Progress in Perfecting Paella

I've been cooking paella sporadically for a few years now, based primarily on a recipe that my wife got from a Spanish lady she knew in grad school.  And many of them have been quite tasty.  But they've all had one specific problem, that I had been unable to address.

You see, "traditional" paella is made in a certain type of flat metal pan, and cooked, uncovered, over an open fire.  Cooking it this way helps drive out all of the excess water, and actually kind of fries the rice on the bottom of the pan, creating a crust called the socarrat.  This socarrat is the key aspect that our paellas had been missing.  The recipes we used called for baking in an oven, and the Calphalon oven "paella pan" never really worked well, producing tasty but soft rice.  Using the dutch oven was even worse-- the rice tended to turn mushy.

So last night we tried a new approach-- sauteing the ingredients in a large cast-iron skillet which was then put into the oven, lightly covered, while the ingredients finished cooking.  And it was a definite improvement.  The rice didn't quite form the proper socarrat on the bottom, although there were hints of it around the top edges.  And the rice was much less blown out and mushy.  I think that if we tried it again, using even less cover and a bit longer in the hot pan, we just might get there.  Someday, I might even try cooking it on the grill to get that extra smokiness.

On the other hand, some day I'd like to take that pan out of the oven without burning myself.  I was sure that the potholder was covering the entire handle that time (I was almost correct).

Oh, and for the record-- this time around, the paella was built with arborio rice, Spanish-style chorizo, onion, garlic, peas, shrimp (frozen), crab meat (canned), oysters (fresh but pre-shucked), clam juice, chicken stock, saffron, pimientos, and boneless skinless chicken thighs.  Oh, and a couple leftover anchovy fillets that I had been trying to figure out how to use up.