Your friends will think you've been to cooking school in Milan when you serve them this fabulous dish.
Adventures Of A Black Belt Sommelier
A very simple recipe for wonderful wild mushroom risotto
Looking back to the adventures of a black belt, Somelier, you're going to love me for this episode because I'm going to teach you how to make really superb wild mushroom risotto and every time you serve it to your friends or family, they're going to think you're just a magic maker because this is such a simple recipe and it is so delicious. The first secret is when you use Parmesan, either a wheel or a wedge, don't throw away the heels. Just take them in a bag and freeze them. We're going to tell you why later on in this recipe. You need a quart of chicken stock in a pan, warm, not boiling, but, you know, all hot. And then a Dutch oven, I use a leopard, we use a Dutch oven because it's really heavy when it transmits the heat evenly, kind of drizzle, a good drizzle of olive oil at the bottom of the Dutch oven and add maybe a couple of tablespoons of butter. When the butter stops foaming, add a yellow onion that you've sliced then and just let that sweat. Just keep it kind of stored every now and then and let the onions caramelize. Once the onions are kind of golden brown, you can add a couple of cloves of garlic that you've minced and just let that more heat up and become aromatic for about a minute. You don't want to burn the garlic, this is a mistake a lot of people make. Garlic should not smell burnt, so don't ever add garlic to an empty pan. Always have something else in it before you add the garlic. Once the garlic is aromatic, which should take about a minute, then you can add your wild mushrooms. I usually use, you know, eight ounces of wild mushrooms kind of cut into halves or quarters depending on the size of the mushroom. You want to cook them long enough that they start to soften, but you don't want to cook them all the way because they're going to continue to cook as you cook the rice. So you've got your quart of chicken stock hot and now you've got your mushrooms kind of cooked about halfway where their liquid has been released and that's added to the butter and olive oil and garlic and onions in the pan. Once the mushrooms have started to soften and release their liquid, then you can add two and a half cups of arboreal rice. It's important to use the right kind of rice, arboreal rice, add two and a half cups of arboreal rice to the pan and kind of stir that. You want to let the rice toast a little bit before you start adding liquid to it. So for just like a couple of minutes, stir the rice in the pan with the mushrooms and the onions and the garlic and you can smell when it starts to toast a little bit. Not a lot, just a little bit. Once that's happened, you can add about a cup of white wine, dried white wine, not cooking wine, not really bad white wine, but a good quality white wine, you know, and not a California short knife, you don't want that. So you know, nice Italian white wine like an Orvietto or a Gavi or something like that would be really good. And then you want to just let that cook until the wine is cooked away and the rice is almost dry. Then you start adding the stock, the hot stock, a ladle at a time. And as the stock cooks and cooks off, then you add another ladle. This process should take about 20 minutes. It's an old standard rule that it takes 20 minutes to make a good risotto and you should be stirring all the time. And you're down to about the last couple of ladles of stock. It's a good idea. I usually add some chopped fresh thyme, maybe a tablespoon full. And that's when I add one of those wheel heels of Parmesan, or maybe even two heels of Parmesan, because the warm risotto will melt the cheese off the heel, off the rind. And it really makes an enormous amount of difference in how good and creamy and delicious your risotto is. That part of the cheese is right beside the rind, otherwise you would have thrown away. So then when you get, when you have added the last two ladles of stock, then you taste the risotto to see if you need to adjust the salt and pepper, you probably will, because this is what we haven't added. And season it with salt and pepper as much as you'd like to get your taste and remove those rinds, the Parmesan rinds, and you can also taste the risotto and see does it need to cook a little bit longer or is it ready to serve? Usually when the last ladle of stock has been cooked off, risotto is perfectly ready. And then you can just spoon it on into a bowl or on a plate and serve some kind of protein with it or if you're a vegetarians, what you like in the place of a protein, and it's a match made of it. Sirio Machione, who used on La Cirque, he grew up eating this. They loved it so much. They didn't have plates. He grew up so poor. His mother served meals on a table, just a wooden table in the kitchen. And there were depressions in the wood from the erosion of the spoons and forks being used against the wood. And so their plates were just depressions in the top of the wooden table. That's why he began up on a La Cirque, he was always so tremendously motivated to make it such a great restaurant. And so there's your simple, very simple, very easy recipe for what will turn out every time to be a really, really superb wild mushroom risotto. Thank you so much for your time and attention. [BLANK_AUDIO]