How to make Risotto 101~with Chef Frank

hi I'm chef Frank this is proto cooks and today I'm gonna show you the technique of making risotto so what is risotto risotto is basically an Italian rice dish it's not the easiest thing in the world to make but it's also not that difficult once you have the technique down and I think that it's this big bad scary thing for most people because it takes a little time it takes about 20 to 25 minutes to make and people get nervous about that at the end of the day it's a very simple dish and that's what we're gonna do today we're gonna kind of review the technique and not really worry so much about the ingredients so I'm going to talk to you about technique here and we're gonna flavor it simply we're not gonna put too much stuff in it but it's one of those dishes once you get down you can put whatever you want in it and make it amazing you can put shrimp you can put vegetables you can put whatever you want in it so getting this technique down it's what's most important so today what we're gonna do is really focus on the technique of making risotto let's look at the ingredients this is what they use to serve about four to six people one small yellow onion 1 clove of garlic about quarter of a cup of pecorino romano cheese 2 3 tablespoons of butter unsalted 2 cups of arborio rice about a cup of dry white wine six to seven cups of chicken stock and a beautiful little chive flower I got this from my garden and it's just an optional garnish I think it's just gonna make this look pretty there are two ingredients I want to highlight and talk about a little here chicken stock chicken stock I'm using for this is a simple chicken stock that I made whenever I put your chicken or cut chicken at home I saved the bones to save the skin and I put them in the freezer and when it's time when I have enough or when it's so crowded that my wife yells at me in the freezer I take it out and make a chicken stock do you have to remember when you're cooking the quality of you ingredients that you put in is going to affect the quality of the food that you get out of it so using a good chicken stock that you've made is always the best if you don't use a low-sodium chicken broth this way you can control how much salt goes into it but for the most part chicken stock that I have doesn't have any salt in it so I can season at the stove the other ingredient that I wanted to highlight and probably the most important ingredient here is your boreal rice right this is a short grain rice that's high in starch right it has a lot of starch has a lot of starts on the outside you can't use any other rice well there's a couple other this viola nanano and carnaroli which are other Italian Rice's that you can use to make a risotto but for the most part you want to use those three Rice's and the reason for this is because they're a short grain rice that has a lot of starch and it makes your risotto super creamy you can't have a risotto with sushi rice or or with rice for Paia or even long grain rice or basmati rice it's not a risotto so make sure you take the time to find arborio arborio viola nanano or Carnaroli rice for your risotto so those are the two most important ingredients here I feel because they're going to give you the most background flavor for your for your risotto I'm gonna chop my onion for the risotto just take off the ends and this is just my method of chopping young and take off the ends cut it in half and then take off any peels make sure none of this gets on your board you want to get all those skins off okay and I'm going to cut this fairly small I have a video about how to chop onions and it'll be a link in the description so my onions are chopped small I move my cutting board and I slide them into my bowl okay and then my garlic I'm just gonna give a whack get the skin off again this paper just like the onion paper is not good in your food and there's a little root end there that I like to take the root or the the root or the stem end off and then this one I'm not too worried about I'm just going to chop it okay put it back in my bowl and now we're going to go over to the stove and cook we're over at the stove I have everything I need in France we call that Mazin floss which means everything in its place you should have everything within arm's reach of all your ingredients so you can grab them you don't have to be running around the kitchen you want to set yourself up really well the general ratio for risotto is 3 to 1 3 parts liquid to one part rice and you know that could be 4 to 1 but for the most part you want to have a little extra stock and just be just in case you might need it in your risottos a little tight you won't have a little extra stock which I have this is a technique like I said earlier you want to focus on the technique here not so much the recipe if you know the ratio and the technique you can pretty much make a risotto anywhere at any time so let's get over to the pot and cook this so now we're gonna start cooking I didn't say this in the ingredients earlier but I'm gonna put a little olive oil in here so maybe it's about a tablespoon tablespoon and a half of olive oil I'm gonna have my onion okay and I want to sweat these sweating onions basically means we're cooking without color okay my my stove is a little hot I have my pot a little too hot but I want to sweat these out and cook them with little-to-no color cuz I don't want my risotto to get brown like that so keep stirring these break them up if there's any tubed uh pieces that are too big but we really don't want to get these Brown we just want to take some of the moisture out I'm gonna add just a touch of salt here which will draw some moisture out and cook our onions we just don't want to be raw we're going to just be wilted and translucent so there we go we're getting there cool so what's great about this technique is that you once you have the technique down you can pretty much put whatever you want in it shrimp stock seafood stock mushrooms you can do pretty much whatever you want with it it's a very very versatile dish and you know again ratio for the rice is about 3 to 1 of liquid to rice you can flavor it however you want I'm using onions and garlic if you want to use shallots by all means use shallots now I'm gonna add the rice okay so I'm gonna other rice and I'm just gonna put it in the pan and stir it around with some of that oil and just kind of coat it with the oil and I'm gonna wait for it to kind of change color so you can see the rice is kind of a little translucent with the white center and I'm gonna leave it on here just to kind of dry it out a little and the rice will kind of turn a nice bright white again I don't want to toast the rice I don't really want any color here I just want to dry the rice out or parch the rice a little that's what I'm gonna do here okay and start to finish it should take about once you have all your mise and Plus set it's only painting about 25 minutes to do this so if you're going to do this for a dinner party of 30 people you're gonna struggle this is something you do in smaller batches it's usually a little easier to do smaller batches for less people in the restaurant industry sometimes what people will do is they'll par cook the rice in this fashion and once it's about halfway cooked they'll put it onto a cookie sheet or a sheet tray and they'll cool it off so it's halfway done already I'm not gonna do that here we're gonna go start to finish okay so you can see that my rice is nice and dry it out it's turn a little white I'm gonna add some of my white wine and again you don't have to use all the white wine I had about a cup cup and a half I am gonna use it all and the key here is to this is where the stirring starts right you don't want to beat it up but you want to continuously stir make sure there's no rice on your spatula and make sure there's none on the side you don't want to just add all the liquid now we want to add liquid in batches and that's the key here we stir the rice and once the liquid is is absorbed we add more liquid and what's this is gonna do is gonna draw out a lot of the starch the rice granules are rubbing together and it's gonna draw a lot of the starts out of the rice and make a nice creamy risotto okay but if you just pour all the rice and all the liquid in now all you're gonna have is boiled rice and that's not what you want I'm gonna add a little salt right now just to season i season throughout the cooking and that's kind of what I want to do season throughout but I want this wine to cook off and what's going to happen is the rice is going to absorb the wine it's gonna get flavor from the wine but it's also going to cook out the alcohol here so most people who don't like alcohol in their food this is where your your alcohol will get cooked out okay so you can see that it's bubbling away you can see that it's creamy right and you can also see that the rice absorb my liquid my liquid was very was very fluid and now it's kind of getting thick because all the starch in the rice so okay I lowered my heat just a little the other thing that's really important here is that my stock is hot you don't want to use cold stock for this I'm gonna add an addition of stock right now my wine is almost cooked out I'm gonna add an addition of stock right just so that the rice is kind of slightly floating and then I'm gonna stir again hot stock is really important if you use cold stock the rice is gonna sit in cold liquid for too long of a time and it's gonna break up rather than stay whole and get nice and creamy okay so I'm stirring I'm not going too crazy with the stirring I'm just kind of staring nice and evenly and taking my time okay but you can also see that once I add that stock it's kind of getting like starchy and creamy okay and this is the process this is the technique we add liquid we stir the rice until that liquid is absorbed then we add another addition of liquid in that three-to-one ratio okay and you can see here I want to add my seasoning at this point because what's gonna happen with the seasoning is it's gonna season the liquid that's going to be drawn into the rice so just a little more salt I'm gonna season throughout so you can see it's starting to bubble away we want to make sure it's not sticking to the sides or sticking on the bottom stir stir stir okay you notice that I have a metal pot but my spatula is a plastic spatula this is a beautiful Matt for spatula it's perfect for risotto I've used it throughout my career or something similar to this you don't want to use a metal spoon here because what's gonna happen is if you have a metal spoon it's gonna drag along the bottom of your pan and sometimes it could discolor your risotto so you can see that the liquids bubbling away it's starting to be absorbed and it's not so liquidy it's nice getting nice and thick and about another minute I'm gonna add another addition of my stock so just another addition of stock one to cool we had our stock I stir it in and you like I said you don't want this to be sitting there floating in the stock like it's boiling away I might added just a little too much there but with this technique you should have a perfect risotto every time okay let it come to a simmer stir it this point you're kind of tied to the stove so you want to make sure that you're going to get this right adjust your heat if you have to but sometimes you have to turn the heat up and down my cooktop is an induction cooktop I don't have gas so it's kind of a little a little more difficult to get the heat right but you want to adjust your heat up and down according to what's happening your pot see it's bubbling away nicely and I want it to bubble away so if you see that it's starting to stick to the bottom okay keep on stirring the rice granules are giving up some of their starch they're rubbing together and my risotto is getting nice and thick it's starting to thicken so this is how it goes we keep on adding as the liquid is absorbed we add another another amount of liquid we don't add a lot of liquid at a time but basically add liquid as the rice needs it when I teach this at school I have the students sit with me or stand by the stove while I do this for 20 minutes straight and it kind of gets a little boring for people but this is the technique that I like to teach okay you can smell it smells delicious I have a really nice chicken stock that I made at home with all my leftover chicken bones having good ingredients going into this is gonna make it that much better risotto is uh like I said earlier is not an hard dish it's kind of a labor of love it's time-consuming so you definitely want to make this for people that you like and not people you don't like and I think that's what scares most people is like oh my gosh I have to stir all this time it's fun okay so it's getting thick I'm gonna add a little more stock and keep stirring okay so I'm gonna do a couple more additions of stock and we'll come back when it's ready to finish so it's been about 10 minutes right you can see that this is getting a little thicker my rice is starting to absorb all that liquid I'm gonna add one more little shot of salt I'm gonna add a little bit of pepper some black pepper classically people don't like black pepper and white things but I really don't have a problem with it I like the flavor of a black pepper as opposed to white pepper I just have never been a fan right so here's the biggest mistake that people make a risotto right the the under cook it or overcook it you want to taste this I got a spoon I'm gonna drip some on I'm gonna taste I'm looking for it to be to some where have a little bite we're all Dante it needs a little more salt okay so I wanted to have a little bite to it but not so much that it's raw and chalky okay the other thing that people do wrong with risotto is that they make it so you put it on the plate and it stands up when we go back to the cutting board I'm going to show you what the finished product should look like and how it should look on the plate so I'm gonna bring this over to the cutting board and we'll finish it back over my board I have my hot rice I have a little stock in case I need to adjust this I would normally do this on the stove but I want you to see everything that I'm doing here the seasoning is good I think I need just to touch more salt I have my butter my cheese and my garnish just remember the cheese always goes in last right I'm gonna add my butter now it's unsalted okay and I'm gonna stir this in so what the butter is gonna do it's gonna make this a little more liquidy so you got to play this game between the cheese if you're gonna add cheese and the butter the butter is gonna make this a little smoother and liquidy cream doesn't generally go into risotto if you want to add cream you can as long as it's an ingredient but it's not don't use it as a crutch to make this creamy it should all be about the method okay so right now I'm stirring it I'm actually kind of beating it a little and you can see it's super creamy but if for my taste it's a little tight I like this to flow I serve this on a plate a lot of people will serve risotto in a bowl and it kind of stands up I want it to flow onto my plate the Italians have a word for this is called Elounda or with the wave that's not the exact translation but it's close right so that's why I have my hot stock over here just to have a little bit of extra just to kind of adjust my liquid content and I give this a stir like I said generally I do this over at the stove over a very low heat you don't want to add the cheese and then put it back on the flame if you add cheese and put it back on the flame the cheese tends to separate out a little and cooks and we don't want to cook the cheese I'm gonna add my cheese now okay and I'm gonna give it a little bit a little bit more of a stir and you can see what the cheese did was it tightened it up a little right so I wanted a little looser than this so just to touch more stock and then we're gonna put it on the plate yeah that's looking good I like that that's good so it's nice and creamy and delicious so let's put this on a plate and give it a taste before I put on a plate I want to give one last taste really good it's creamy it's hot it's delicious it's seasoned well okay so maybe just a touch more stock because I don't want this to be too dry and we're gonna put on a plate so when I put on the plate I tend not to just dump it a lot of people might just dump this on the plate but I want to serve it with a spoon put it in the center of the plate right I get out in the center of the plate and then I get my plate of shake right this helps if you have a plate that's hot but you see how it's a little liquidy it's super creamy and delicious so I'm gonna take some of these beautiful chive blossoms or chive flowers they taste like onions they're delicious if you don't have these it's not necessary you can put some herbs in here if you want and that is how you make risotto it's like I said before it's not necessarily recipe it's a technique but that is risotto this is how you make risotto it's a technique not necessarily a recipe you can do many different things with this this is one of the simpler versions that I've ever made but I want you to see the technique and practice this dish the only way you get better things if you practice I hope you enjoyed this video I'm chef Frank for proto cooks give me a thumbs up like subscribe tell your friends give us comments we love the comments good or bad I try and answer them when I can have a good one and happy risotto [Music]

Channel: ProtoCooks with Chef Frank

Views: 92,024

Rating: 4.9454455 out of 5

Keywords: #risotto, #chefdaddy, #cookingtechnique, #101, #rice, #cheffrankproto, #cheffrank

Id: ZKnwR-11IeE

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 12 2020