Mushroom Rice Recipe - Spanish Mushroom Rice | Hank Shaw (2024)

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Spanish rice dishes are among the best in the world, none more famous than paella. Think of this as a mushroom paella, not the classic paella Valenciana. My recipe centers on the rice, yes, but also mushrooms, a little pork, and some shredded meat. If I had to be pinned down on what to call this, it is, primarily, a mushroom rice.

Autumn or winter is when you want to eat this dish. It’s warming, the mushrooms are in season, maybe you’re hunting. I’ve added shredded chukar to this dish — chukar is a species of partridge commonly hunted in Spain. You can use whatever white meat you want, from shredded chicken breast to rabbit or quail.

My version of mushroom rice really hinges on the combination of both fresh and dried mushrooms. Flavor is king here. No white button mushrooms! For the dried, any good selection of dried you can find. There are “forest blends” I like a lot, and if you are going for just one variety, black trumpets, morels or porcini would be my favorite. For fresh, I used porcini, but anything with flavor works: maitake (hen of the woods), other boletes, chanterelles, cremini, shiitake or those “chef blend” packets you can buy in the store.

I got the inspiration for this recipe from a fantastic book by Daniel Olivella called Catalan Food: Culture and Flavors from the Mediterranean, which I highly recommend. His version is Hunter’s Rice, which is, more or less, what this is: After all, you hunt both mushrooms and the birds that go into this.

To really make this recipe the way it ought to be you need a wide, shallow pan and Spanish rice. I prefer bomba rice, which you can buy online or in some specialty stores, but risotto rice works, too. Look for arborio rice. This will not work well with typical supermarket long-grain rice. But almost every supermarket I’ve ever been in at least has arborio risotto rice.

You’ll also want to make a sofrito, which is a Spanish and Latin American base that many dishes are built on. I give you a recipe for it below, but the store bought sofrito from Goya or whomever is perfectly fine here.

All this sound too involved for mushroom rice? If you’re looking for a simple side dish, maybe it is. This however is a meal in itself, something to drink wine and celebrate with. Something to show off your ingredients, because each plays a prominent role in the finished rice.

It really isn’t very hard to make. You cook the dish in a wide, open pan, like a big frying pan, and you add the various liquids by pouring them around the edges of the pan, several times, to cook the rice while getting some crusty bits on the bottom that make paella so distinctive.

Should you have leftovers, they are phenomenal as breakfast the next day, bound with a few scrambled eggs.

Incidentally, the concept of mushroom rice is close to universal. I have a recipe for Japanese matsutake rice, as well as several different Italian mushroom risottos, from a porcini risotto to a morel risotto. I also use wild mushrooms with my wild rice pilaf.

I like to make this dish as one of many courses in a Spanish feast. Serve this after a course of zarzuela de mariscos, and if you want a great appetizer, try making some salt cod fritters with saffron aioli. I also like incorporating fish with green sauce.