the pan should be almost silent, and audible bubbling means the heat is too high and the base is about to catch.
- How the flavour moves
Smoke first, then savoury fat, then a long salty middle, and a finish that is slightly one-note by design — which is exactly why the lemon is on the table. A squeeze across the top resets everything and turns a heavy dish into a bright one, and it is worth serving the wedges rather than deciding for people.
- Serve it
Hot from the pan, and it holds heat for a long time because of the fat and the depth of the rice. That is useful at a table where people arrive at different times.
- Goes with
A sharp green salad with a lot of vinegar, and bread. Cold beer or a cheap dry Spanish white. Nothing else starchy.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Easy. The only discipline it asks for is not lifting the lid.
- Cost
Cheap. Bone-in thighs and rice, with the chorizo as the only real expense.
- Equipment
A wide shallow casserole with a well-fitting lid, and a probe thermometer.
- When to make it
A weeknight with an hour and a quarter, most of which is unattended.
- Best season
None.
- You know it is done when
The rice should have absorbed all the visible liquid and the grains should stand separate when a spoon is pushed to the bottom of the pan. The chicken skin should still be crisp because it sat above the liquid throughout.
- And it feels like
Separate grains with a little bite, not creamy and not crunchy. Chicken should come away from the bone easily.
- Food safety
74C/165F at the thickest part of a thigh. Bone-in meat reads cool near the bone, so measure the meat.
- Where it goes wrong
- Pouring away the chorizo fat, which is the seasoning.
- Using cured slicing chorizo instead of cooking chorizo.
- Burning the smoked paprika, which takes seconds and turns acrid.
- Stirring after the stock goes in, which pulls starch out of the rice and turns the pan claggy.
- Lifting the lid to check, which lets the steam out that is doing the cooking.
- Submerging the chicken skin, which undoes ten minutes of careful rendering.
- Skipping the ten minutes off the heat, which is when the last of the liquid is absorbed.
- If it does go wrong
Rice still hard with no liquid left: add 100ml of hot stock, cover, and give it five more minutes off any real heat. Rice claggy: it was stirred, and there is no fix. Base catching: the heat was too high; move it off, do not scrape, and leave it covered. Bland: rice absorbs salt enormously and it needs more than seems right.
- Making it ahead
Not a make-ahead dish, though the vegetables can be prepared in advance.
- Keeping it
Three days in the fridge. Cooked rice should be cooled quickly and refrigerated within an hour.
- Reheating
Until piping hot right through, with a splash of water and a lid. Rice reheated once only.
- Freezing
Freezes acceptably for a month, though the rice softens.
- Leftovers
Good cold with more lemon, or fried hard in a pan the next day so the rice crisps.
- Scaling it
Limited by pan width rather than volume. The rice needs to sit no more than about 2cm deep or it cooks unevenly.
- Substitutions
Paella rice is the wrong rice here and would need different liquid and different handling; long grain is deliberate. Basmati works and gives a slightly drier, more separate result. Chicken drumsticks are fine. Vegetarian chorizo exists and renders differently, giving colour but much less fat, so add a tablespoon of oil with it.
- Dietary swaps
No listed allergens as written. Dairy free, egg free and gluten free, though chorizo formulations vary and are worth checking.
- Shopping for it
Spanish cooking chorizo and a proper sweet smoked pimenton, which is not the same as ordinary paprika.
- Keeping the cost down
Bone-in thighs are among the cheapest chicken available and are the right cut. Two hundred grams of chorizo seasons a whole pan.
- Nutrition
Substantial, and most of the fat is rendered chicken and chorizo fat rather than added oil.
- Worth it?
Keep the fat, do not stir, and let it stand for ten minutes.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Spanish flavours, in the arroz con pollo family. Not a regional dish with a fixed identity.
- Also called
None. Arroz con pollo is the nearest name and belongs to a much larger family of dishes.
- What the name means
Descriptive.
- History
Rice with chicken is cooked across Spain and, through the colonial period, across Latin America and the Caribbean, with each place developing its own version — some with saffron, some with annatto, some with beer, some with green olives and capers. This dish sits in that family without belonging to any one of its branches, and it would be a fabrication to attach it to a specific tradition.
- Why it matters
None claimed for this version. The tradition it draws on is domestic, everyday cooking rather than festive cooking.
- When it is eaten
A weeknight where one pan is the whole ambition.
- The traditional way
Toasting the rice in fat before liquid goes in, which coats each grain and helps them stay separate, and cooking undisturbed under a lid.
- How this version differs
It is deliberately not a paella, and the differences are worth stating because the two get conflated. A paella is a Valencian dish cooked in a wide flat unlidded pan with short-grain bomba or Calasparra rice, never stirred, over a broad heat source, with the aim of a caramelised crust of rice on the base called socarrat, and it is usually saffron-coloured. This is a lidded, long-grain, one-pot dish that is chasing separate grains and crisp chicken skin instead, has no saffron in it and makes no attempt at a crust. Calling it a paella would be wrong, and the collection already has a paella that does the real thing.
- Sources and credit
None.
Air Fryer Chicken Breast
Air Fryer Chicken Thighs
Air Fryer Whole Chicken
Butter Chicken
Chicken à la King
Chicken Alfredo
Spanish
Main courses
Dinner
Chicken
Pork