Day 7: The Pursuit of Excellence

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Nov 05, 2021

Things are heating up

It’s day 7 of my 100-day chef stage and there’s a real buzz in the kitchen today.

Outside the fire pits are blazing. Flames lick up over the edge of paella pan and dance into the stock; flavouring the rice with smoky dark deliciousness.

We’ve been allowed to watch the cooking of the first paella by the legendary Josefa Navarro.

But as I walk towards the pan, I have to face facts: I can’t take the heat.

I can feel the heat burning my cheeks and so I move backwards.

As I retreat, Josefa moves forwards. Her hands actually go into the flames.

And it’s then when I realise I’m in the presence of someone special. Or, at the very least, someone with asbestos arms. Either way, I want to know more.

Who is Josefa?

Josefa Navarro is the latest superstar chef to visit El Monastrell in a series of one day pop-ups to celebrate the restaurant’s 20th anniversary.

A month ago Joan Roca (El Celler Can Roca) visited and last week Andoni Aduriz (Mugaritz) made an appearance.

These are huge names in hospitality. It’s rather like Rafa Nadal turning up your sports centre one week, followed by Nadia Comenci the next.

Today, it’s the turn of Josefa Navarro, who will cook her signature Rabbit and Snails Paella - lauded as the best arroz (paella) in Spain.

Josefa is unfazed by the heat. She’s so used to it. Now, in her late 50s, she has been cooking this rabbit and snail paella every day, for the past 34 years.

This is the only dish Josefa cooks.

It’s a recipe that comes from her mother, and her mother before. Rabbit and snail paella is the original paella, around way before the coastal people added sea food.

Invented by the rugged people of Alicante’s hot, arid interior, it comes from a time when food was scarce and people used what they had. Snails were picked from the rosemary bushes and local wild rabbits were shot.

Walk into Josefa’s small restaurant in Pinoso and you won’t get a menu; there are just two rice dishes to choose from - this one and a vegetarian version. That’s it.

“If try to cook too many things, you become good at at a lot of things, but excellent at none,” says Josefa.

That sounds like something my judo coach, Don Werner would have said. He too, believed in the pursuit of excellence and all it takes to reach the top.

Josefa has taken commitment to a whole new level. She has stuck with this same recipe, day after day, year after year.

She didn't decide after a year or so to branch out and introduce a seafood paella. Or after a decade or rabbits and snails, decide to give baking cakes a whirl.

Can you imagine how good you would be if you cooked a paella each day of your life? You might put on a few kilos, but damn you’d be shit hot at cooking paellas.

Josefa cooks upwards of 20 arroces (paellas) daily at her restaurant and when you do the maths, that is just shy of 250,000 paellas cooked over the last 34 years.

Imagine how good you would be at anything if you did it 250,000 times?

The pursuit of excellence

Excellence has 3 requisites:

Acquisition of a large knowledge base.
Commitment. Those who attain excellence are absolutely determined to continually improve and persevere.
And then there’s practice, and lots of it.

Practice. Training. Call it what you like this is something every sportsperson knows about only too well. In judo, it is known as uchikomi.

Uchikomi is Japanese and means: the repetition of a throw up until the point of actually throwing. To do an uchikomi, you take hold of your partner’s judo jacket, turn in for the technique and then turn out again. And then repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat…

By the time I stepped onto fight at the Barcelona Olympics I had done over a million (not an exaggeration) uchikomi. No doubt, so too had my opponents.

Repetition is the mother of skill. Or another good one from my judo coach: the only place you’ll find success before work is in the dictionary.

Turning up the heat

Let’s return to the fire, where we can see excellence in action.

As we rejoin Josefa, sparks are flying in all directions, making the feeble ones (me) flinch and she is about to begin.

Josefa woke up at 5am this morning to prepare the stock, and cook the rabbit so everything is ready to go.

First she adds the stock, along with the snails and rabbit. Only when the stock is boiling fiercely, does she add the rice.

She tastes the stock, adds salt and saffron. Then she tastes again, and adds more salt.

She keeps doing this. Throughout the cooking time she keeps tasting the stock and adding small pinches of salt or saffron, or both.

For the first 10 minutes, the stock bubbles away, the rice absorbing three times its own weight in liquid.

As the liquid is absorbed, the ingredients begin to appear.

First the snail shells appear. Then the smaller pieces of rabbit. And lastly the grains of rice which have organised themselves into a thin golden layer, each grain intact, soft and separate.

She doesn’t use a timer. After 34 years, Josefa just knows when it’s ready - but my watch says it’s been about 16 mins, when she grabs some cardboard for makeshift oven gloves.

Josefa puts hands into the fire one last time, and using the cardboard to grab the pan handles, she lifts her masterpiece from the blaze.

Briefly she tips the pan to show us. There is a line of chefs watching her every move, and then it is whisked away for the customers to devour.

The chefs return to the kitchen. However, it’s my lucky day. Today Miriam and I, have been invited by restaurant owner Maria Jose San Roman to attend the event.

I change out of my whites at world record speed, and within minutes I’m sat on a table in the restaurant, waiting for those swing doors to open.

Soon it’s our turn. And it’s Josefa herself who brings a huge paella dish to our table. It’s a deep golden ochre colour. We eat directly from the pan, as is the tradition,

It tastes of simplicity, of earthy snails, wood and smoke, and pungent toasted saffron. It tastes of days gone by, of farmland, of rugged landscapes and rosemary bushes, and we wonder how you can get so much from a dish so simple?

We nod, and we smile, and we agree it is way beyond good.

It is superb, exceptional, outstanding and any other superlative you wish to hurl at a plate of rice.

Safe to say, after 34 years of pursuit, excellence has been attained.

Want to join me on this journey?

For the next 100 Days I’m staging in Spanish Michelin star restaurants. In the next episode, things get arty. I learn how to plate up. You get some creative cheffie ideas.

If you want to join me for the next episode, add your name to the list.

Want the Recipe?

Want to make Josefa’s Rabbit and Snail paella at home? If you would let me know.

The recipe is my version of the original. I’ve changed very little as to the ingredients, however Miriam is against me lighting a bonfire in the house for some reason - so it’s cooked on an electric hob and smoked with rosemary.

I’ve cooked this paella many many times now (although a few hundred thousand times less than Josefa) and it hasn’t failed me yet.

If you would like the recipe, please leave a comment below saying yes to the recipe.