Upon a quick scan of my pretty-sparse fridge a month or two
back, I realized that I had the perfect set of ingredients to make a dish that
I had never before tried – risotto. I
had about a ½ cup of white wine, one cup of leftover vegetable broth and some
leftover yellow onion, in addition to an unopened box of Arborio rice in the
cupboard.
Because it was my first time making risotto, I consulted
some cookbooks and recipes online to figure out the right technique – and it
seemed that constant stirring with a lot of liquid was the only real
“must”. Specific ingredients seemed to
be up to the cook, so I decided to improvise the following recipe with items I
had in the house (I did not want to buy new items to make the risotto in an
effort to put to good use things already in my kitchen). Ingredients, technique and lessons learned
follow the picture below.
Makes 4 larger meal-size servings, or 8 side dish servings
Ingredients
- ½ cup white wine
- 1.5 cups of Arborio rice
- 1 cup vegetable broth
- Approx. 2 cups of water
- 1 medium to large yellow onion, diced
- 1 cup frozen broccoli, finely chopped and partially steamed
- 4 cloves garlic, chopped
- ¾ cup shredded mozzarella (optional)
Directions
- Heat water and vegetable broth in small pot
- Heat 2 tbsp. of olive oil in large saucepan
- Add onion, garlic and broccoli and saute
- As the onions become cooked, add in the dry rice and saute with the vegetable mixture for 4-5 minutes, stirring to ensure that the rice is incorporated into the mixture
- Add the wine, stirring until the white wine blends into the rice
- Add 1/2 cup of heated water/broth combination to the saucepan, stirring until the liquid has been incorporated into the dish
- Continue
adding ½ – ¾ cup of the heated water/broth combination to the saucepan,
stirring until the liquid incorporates into the rice, until you reach the
consistency you would like for the dish (I believe I was cooking the dish
for an hour from start to finish).
- Remove
pan from heat, and garnish with mozzarella, if you desire, either in the
pan itself or in the individual serving bowls
Lessons Learned
I learned several lessons from this first attempt at
risotto, starting with several ingredient-related flags.
First, I definitely used too much onion – there was a little
too much onion flavor in the risotto and I think that it would have been better
to use maybe ¾ of the amount I ended up using.
Second, I only wanted to use ingredients I had in the house,
which meant I only used one cup of broth to two cups of water, instead of using
all broth. I think that that diluted the
flavor of the risotto, so that it ended up being blander than it should have
been.
Third, risotto is fairly bland generally and I think that
one may need to really think creativity when it comes to vegetarian risottos in
terms of how to pump up a flavor to make them an interesting main course as
opposed to a good side dish that is complemented by a more flavorful main
course. I don’t have a great answer to
this yet, but perhaps some hot peppers or other interesting flavor can help
make risotto transition to a solid main course.
