Monday I made the Congee with Shrimp, Saffron, and Spanish Chorizo recipe from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. This is a paella-inspired congee.

The ingredients entirely Western, with smoked paprika, Spanish chorizo, and saffron. Kenji calls for “8 small dried chiles, such as Sichuan or árbol (omit if you don’t want it spicy).” As the kids have not been excited about these congee dishes, I opted to keep it spicy, which proved to be a mistake. I went with the chiles de árbol option since the rest of the ingredients were Western, but perhaps the Sichuan dried chiles would have been milder.

The recipe is a stir-fry before adding the stock and rice and cooking for an hour as a congee. The chorizo is cooked over medium-low heat until crispy and its fat has rendered. Then shrimp shells and garlic are cooked in that fat to further flavor it. Kenji directs to remove with a slotted spoon, “pressing on them with a second spoon to release as much fat into the wok as possible.” Surprisingly, I lost a lot of the chorizo-oil fat at this step. Even pressing on the shells and smashed garlic I was left with maybe a teaspoon of cooking fat.

The shrimp and scallions are then stir-fried in the remaining fat, then removed to hang with the cooked chorizo until the end of the dish. The rice is stir-fried before simmering, which I understand helps the rice keep more of its form at the end.

I think the flavor was good, but it was so spicy I could hardly taste anything else. My wife also really struggled with the heat. Sometimes she or I will find a dish quite spicy while the other is okay with it, but this one we agreed on: HOT.

Maybe I’ll try this one again with fewer chiles, but I’m not eager to return to congee. Also I could just make paella. The next section in the cookbook is fried rice, and we’re all very excited about that.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.