Baby food to its detractors and, even to its biggest fans, an ugly splodge of a dish, the subject of this month’s How to Eat, risotto, has nonetheless overcome such criticism to embed itself in the typical British cook’s mid-week repertoire. Yet the very reason for risotto’s popularity – its simplicity and apparent endless versatility (“If you cook your risotto well, then whatever other ingredients you use, it will work,” as the chef Ernst Van Zyl once put it, wrongly) – explain why this potentially delicious confection of butter, parmesan and amylopectin starches is regularly botched. What should be a viscous pottage of savoury pleasure is often nervously prettified and reinvented using bizarre ingredients, to its obvious detriment.
Much as the mantecatura is essential to beat a creamy finish into a risotto, HTE is here to browbeat some sense into those who think strawberry risotto is a reasonable concept, and not a recipe for disaster. Yes, there are several savoury fruit risottos in iconic Italian cookbook, The Silver Spoon. But so what? The Italians may have invented risotto but (cf. the English and football), that does not mean they will always know what is best for it.
Che cosa risotto?
As ever, HTE defers to Felicity Cloake and senior Democratic politicos in matters of preparation and, self-evidently, outside Italy, risotto has morphed from a dainty primo to a big old bucket of a main course. But HTE must insist on two other points:
1) Risotto is made with stubby, short-grain rices, not any old pearl barley, spelt or bulgar wheat grains, much less orzo pasta.
2) Sensitive aesthetes that they are, chefs often feel the need to gussy up or hide risotto. They scatter it with cosmetic toppings or secrete it away under a handsome wodge of protein (lamb loin, sea bass fillet, chicken breast), as if it can operate as a component part of a meal. It cannot.
Risotto is a self-contained meal. One within which all the constituent ingredients should be chopped and mixed so that you get a little of everything in each moist mouthful. That does not happen if you serve a piece of protein on a bed of risotto. Inevitably, you end up eating large pieces of meat with a smidgen of rice, almost as a condiment. It is a literally and metaphorically unbalanced approach. Osso buco, which, crucially, utilises a meltingly tender piece of meat, is the exception that proves the rule.
Presentation
That urge to gentrify risotto leads to various clangers. Adding some crunch on top: walnuts, pine nuts, pangrattato or other fried breadcrumbs, is a welcome textural fillip. Far less welcome are prissy parmesan wafers stuck in like rabbit ears, unnecessary dainty toasts served on the edge of the bowl or (ye gods!) amaretti biscuits crumbled on top. Generally, all such additions – the drizzles of olive oil or, worse, bullying truffle oil; swirls of pesto or gremolata; endless flurries of chopped parsley; chives crossed like a medieval warning sign – add nothing and often actively detract from the dish.
Broadly, whatever you top your risotto with should also be included in it, be it nuggets of scallop or grated lemon zest, glistening wild mushrooms or batons of asparagus. Any toppings should reflect the risotto’s internal flavours, and must be distributed sparingly to ensure that they do not upset the rice:veg and/or protein ratio which should be 2:1 or more, in volume. This is a soupy rice dish. The rice must lead.
Bowl or plate?
Risotto is butt-ugly, but that is no reason to actively exacerbate its lack of visual sass. There are many admirable aspects to how closely wedded even high-end Italian food is to the nation’s peasant-cooking origins, but Italy’s eschewing of anything approaching “plate design” is perverse to the point of being self-defeating. While we tease our food into tweezer-tight, Insta-ready perfection, the Italians are still very much dumping stuff on plates. Take it or leave it. Flavour over beauty. You shallow idiot.
The risotto is a classic in this regard. The confrontationally black squid ink risotto nero is the most extreme example, but, more generally, Italy tends to serve its risottos on flat or very shallow plates where it lies in an indiscriminate splat, as attractive as fresh cat sick. Even Michelin star chefs are at it. HTE once ate Marco Stabile’s “remembering my father” risotto, a dun-coloured dish of “forest flavours” which, thankfully, tasted far better than it looked. It would have benefited enormously, however, from a bit of colour in its cheeks and being served in a bowl.
This spreading out of risotto on a plate – seen as a sacred law by some chefs – is justified on the basis that, when eaten from the outside in with a fork (question: who wants a fork’s prongs repeatedly scraping and clanging on porcelain as you eat?), this allows the risotto to cool readily, so that its flavours can shine through.
That is readily achievable by simply eating from the outer edges of a bowl and/or blowing on your food to cool it down. With the added bonus that when eaten from a deep bowl (using a round soup spoon, not an oval dessert spoon), a risotto looks far more attractive and actively invites you to dig down into it. As opposed to a plate, a bowl conveys warmth, fullness, plenty. It promises cosy satiation through carbs.
Ingredients
There is a school of thought that, like pizza, risotto is a blank canvas on which you can apply any number or type of ingredient. If Ofsted inspected that school of thought, it would be deemed to be failing. It would be put in special measures. The head would be forced to eat a Thai-style or paella-inspired risotto and warned that, philosophically, they are fostering such hooliganism. You want to make bibimbap, egg-fried rice or jambalaya? Go ahead. They are fine dishes. But do not crossbreed them with risotto. Chaos will ensue.
Instead, a risotto needs rules:
1) Beyond the basics of a classic risotto bianco (rice, stock, butter, onion, optional garlic, wine, parmesan), a risotto should include no more than two “extra” ingredients. You want those individual flavours to shine through in a complementary way. Anything more complex can quickly become a muddle.
2) Surprisingly, given how vehemently many observers object to the addition of cream (“Sacrilege! Blasphemy!”), several risotto recipes in The Silver Spoon include it. Authentic or not, HTE believes that a risotto’s creaminess should be achieved via starch, butter and cheese, not the addition of cream, mascarpone or a soft goat’s cheese, all of which can easily mask flavours and turn this into a heavy, overly rich, one-note dish.
3) In terms of ingredients, they must either provide a pleasant contrast to the texture of the rice (still al dente vegetables; vegetables roasted to achieve a lightly crisp edge), or in their slipperiness (mushrooms; flaked fish), elide smoothly with it, while remaining distinct.
Dense, fibrous protein (eg chicken breast) or naturally sludgy, stringy vegetables (eg aubergine, spinach), are problematic here. In one of his cookbooks, Gennaro Contaldo talks of how “nice and mushy” pumpkin is in a risotto. HTE raises an eyebrow at this, to the point of muscle spasm. Those extra ingredients should not be on the point of disintegration. You should not be able to slurp a risotto. It should retain some bite.
4) With a few exceptions (prawns, mushrooms), all those ingredients should be chopped into diminutive pieces, 2cm square and smaller, so that they are evenly distributed throughout the risotto.
5) Do not put fruit in a risotto. Has HTE tried all the fruit risottos? No. Has it tried any fruit risottos? No. It is just one of those things, like golf, Liam Gallagher’s solo material or “spice”, that HTE knows, instinctively, without trying it, to be a malign force in the world.
6) Do not use any sort of blue cheese in a risotto. Blue cheese is not cooking cheese. When warm, its flavours go haywire, it becomes shrill and aggressive, sweaty and fetid. It stinks up the place. Like a stumbling drunk.
7) Do not use mint in savoury foods. Ever. Anything but the faintest hint, anything above a barely audible whisper, is like emptying a tube of Colgate into your mouth.
Some nice things to put in a risotto
Asparagus, peas, broad beans, fennel, lemon zest, chorizo and other fatty, coarsely ground sausages, bacon, Jerusalem artichoke, finely shredded radicchio, pumpkin and other squash (hard roasted; see also parsnips), courgette, celeriac, beetroot, cauliflower, wild mushrooms, seafood and smoked fish, pesto, soft herbs.
Bad things to put in a risotto
Squid ink (turns a risotto into a sticky, briny bore), spinach (like a hot wet rag in a risotto), aubergine, blue cheese, mozzarella (here, it becomes a kind of inescapable ectoplasm), tomatoes (incapable of maintaining your attention as the main flavour), fruit, truffle oil, prosciutto, varieties of cabbage (dull and inevitably left in large pieces so it flaps hot stock all over you, as you eat), scallops and crab meat, both expensive, delicate ingredients wasted in a risotto, dense meats such as duck, chicken, pork, lamb, beef. Cooked and woolly or smoked and jellified, salmon lacks the definition to distinguish itself in a risotto.
When
Evenings-only, when you can fully give yourself over to the ensuing carb-coma.
So, risotto, how do you eat yours?
