Add a bit of zhuzh to a risotto by serving it in a tian (cylindrical stack).
Risotto is perhaps the ultimate comfort food.
BY JOHN CORBETT. “There are very few ingredients,” says the British cookery writer Valentina Harris in her informative book, Risotto! Risotto! (Cassell, London, 1998), “which cannot be used to make a satisfying risotto.”
Among the 80 recipes she presents are risottos featuring cheese, eggs, meat, fish, seafood, vegetables, herbs and truffles. There are also unlikely-sounding but delicious versions incorporating fruit and alcohol, and on the farthest culinary margins of the dish, rice-based sweets such as risotto ice cream and risotto cake. It’s a tour de force of versatility that underscores risotto’s place as a major star in Italy’s culinary firmament – and through a pleasing combination of good research and cultural affiliations (the author is descended from the Sforza family who ruled the Duchy of Milan during the Renaissance), all of the recipes are authentic.
It would be hard to find a better short guide to the subject than Risotto! Risotto!, embracing as it does the types of rice used to make risottos (many more than the two best-known ones of Arborio and Carnaroli), advice on making the stocks that form an integral part of the dish, suggestions about the proportions of ingredients like onions and butter, and plenty of history.
Perhaps because her Renaissance-era forebears oversaw the laws (yes, laws) surrounding the cultivation of rice when it was introduced to northern Italy from Ottoman Spain, Harris is particularly good on risotto’s high-low demographics. Originally an exotic imported novelty which could be afforded only by the gentry, rice was soon seen as a useful way of filling the bellies of a fast-growing population that was placing strains on the country’s wheat supplies.
Along with other carbohydrate-dense foods like polenta and thick soups lined with coarse rye and buckwheat bread, rice swiftly became a staple of la cucina povera, the food of the peasantry and urban poor. Ironically, as Harris points out, this style of cuisine has now achieved élite status on the tables of the smartest restaurants worldwide.
Once a food of thrift and necessity, risotto is now frequently found on the smartest tables.
Another interesting fact the book unearths is that our modern technique of preparing risotto by browning short-grain rice, adding stock and stirring, emerged only in the nineteenth century. In the old days rice was cooked along with other ingredients by boiling. That certainly wouldn’t have suited Arborio rice, which was developed only in 1946 (another surprise) when a Japonica rice cultivar was crossed with an Italian Vialone rice. This largest and chunkiest of all Italian risotto rices is superabsorbent and creamy in texture, but if overcooked (and it is easy to do) it tends to go porridge-like.
I cannot think of risotto without remembering a lunch I enjoyed in Sydney about sixteen years ago. It does get cold and miserable there occasionally and one wintry day when I was travelling around the city on business, a client cancelled a meeting scheduled for just before lunch – and another client cancelled for straight after. With a couple of free hours up my sleeve I cast around the Paddington street I had come to and saw a newly refurbished pub with an attractively-priced menu.
The small upstairs dining room, which I had to myself for the first twenty minutes, was exactly the sort of place I like for a pub lunch: its warm-coloured décor and tables covered with paper cloths (far more practical than starched white cotton) could have come straight from a bistro in France. As I chose the risotto special, broke a bread roll and sipped the first of two glasses of wine, it rained and hailed enthusiastically outside. Inside, in the warmth, I enjoyed the creamy, rib-sticking comfort of this risotto dish (it’s my version) which I have since made many times.
Risotto with spinach and blue cheese
(Serves four)
Ingredients
One cup Arborio or Carnaroli rice
2-3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil (or butter)
One onion, roughly sliced
12 unpeeled cloves of garlic, excess paper rubbed off
Half a cup dry white wine
1 litre chicken stock or vegetable stock
100g (one wedge) blue-vein cheese
Three handfuls of washed, drained spinach leaves
Salt and pepper
Method
Place a large stockpot or heavy cast-iron saucepan on a low to medium heat and toast the Arborio rice for three to four minutes, stirring occasionally.
Add the oil or butter, onion and garlic cloves. (Cooking the cloves whole turns them into delicious little pops of flavour).
Add half a cup of dry white wine, stir gently and let the wine reduce for three to four minutes.
Add the stock, one third or half a cup at a time. Stir the mixture gently and let each addition of stock reduce right down before adding the next. Continue adding stock and stirring the mixture regularly (it helps the rice become creamy) until you have used almost a litre. This should take about 25 minutes. Think of the necessity to stay by the pot as an opportunity for some meditative time out.
A word about ingredients: Risotto can be as simple or as luxurious as you like. For an everyday meal I use brown onion, whatever white wine is open in the kitchen, a wedge of supermarket blue-vein cheese, humble silver beet from the garden, and Oxo stock cubes if I am out of liquid stock. For smarter occasions you could substitute shallots or leeks, more expensive stocks such as Campbell’s or Essential Cuisine, and “trending” vegetables like cavolo nero. (If you do use cavolo nero, add it earlier than you would add spinach as it takes longer to cook).
After twenty minutes, test a few grains of rice for tenderness (it should be almost al dente), and season to taste with salt and pepper. In the last several minutes of cooking, add three big handfuls of washed spinach leaves and stir in gently to combine. Almost at the end, stir in the crumbled blue cheese.
Remove from the heat and let the risotto sit for a couple of minutes to become mantecato (creamy). Serve in individual bowls and remember the old Italian saying: “Rice is born in water, but it must die in wine.”
Photos: Sevilla.abc.es; vzug.com