Risotto Recipes - What you got?

[irul&ublo]

Good god, imagine adding 1/4 cup of veg oil to risotto? arg, narsty.

No, I was talking about at the initial "softening" of the rice as well. However, this was in the kitchen of the Ritz. so who knows if we were just trying to impress the chef with our superior tasting abilities, were still recovering from the drugs and alcohol binge that occurs nightly in those kitchens or what. but there was definitely a difference.

Not much difference adding a half stick of butter, which a lot of recipes call for at the end. I can't remember, though, ever seeing a risotto recipe calling for cream.

There is an excellent Italian restaurant in Sacramento that makes a risotto with Barolo and no broth, so like a whole bottle....really good, but unusual.

[Below Zero]

The GF and I cooked Risotto for the first time last week. The rice would not get soft so we threw the whole thing out. It was pretty much a wasted two to three hours.

[shamrockpow]

Not much difference adding a half stick of butter, which a lot of recipes call for at the end. I can't remember, though, ever seeing a risotto recipe calling for cream.

Just cause there`s no recipe, doesn`t mean it doesn`t work!

Oh and one more suggestion: thyme.

[RootSkier]

The GF and I cooked Risotto for the first time last week. The rice would not get soft so we threw the whole thing out. It was pretty much a wasted two to three hours.

I have made risotto with a variety of rices, and this has happened to me once, with brown rice. Of course, I had company over, too.

It worked with brown rice previously, but I am loathe to try it again. Arborio rice is the standard and always seems to work.

[MassLiberal]

Brown rice takes forever, and does not work in risotto because it never releases its starch (making it creamy). However, for any other rice dish, brown rice is da bomb.

Irul, there's a huge difference b/n butter and veg oil. I'd eat a whole stick of butter if I could, but I'd feel like a pig afterwards. Downing a cup of vegetable oil would probably cause me to vomit.

[Benny Profane]

rerun:

Benny's shrimp risotto:

First, Balducci's markets the best arborio rice I've found. Worth the trip to one of their stores for some. Buy a lot, it's vacuam packed. http://www.suttongourmet.com/ Unfortunately, no mail order.

For 2-4 as a pasta course

Make your veggie broth first. In a large pot, boil a large onion chopped, a few carrots chopped, some celery, and whatever else you like in your veggie broth. At least an hour, and strain, put back on the stove, keep warm to almost simmer.

Shell 12-14 large shrimp (if your market shells and cleans, ask for the shells in a seperate bag), and put the shrimp in the fridge and shells in the broth (long before straining!).

In a large non stickish frying pan (my stainless surface works well), fry about a half teaspoon of chopped shallots and a small handful of chopped celery 'til soft.
Add a nice cup of risotto, "toast" for a little while. (it doesn't turn brown, so don't overdue it) Start adding liquid by first adding a generous cup of white wine. When the rice has soaked that up (pay attention, now, the next half hour is the babying part), start adding the broth, a ladle at a time, stirring frequently. The rice should be close to done in about 25 minutes. (salt and pepper to taste a few times). When the rice is almost done, fold the shrimp into the mixture, and let cook for a few to five minutes (the shrimp won't cook as fast as you think). Non fat fans, don't wince here - add a half stick of fresh butter, stir in, and, this is important, cover and let rest for 5 minutes.

Serve with a little parsley, and, I know, it's seafood, but a good parmasen lightly grated is pretty cool.

Bon Apetite!

[steve]

The best article of rissoto I've ever seen.

http://web.archive.org/web/200210121...ticleview/226/
(The site is long since gone, so I linked it through the wayback machine.)

oh screw it. Here's the text (which I have to break up into at least four sections)
Yes, it's long. Read it anyway..



Risotto Day with Chef Matt

By Steven A. Shaw
Published 06/25/2001 09:36
Make risotto like the pros . . .

"A really conscientious professional line cook tastes everything that can be tasted without cosmetically damaging the dish"

Morning

"YOU'RE GONNA pay for this," barked Chef Matt, my friend (although this status was questionable at the moment) and sous-chef at one of New York's top restaurants, as he approached me on the number six train platform at an ungodly hour on a rainy Saturday morning in August. "I can't believe you talked me into it."

The plan was to pick up a bunch of stuff at the Union Square Greenmarket and spend the day (Chef Matt's one day off, and the only day of the week he doesn't have to cook for a living) at my apartment making risotto. I wanted Chef Matt to go over some basic risotto technique with me because I've been terribly disappointed in the risotto recipes I've seen in cookbooks (I'm of the opinion that most cookbooks and cooking magazines are pretty much useless) and I wanted to be able to dispense some truly practical risotto advice. Also, there's a certain mystique surrounding risotto, and I wanted to demystify it a little and perhaps motivate one or two people to give it a try (to that end, I'm going to share with you a secret restaurant strategy that makes it a lot easier to serve risotto to guests than you previously thought possible). Plus I just wanted to learn how to make really, really good risotto.

Just in case you're not up to speed on risotto, it's a creamy Italian rice dish of infinite variations made from extra-starchy short-grain Italian rice. It's also one of the most delicious foods imaginable if made correctly, and one of the worst if made incorrectly.

Taking Stock

We cooked on Saturday, but the risotto adventure actually began on Thursday when we made the plan and, at the end of our phone call, Chef Matt said, "Oh, and you better make some chicken stock."

I moaned and groaned, but the truth is you need good stock to make good risotto. I've seen dozens of recipes that claim you can achieve adequate results by substituting bullion cubes, canned stock, wine, water or whatever, but it's a lie (I can't believe how much energy is put into creating excuses for not making stock--if we just devoted that energy to making stock, the stock would be done by now). The only ways you can really avoid making stock are either to buy an ultra-gourmet frozen stock (or stock in a jar), in which case you'll spend so much money on your stock that you may as well just go to a restaurant for dinner (plus these stocks tend to be oversalted), or to negotiate a stock purchase from a nearby Chinese restaurant, in which case you can get a quart of stock for a buck or two but it will have distinct Asian aromatics (ginger may not be a flavor you're looking for in risotto). So, ultimately, you have to bite the bullet and make some stock.

Luckily, stock freezes well, so you can make a ton of it and have it on hand in the freezer for a couple of months (or more if you don't do much cooking). I find that the best way to freeze stock is in Zip-Loc bags. Just let it cool and then ladle it right into the bags. Use some big bags and some small bags, and have a rough idea of how much one ladle is so you can know that the small bags are three ladles worth (which might be a cup or a cup and a half depending on your ladle) and the big bags are six, or whatever. Some cookbooks tell you to freeze stock in ice cube trays so you can have a cube of stock for those times when you just need a little (as in making a quick deglazing sauce). This sounds like a clever idea, but I've tried it and I've never in reality used those cubes. Better just to defrost a bag at a time and have it on hand in the refrigerator. If you're really strapped for freezer space, you can reduce (i.e., boil down) your defatted stock to a quarter or less of its original volume before freezing--you just have to dilute it with some water when you bring it back to life.

So, to make a basic mild chicken stock (if you're up to speed on stock-making, skip to the next section) for cooking (as opposed to for soup, where you'd want to make a richer stock or reduce this one), start with some chicken. I'm assuming you don't cook whole chickens twice a week and therefore don't have a bag of bones in the freezer at all times (if you do, you don't need stock lessons from me). I suggest buying the cheapest chicken parts in the store. Near my house, at inflated Manhattan prices, you can pick up a big tray of thighs or wings for 79 cents a pound. Buy four or five pounds and throw them in a big stock pot (16 quarts is good, but if your largest is the eight quart pot you got as a wedding gift then just run with two pots--it's silly not to make as much stock as possible if you're already going to all that trouble). Add a couple of big onions (cut them in half so the water can pick up the flavors), a bunch of celery (or a half-bunch if it's a big one) and a bag of carrots (don't worry if you add more or less of something--this isn't an exact thing) and nearly fill the pot with cold water. It's recommended that you rinse and peel the onions and carrots and remove any large green leaves from the celery (they are bitter), but I don't believe it's important to be too much of a perfectionist about this. Bring everything near to a boil and then cut the heat to a quick simmer/slow boil (i.e., not a rolling boil--just a gentle bubbling). For the first few minutes of simmering, crud will rise to the surface. Just take a spoon or ladle (or a skimmer if you have one) and skim this stuff off every couple of minutes until it ceases to reappear. Then you can go and do other things for a couple of hours while your stock simmers (just to be safe, check on it and give it a stir every once in a while).

You can add salt, or not, as you wish. I don't believe stock intended for cooking necessarily has to be seasoned--you can always add that stuff later as needed.

On this particular stock making occasion, whole chickens were on sale so I just bought two small whole chickens and used them. After the chickens seemed cooked through, I yanked them out of the stock pot (I used a long fork and just stuck it into their body cavities, lifting slowly back so as to drain the hot liquid out of the cavities instead of spilling it on my feet). Running them under cold water, I used my hands to peel back the skin from the breasts and I picked out all the breast meat, which I later used to make some wonderful chicken salad. Then I returned the birds to the stock pot for the duration.

After a couple of hours, you need to strain the stock. The easiest way to do this is to have another stock pot of equivalent size, a gigantic strainer and two assistants to help you pour. But since you don't have that, you can do what I do (after letting it cool a bit) which is transfer it to various small bowls and containers (whatever I have around) through a strainer, colander or other filtering device (it doesn't have to be perfectly strained) by means of a ladle or Pyrex measuring cup (far more efficient than a ladle). When you get to the bottom of the pot, where it's no longer possible to manipulate a ladle around all the bones and vegetables, the pot will be light enough to lift so you can carefully pour off the last of the liquid and then pour the rest of the stuff into the garbage.

Refrigerate the stock overnight so the fat congeals on the surface (or you can use a defatting pitcher, or you can get a professional stock pot with a bottom spout, but I just use the refrigerator) and skim it off (it's very easy to handle when it's cold). Then you're ready to do just about anything with the stock: Cook with it, freeze it, or reduce it further to make soup (or for more efficient freezing).

[steve]

Shopping

We weren't sure what type of risotto we would be making. We loosely agreed to do one seafood and one mushroom risotto, but we resolved to let the final determinations be guided by what looked freshest and best (and, if we were lucky, cheapest) at the Greenmarket. Unless you're making a classic dish that demands and immutable set of ingredients, the best way to cook is to be flexible and let the available ingredients guide you. This basic premise of good cooking is lost on most of the population of the United States, I think because most people (encouraged by the food media) are recipe-obsessed. They want short, self-contained recipes and don't want to take the time to build their cooking on a solid foundation of technique (I go on about this phenomenon ad nauseam on the cooking home page).

We made one pass through the Greenmarket to determine what looked good on its own merits without any regard for the underlying risotto project. We made a list and then, like a jigsaw puzzle, we tried to figure out what would go well with what (this was where Matt, more than at any other time this day, showed his true mettle as a chef). Plums looked really good (there were about ten varieties all of which looked to be at the peak of translucent ripeness), but we couldn't figure out a good way to incorporate them into risotto. So we just bought a bunch of those to snack on throughout the day. Ultimately, we decided (or, I should say, Chef Matt decided and I agreed) that Risotto Number One would contain corn, zucchini, yellow squash (I had that at home because my father-in-law had brought us some from his Connecticut garden the previous week), red and yellow cherry tomatoes and lobster (which we'd have to get elsewhere, there being no lobsters at the Greenmarket this day), plus fresh basil and tarragon. Risotto Number Two would contain portobello mushrooms, pheasant sausage and goat cheese (Coach Farm had some overly dry goat cheese on sale down at the end of its counter and we figured it would be good as an ingredient even though it was too dry to eat straight), plus fresh thyme and chives (garlic chives, actually, because they happened to be available at the Greenmarket). We weren't entirely thrilled with the idea of using portobellos, but the only mushrooms available at the Greenmarket were cultivated ones and Chef Matt feels that, among cultivated mushrooms, portobellos give the most flavor-bang for your buck. We bought those ingredients, plus Chef Matt kept snatching up other items that looked good. "Rule number one of being a chef is you've got to have lots of stuff. We'll figure out what to do with all this later."

We headed back uptown on the subway and, after a coffee stop at Dunkin' Donuts, we visited Leonard's (Third Ave. between 78th & 79th), a small family-run seafood and meat shop that I like very much (even though it's a bit overpriced), to acquire a lobster. The guy who helped us asked how we were planning to cook the lobster, and I suppose he expected us to say "steamed" or something like that. But Chef Matt just looked at the guy and said, "Well, we're going to pop off the claws and tail and boil those. Then we'll chop the meat up and use it in a risotto. We'll make a lobster cream with the body and mix that into the risotto too, and maybe we'll garnish it with some of the roe." The guy reflected for a moment and replied, "So, uh, what time is dinner?" We bought a small lobster, maybe a pound and a quarter, for about ten dollars.

As we walked over to and up Madison Avenue towards my apartment (and as the lobster disconcertingly kicked and struggled in the bag, which would intermittently brush against my leg), we tried to think of any ingredients we might be missing. I had all the basics like salt, pepper, butter, oil and wine at home. We knew we needed some cream, which we could grab at any supermarket or bodega. We ran through the list a couple of times and then it hit us, both at the same time, "Rice!" At this point we were way out of Citarella territory, and you simply can't make risotto with regular old American long-grain rice, so we settled for what seemed to be some perfectly nice Arborio rice at Food Emporium (Chef Matt liked that it was in Cry-O-Vac-type packaging, which he felt would insure at least a high probability of freshness). Ideally, we would have bought Carnaroli rice at a better-stocked gourmet market, but the Arborio was fine (and probably better suited for this story because it's available nationwide at better supermarkets). We bought two pounds.

[steve]

Preparation

Our first act upon arriving at my apartment was to have a beer and relax. We also ate some potato chips (as luck would have it, one of my kind readers had recently sent me five pounds of Grandma Utz's delicious lard-cooked potato chips from Pennsylvania) and made some to-do lists. These lists would help us be as efficient as possible in preparation (or, as they say in the restaurant business, mise en place, or, for short, just mise) and would, theoretically, help us not forget a key ingredient or procedure.

The big reason you rarely see anybody serve risotto to guests is that it takes about half an hour to make start-to-finish and, except during the first few minutes when you're sweating the onions, you can't leave the stove for more than a second because you have to stir the stuff constantly (thus, you will be considered a bad host unless all your guests happen to be Italian). That, combined with the admonition in many Italian cookbooks that risotto must be served within nanoseconds of completion ("The guests should be waiting at the table for the risotto, not vice-versa," is something I've read a lot--try enforcing that with a bunch of independent-minded, unruly New Yorkers), is enough to deter even the most confident cook.

But when you order risotto at a restaurant--even at some of the best restaurants--you can have it at your table in five or ten minutes. So what's the trick? A hotter flame? Faster stirring? Magic? None of the above, yet the only risotto shortcut I had ever seen mentioned in cookbooks is the pressure-cooker method. Although this creates an acceptable risotto-like substance in half the time (and with minimal stirring), it's certainly not a true substitute (even though I'm told that, today, most Italian home cooks make it this way).

But now, thanks to Chef Matt and the miracle of the Internet, I will share with you this simple, eminently sensible restaurant trick that will have you making risotto three times a day:

Cook the rice ahead of time.

Here's how it works. You do the whole risotto thing just as if you were going to cook risotto from start to finish. You sweat the onions. You add the rice, coat it with the oil and cook until translucent. You add wine, stir, and gradually add stock, stirring constantly. But when the rice is about five minutes undercooked, you stop. You put the rice aside. You can even refrigerate it for a day or two. Then, when it's time to serve the risotto, you take your partially cooked rice, heat it with cream, butter, olive oil, or whatever (it depends on the specific risotto you're making), add the meat, fish or vegetables, heat everything through and serve. Five minutes. We'll call it the par-cooking method. You'd been hard pressed to tell the difference between risotto cooked this way and risotto cooked the traditional way. And, just in case you still have reservations, let me add that Chef Matt has worked in some very serious Italian restaurants that follow this procedure--plus I even checked with the kitchen at Lespinasse, which makes the best risotto I've ever tasted, and that's how it's done there. Perhaps the procedures Chef Matt and I followed would not yield the world's most authentic risotto--what we planned to make was more of an Italian/French/American risotto hybrid. Our wanton use of heavy cream (which I think of as the Gallic contribution to risotto technology) will be particularly offensive to risotto traditionalists (although I've seen at least one classic Florentine recipe that calls for cream). But, as A.A. Gill says, "if authenticity were an unbreakable rule, we'd still be holding sticks with lumps of gristle over open fires."

The advantages of the par-cooking method are legion. Not only does it allow you to do all your preparation in advance and then spend only five minutes cooking the risotto when you have actual guests in your house (this is what you're looking for in any guest-friendly food), but also it means you can easily make as many different kinds of risotto as you like for the next couple of days.

[steve]

So the first thing we had to do was make some rice (at the same time, we had a pot of water coming up to the boil for lobster- and vegetable-cooking purposes, and we warmed a small pot of stock, about a quart and a half, for use in the risotto cooking).

First you need to sweat some onions. For two pounds of rice, we used one gigantic cheap supermarket onion, but we could have used two, or a half, without it making that much difference to the recipe. You just want to have some onion in there, and the exact amount is flexible. Chef Matt says the trick is to chop the onions finely enough such that the pieces of onion are smaller than the grains of rice. That way you don't have chunks of onion in your risotto.

When Chef Matt slices and dices, he's trying to create a professional end-product. So, for him, it's very important for every piece to be identical. He can look at two miniscule pieces of onion that, to me, look exactly the same and say that they're totally different (he said this, accompanied by a withering stare, with respect to everything I chopped). But for the home cook it's not necessary to be so precise. As long as the pieces are very small, we're okay.

To sweat the onions, put a healthy dose of oil in a pot (use a pot that has enough room for the rice to expand to three times its size--we used a Calphalon non-stick rondeau, which Calphalon calls a sauce pot) and add the onions. We used peanut oil, although we could have used any neutral oil (like canola oil), because this par-cooked rice base is not intended to have much flavor of its own (it's more of a canvas for what we're going to do later). We planned to add some really nice olive oil from Israel for flavor during stage two of the cooking. Add it earlier, and much of the flavor is lost--that's why fancy olive oil is cold-pressed in the first place. Neutral oils, because they have little flavor, are not adversely affected by the heat. They also tend to have higher smoke points, i.e., they don't burn as easily as olive oil. You want to go with a very low heat, because the idea is to get the onions translucent without having them take on any color. You may have to add a little more oil part way through the process to avoid burning.

Once your onion base is aromatic and translucent (this can take five or fifteen minutes depending on many variables), turn the heat from low to medium, add the dry rice and give it a stir (we used a wooden spoon). The idea here is to coat every grain of rice with oil and to heat the rice until it, like the onions, is a bit translucent. Again, this can take a few minutes and you should keep the heat moderate so as not to brown anything. The reason you're trying to avoid browning is primarily that you want the risotto to be white--it's not going to ruin the dish if it gets some color, but it won't look as pretty.

Now it's time to turn this rice into risotto. Start by adding about a cup of white wine (enough to moisten the rice and leave some liquid loose in the pot). Start stirring the rice (making sure you're getting the spoon underneath and around the sides so as to keep everything moving) until the rice soaks up the wine (really, it will happen) and gets a little gummy. Then add a couple of ladles full of stock. Again, stir until the rice absorbs everything and starts getting gummy. Then add more stock. Repeat the process for about 15 or 20 minutes (work slowly, using lots of TLC, and you can't go wrong). This is the central procedure in making risotto, and it's the place where people seem to have the most conceptual trouble, but it's not particularly mysterious and there is a tremendous amount of flexibility here. The point is simply to add more stock before the rice gets too dry and sticky, but not to add stock too much faster than the rice can absorb it. Just add the liquid a little bit at a time (two ladles is a good rule of thumb), enough so that you have some little pools of liquid on the surface of the rice but not so much that the rice is completely submerged, and stir until it all gets absorbed. Then stir a little longer (we're talking in the twenty or thirty seconds range) until the rice starts to get gummy and pasty (but don't actually let it reach clumpiness). Then add more liquid.

Every once in a while, taste a grain of rice. You want to make sure the rice is cooked but still quite al dente (firm in the center) when you stop the cooking this time around, and you want to have nice, creamy, semi-gummy rice. You also need to add salt periodically, to taste. I was a bit shocked at just how much salt Chef Matt made me add over the course of the cooking process (I was doing the rice and, when I would pour a little salt in from the carton, he would lift my elbow to make me pour a whole lot more), but that's why food in restaurants tastes so good (that, and lots of fat, but we'll get to that later).

We also made a bouquet garni of fresh thyme sprigs and let that swim in the risotto during the par-cooking process. A bouquet garni is typically herbs wrapped in cheesecloth (so you can take them out of the food after they've provided flavor), but we didn't have any cheesecloth so we used a twist-tie from a garbage bag and made a little bundle of thyme sprigs that looked like something from the Blair Witch Project.

So now you have a basic par-cooked risotto and you can do the rest of the preparation. If you've done all your other preparation and you're only looking to make one risotto, you could, of course, just continue cooking for five more minutes, add whatever you need to add, and serve. But we wanted to make a couple of types of risotto, so we put the rice aside (you could refrigerate it but we were going to use it within the hour, so we just slid it to the back of the stove, no heat, and let it sit).

[steve]

It was time to murder the lobster. Chef Matt nonchalantly grabbed the struggling crustacean and, before I could ask him to slow down to discuss the various ways to kill a lobster humanely, he had, with his bare hands, ripped off the live lobster's claws and tail. While the body was still squirming (even though the lobster, its nervous system severed, was no longer technically alive), Chef Matt pulled out the roe (it was a female) and got rid of all the other internal organs and unnecessary parts (like the head). He threw the claws and tail into the pot of boiling water. He chopped the body into manageable sections and threw them in a sauté pot with chopped garlic, onions and oil--this would eventually flavor the lobster cream, which we would add to the risotto at the end of cooking to give the whole dish a lobster flavor. He also took the roe and put it in a little beggar's purse made from plastic wrap and a twist-tie. This he also threw in the boiling water (I was sure it would melt, but it didn't) until it was cooked through (about fifteen minutes). This would be the garnish. Both the lobster cream and the roe were professional flourishes that I'd probably never add on my own. Were I to do this dish alone, with limited time and skill, I'd probably just buy a lobster tail, boil the meat and add it to the risotto.

When the claws and tail were cooked (you can tell by the color if you do a lot of lobster cooking, but a good rule of thumb is three minutes for tails and six for claws--you want them rare because they'll get a little more heat when you add the meat to the risotto), we threw them into a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking and "shock" the meat (this loosens the meat from the shell) and then picked the meat out of the shells. To get the knuckle meat, we used kitchen shears to cut the knuckles lengthwise on both sides. We made sure we got the excretory line out of the center of the tail (Chef Matt just sort of scraped it out with a knife--he knew a fancy trick to accomplish this task, which involved twisting and pulling on the center tail plate, but it didn't work on this occasion). We also made sure to remove the cartilage from the middle of the claw meat. Then we chopped it all up into nice sized pieces and set it aside. Chef Matt finished the lobster shells with some cream for a few minutes, and then we strained the cream (we actually didn't have a strainer handy--I have no idea where it was hiding--so we used a metal flour sifter), added some herbs (the residual warmth of the cream would cause the herbs to release their essential oils and infuse the cream with herb flavor) and put that aside. Finally, we spread the roe thinly on a folded piece of aluminum foil and put it in the toaster oven at 200 degrees to dry out (we just left it there with the heat on for an hour or so until we needed it).

For the cherry tomatoes, I used a paring knife to score the bottom of each with a small "x" and then we put them in boiling water for three seconds, plunged them into ice water, then back into the boiling water again and finally into the ice water. This loosened the skins such that I could just slip each skin off by squeezing gently with my thumb and forefinger (physically, this is the same thing we did when we shocked the lobster meat--it's a common technique with many applications). Peeling the tomatoes wasn't strictly necessary, but they're much nicer to eat that way because without skins they won't explode all over the place when you bite them or pierce them with a fork. A long-handled basket-strainer is a great tool for all this boiling and blanching, but you can also just fish stuff out with a ladle or other scoop-like device if that's all you have available. Ideally, we would have cooked the vegetables in the water before cooking the lobster, because they would have given the water a little flavor that would subsequently have been imparted to the lobster, but on this day we wanted to finish the lobster prep before my wife came home and freaked out (she's a little squeamish about torturing and killing animals in the apartment).

We transferred a little of the boiling water to a smaller pot to boil the corn kernels (we just sliced them off the cob with a big knife). These we cooked for just a couple of minutes and, still al dente, we threw them into a colander to drain and set them aside. We did the same thing with the squash and zucchini.

We removed the stems and gills from the portobello mushrooms (a spoon is the best tool for removing the gills--just kind of brush them over a garbage pail until they release), halved and sliced them, sautéed them in olive oil and set them aside. It was at this point that my wife came home from her Marathon training run (I like to say that she ran thirteen miles while Chef Matt and I cooked thirteen miles), looked at what was going on in the kitchen, shook her head and went to take a shower.

Finally, we chopped up a bunch of each of our herbs and left some whole pieces out for garnish and laid out all the cheese, stock, butter, cream and oil we thought we'd need. Somewhere along the way one of us had chopped the sausage. We know this happened because there it was in a bowl, but neither of us remembered doing it. You might think, at this point, that my tiny apartment kitchen would have been a complete disaster area. But we worked neatly, cleaning up as we went, and things were still pretty much under control. Chef Matt says that cleaning as you go is essential. "When you leave the kitchen to eat, the only thing left to be cleaned should be the china and silverware you'll be eating from. If there's one thing that will discourage the average home cook, its dealing with the aftermath of the meal. Not only is it difficult to clean up afterwards, but when you factor in a stomach full of food and a couple glasses of wine, its a downright pain in the ass. Enough to make someone think twice before attempting a repeat performance."

We were ready to make risotto.

[steve]

Cooking (and Eating)

As in a restaurant kitchen, the actual cooking here was somewhat anticlimactic, but that's as it should be (if you watch a line cook at a restaurant cook a piece of fish, you'll say, "I could do that!"--in most restaurants, the hardest part of the cook's job is the preparation and the sequencing of multiple orders, not the cooking itself). If you've done all your preparation right, restaurant-style cooking is often merely the application of heat to something that is, in most other respects, done.

We made the lobster risotto first, and it was depressingly simple. We took a few scoops of rice from the big pot and threw them in another pot. We added half the lobster cream and a little stock and got everything heated up. We added the corn, squash, zucchini and herbs and heated them through. Then we added the lobster and the rest of the cream. Finally, we just barely folded in the tomatoes (otherwise they might break) and some chopped herbs, gave the whole thing a few more seconds on the flame, garnished with whole herbs and dried lobster roe and served. The rule of thumb is that, with seafood risotto, you don't add cheese. Chef Matt believes in adhering to this tradition, and who am I to argue? Anyway, I knew we'd have plenty of cheese in the sausage-and-mushroom risotto.

But most importantly, at each stage of this five-minute process we tasted for flavor and doneness and we adjusted the seasoning (which meant adding a little more salt and pepper, and possibly herbs, to compensate for the dilution caused by the addition of each new ingredient).

I can't overstress the importance of tasting as you cook. There is simply no excuse for failure to taste whenever possible. A really conscientious professional line cook tastes everything that can be tasted without cosmetically damaging the dish (i.e., you can't taste a whole roasted bird without cutting into it--but you can press it to test for doneness and you can run a finger over the skin and taste to check the seasoning on the surface) every time he or she makes the dish. Not too long ago, I saw a chef whack one of his line cooks in the back of the head for sending a dish up without having tasted the sauce. As a paying customer, I hope all chefs are that vigilant (although I don't necessarily mean to advocate physical abuse in the workplace). Most food products (other than dog food and other scientifically engineered items) vary from day-to-day in salinity and other properties, so you can't just assume your dishes need the same amount of salt (to pick just one important seasoning) every day--not if you want them to taste their best--no matter how many thousands of times you make them. And the lesson is the same at home. Even if you want to give people the option of salting food at the table, you should be tasting for all the other seasonings (for example, different batches of herbs and spices have greatly varying strengths). In addition to tasting food while cooking, you should be tasting, smelling and examining carefully all your raw ingredients. If you want to cook well, you have to get down and dirty with the food--stick your face right in it, sniff it, lick it, and manipulate it every which way. I don't care if it's raw meat. You've got to live it and breathe it. That's what every good chef does.

We ate and discussed the lobster risotto. As I stuffed my face, Matt said, "I'm not entirely happy with the way this came out. It's not creamy enough. I haven't done this in a while. We'll nail it on the next one."

The sausage and mushroom risotto was similarly easy to make, and even more fun to eat. It turns out that when Chef Matt said he'd make the risotto creamier, he meant it literally--he added more cream (and butter and olive oil) than before. Let me emphasize here that, if you want to make superlative risotto, you need to add a lot more cream, butter (use only unsalted butter--a little oversalted butter is enough to ruin a few good hours of work) and oil that you're probably comfortable with. If you're making risotto for four people, we're talking a quarter stick of butter, half a cup of cream and a generous pour of olive oil. Just add it all in together and stir until it incorporates itself into the rice--then you can pretend it actually disappeared. The more cream the better, although you want to stop short of making the risotto into a soup.

We folded in the other ingredients, heated through, adjusted, garnished and served. Right in the last minute of the cooking, Matt had the inspiration to take some arugula (like I said, he had bought a whole bunch of seemingly unnecessary ingredients at the Greenmarket), threw it in a skillet for a few seconds to wilt it, and placed it on top of the finished risotto.

This one was truly a masterpiece. Had I been served a small portion of Herbed Pheasant Sausage Risotto with Portobello Mushrooms, Coach Farm Peppercorn Chevre and Organic Arugula in a four-star restaurant, I would have been happy to pay whatever I was charged (most likely an amount equal to the cost of every ingredient we used all day). The texture was incredible and, as an added bonus, the pheasant sausage had managed in just a short time to infuse all the other ingredients with its smoky flavor. Plus we got to eat as much as we wanted (remember, we started the day with two pounds of rice).

Of course, you can make any kind of risotto you want using the above methods. When good truffles are in season, you can just make a plain risotto with butter, cream, olive oil, herbs and truffles (either white ones shaved on at the end or black ones chopped and cooked into the risotto). If seasonality isn't a big concern for you, you can use truffle-infused oils and butters (as well as preserved truffles, some of which are excellent--a good brand to look for when purchasing preserved truffle products is Urbani) all year round. If you can get good wild mushrooms (usually from out West), I think they marry better with risotto than almost anything else. Asparagus risotto is, of course, a classic. Or you could make a really traditional old-style Italian risotto, which would not necessarily involve cream but, rather, just butter and a healthy dose of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. On this day, we had toyed with the idea of a bacon, clam and garlic risotto because there was a guy at the Greenmarket selling thickly sliced nitrate-free bacon and another guy selling very nice clams, plus baby garlic was in season, but we figured we'd do that another day. The options are endless. Just strive for balance--you probably wouldn't want to do lobster, clams and sausage all together.

Then we ate some plums and took a nap.

[TheDingleberry]

Steve Killed THis Thread.

[steve]

Steve Killed THis Thread.

Sorry..
You'll just have to trust me, though - I wouldn't have posted that article if it wasn't worth reading.
Fun read, too.

[RootSkier]

Dude.

[MassLiberal]

Oh well, it helped me waste a little bt of the day away at least. I do think that the Lobster risotto they concocted sounded a wee bit crowded.

[postman22]

melt a spoon of butter, ket 1 cup of risotto get golden, throw in half a cup of white wine, 2 cups of water and one thing of chicken, vegetable or beef stock. once risotto is cooked throw in half a cup of grated cheese just depends on what cheese you like

on the side throw 2 cloves of garlic, half an onion and mine everything put in pan. cut up chicken or stir fry beef cook it up. throw onion and garlic in, throw 2 tablespoons flour over eveyrhting, throw another stock in there, pour one cup water and let it get thick. throw in chopped mushrooms at the end