Perfect Risotto. How to make it like a real northern Italian. (Gluten free by nature)

hi everybody and welcome back to from scratch with love today we're making probably the most quintessential italian dish of all risotto at least for my family's area of italy this episode is going to take a little bit more educational track than we normally do around here and in order to get started we have to make a little field trip stick around you're gonna love it okay so why do we have to take a field trip to do this wonderful thing i've done every other video i've ever made in the confines friendly confines of my kitchen well it's because we have to do a little bit more education this time and i want you to be able to shop for the correct ingredients because honestly if you have bad ingredients you're going to make bad rice so let's get started this is our semi-local biggest supermarket uh it's um about 20 minutes from my house and we're going to go inside and i'm going to show you exactly what to buy all right so we have been anyway so what we need is some very specific stuff not always are you going to get everything you need to store but you should be able to find it if it's reasonably large enough the first thing we need is the correct achievements all right now what we're going to be making today is which is the most common result that you're going to find because intersection point so that's the one you're going to be most familiar with so that's what i'm going to show you and you can get in later into the ones from my area all right so first thing we need not parmesan not anything like that which is a young parmesan-like machine that is not fully so we're going to pick up a slice here this is actually a domestic product good so get that and i'm going to take you to the next part of our office okay so we are in the next section here this is the uh ethnic island store so to speak and we're going to get right now we're going to get that rice and you may have heard uh you need arborium okay and that's true that is spread specifically for this dish however chrono road is really what you want to use and that is um typically regulated by the italian building and is a much finer uh not necessarily a planet grain rice but it gets a little bit creamier and it's spread specifically for this now the arbor a lot of the arborio you get here in the united states isn't real it's grown in california and it is a short green rice and it's grown to specification but it's really not the same thing and that's why a lot of times you're not getting the proper results so let's go grab the rice review okay this is what we want all right and that is you'll notice when we get home i can go ahead and show you giving so we're going to get out of here there's the two things we needed today and we're going to make one more trip and let me get one more purchase all right we are on our way out with our spoils here and we're gonna head on over to our local liquor store here uh in pennsylvania okay we don't have all grocery stores you have not had the ability to sell alcohol so i'm going to do this and should try to get you the proper uh stuff here although this one does carry wine in here it does not have but so we are going to yep move it all right guys we are home um now unfortunately the liquor store did not allow us to shoot inside however we did get what we needed so um yes i have my mask off now because i'm not around other people anyway so what we have here i'm going to go over this of course when we get inside but i want to show you what i was able to pick up okay so here in front of me this is a pretty nice pinot grigio and this is what we needed to get we needed to get a wine from the region of the cuisine we are making and pinot grigio is from the alpine region of italy and that is a white crisp and sweet uh try and works perfectly with the rice we've mashed with it now we've also gotten another one of these this is from kevlar delorean okay um and now we've also gotten this one this is cabot now these are all about uh ten dollars a bottle and you don't really have to go much more expensive than that they're all drinkable cabin incidentally even though it's inexpensive is the number one wine in italy uh so even if you see cavett moscato and people drink that it's it's widely regarded it's sort of like the italian kendall jackson which is fine um you know it's fine drinkable wine it's good table wine um and we also got some prosecco and i got this cool vodka here this is called the uh three vodka it's um it's for rescue dogs uh you buy a bottle and it helps rescue dogs and i thought that was really cool anyway since you know anyway so we're gonna go inside now and i'm gonna get everything in let the puppies out and we're gonna start making rice all right see you in a bit all right so our field trip out of the way why did we have to go to all of that trouble well to kind of clarify some of the things i said on camera when we were out at the store i have a map so if you can see this these are the regions of the italian peninsula now every region is famous for their own specific type of thing now risotto comes from up here okay which is my family is from this area called pimbon the pimonti and milan lombardi this is where risotto really originates okay and there's probably 50 different at least uh you know kinds and techniques but the one you're most familiar with is risotto alla milanese and that comes from milano because that is milan is a very cosmopolitan city and a crossroads for a lot of people so that's what we're going to be focusing on today and that is the technique that is going to give you a good solid basic result that people are going to recognize because the thing is if you start making risotto like we make in pimanti people aren't going to understand what that is it's almost closer to paella some with some of the stuff we make but we make a red rice there that's almost all uh pork sausage and tomato paste and things like that with slightly different rice grains now we got the carneroli rice because carnaroli is a type of arborio short grain rice that comes from emilio romagna and this area here is also where our cheese is going to come from and our our wines are also going to come from this region as well so the re the wine we got is this cavalieroro right and this is a doc jesus certified pinot grigio pinot grigio comes from the alpine region of italy right here it's it's an alpine wine more than anything like that it's just more um excuse me it's an alpine wine just like a gamer schminger or riesling or anything like that but it's made of italian grapes and it has a drier a sweet and dry component to it and it's perfect for this dish because it's from the region right the next thing we need is our cheese and that's grana padano that we got here this is a grana padana we purchased and that comes from this area as well familia romania the same area where parmigiano-reggiano comes from and prosciutto and capicola and bologna bologna which is why we call it baloney in the united states weirdly enough um and also genoa uh here in general salami so in lagodia so all of this area here is basically considered the north of italy then you get down to tuscany and toscana right but here okay is where we need to start our education process with making our rice in italy you have and in most countries too operate this way as well um the warmer you get in climate from north to south okay the lipid of choice meaning the cooking fat you use goes from a more solid uh um like a rendered animal fat or butter to a shelf-stable liquid at room temperature like olive oil okay now in italy the dividing line is right around here okay so here in the alpine region where my family's from for example we're we're actually right this tiny little place called ibrahio like right in here okay anyway um coming down the the peninsula you see pork fat butter all right then butter and olive oil kind of in here and then basically from florence on down it's all olive oil and you the olive oil gets lighter and more and more refined the further down you get on the peninsula as it gets closer to the mediterranean sea um so you'll see extra virgin from sicily for example or calabria or or campagna be very very clear as opposed to cloudy like a northern like a tuscan olive oil would be first cold pressing so and that's because in a warmer climate it needs to stay um you know basically viable right so it won't spoil anyway so our lipid of choice we're going to use butter and olive oil we're going to use about two tablespoons of butter and just a little bit of olive oil just to make sure the butter doesn't burn on us when we're sweating our vegetables now in milan that is how they make it they use olive oil and butter together my great-grandmother my grandmother you make it with butter all right you just make it with butter or you make it with pork fat and we could do that but i want to give you the basic technique that you're going to see and be able to do something well to not not only impress your friends but make delicious food all right so that educational step out of the way there let's go ahead and start up i'm going to chop an onion we really only need first of all six things we need an onion we need some garlic we need some chicken stock which i made yesterday and you may have seen some of the images that i posted as a teaser of this with me making this guy and this is just in a copper pan a copper pot okay that we're going to use for warming copper is a very very conductive the most effective conductor of heat and we need our wine we need our cheese and we need our rice and some seasoning salt and a little bit of black pepper and that's about it now a lot of people are going to talk to you about what components you put into it whether you're going to put mushrooms in it right or whether you're gonna put you know asparagus this is these by the way this is a very traditional northern italian thing these are white asparagus spears um they're asparagus that grow underground deprived of sunlight and they turn white my great grandma loved these things but today we're just going to focus on regular basic plain jane as we can make it risotto and if we want to add something later a garnish mushrooms is a good place to start you can do that one of three ways you can saute them first ahead of time and throw them in at the end you can cook them with your onions and garlic okay or you can cook them when the stock that you make first you can make almost a mushroom stock to include in your rice in italy vegetable stock really isn't used in a lot of things chicken stock is the most common thing to use in you know risotto production is also and also sauces and soups because chickens are pretty plentiful there so let's just get started and i'm gonna go ahead and zoom back a little bit and we're going to use this electric burner and yes that is hot and i'm going to show you how to get going stick around um this just going to be give you a wide shot here to show you what i'm going to start out with we've got our onion okay and we've got our garlic now this is a whole head of garlic but we're not going to be using too much and i don't know if i've ever went over this with you before but peeling garlic is pretty easy and if it never hurts to do it again i've got a big chopping knife here none of my work knives but something i use in the house you just want to smack it like that all right and that takes the paper off pretty easily um and that way you don't have to worry about futzing with it this kind of peels off like that the other thing to remember with garlic is that when you once you start cutting it you have a very limited amount of time to work with it or it's going to turn into you know basically it's gonna get real better so anyway so what we're gonna do here since we're gonna sweat this okay we're gonna cut the ends off our garlic and we don't want to crush this okay so we don't want to use pre-crushed garlic or anything like that we want to slice this really really thin so we want to do this okay you can see there okay i'm going to go to the other camera here all right so you can see how thinly that is being sliced okay what's great about doing that is that that garlic although it won't totally disappear so to speak it's going to give you the flavor you want without overpowering the dish so we got two cloves two medium cloves there and that's all we're going to use in this guy all right next up onion you've seen me chop onions probably 100 times so we're just going to do this pretty easily this is a pretty wide guy it's just a sweet onion if you can get a vidalia use that but any sweet red onion will work we only need half of it all right because this is pretty big so cut it in half do the peeling real easy step all right and then what we're going to do is we're not going to chop this really fine okay again um but you don't want to you don't want it rustically like when we chopped onions for the um for marinara sauce okay because it was stewing for such a long time the size of our dice really didn't matter all that much okay and it could be as big or as little as we wanted it was going to disappear eventually anyway but this guy that's not going to happen so we have to make it a little smaller now we're not going to brunoise this okay so if you're for french color for culinary students we're not going to go that little because that's a little nuts for something like this but we're just going to slice down and you notice i cut it pull to pull okay so when i'm cutting down here the grain of the onion is going across all right just like that okay and then we are going to do three two slices across so one at the top all right now it's always good to have your knife be very sharp to do this okay and then one at the bottom okay all right and this is the size dice we're looking for it's just a medium dice just like that okay it's pretty small they're not all going to be 100 uniform and that's fine but the thing is you got to remember people are going to be eating this and it's not going to be cooking long enough for you to break all the onion down so this is what we're going to do this size is about what we want and that's going to break down easily enough and that's pretty easy to do all right so um i'm finishing up here the prep like i said before i'm just grating our cheese this is our granopa padano now that was a four ounce slice so if you can see here on the other camera just a little mini box grater i'm using now i've reserved about half of this piece of cheese because i'm sorry this is an eight ounce piece of cheese i apologize um we want to put it maybe we want to use that for garnish later grana padano is is not exactly parmigiana okay it's a parmesan type cheese it's just kind of younger all right so the first thing we're gonna do is get our cooking fat into our pot it's been preheating here for a bit pretty easy to do here at this point um it's gonna yank out one of these guys again and we're gonna get i know this looks like a lot of butter i promise you it is not uh it's two tablespoons of butter okay into the pot you hear it sizzle all right and now we're gonna put our olive oil in not a lot just about a tablespoon not a ton and we have our wooden spoon which is how we're going to make this entire dish okay this incidentally was my great-grandmother's wooden spoon that she used to make her risotto with and she passed it down to my grandmother who when she passed away she gave it to me um so um actually she gave it to me quite a few years ago but now there's no real recipe to follow here other than and that's what i've been trying to get to teach you on this show is just basic techniques are going to get you a lot further than following a recipe each time so we have our rice this is not from this is for your edification not mine um this is about a cup of rice just shy of it okay and depending on you know weather conditions and stuff like that you can use two cups of rice one cup of rice half a cup of rice it kind of really doesn't matter so we've got our we've got our pot on now and you can see the bubbling now we're going to put in our onions and sweat those out okay and we're just doing this on relatively low heat incidentally um most of the time what people are going to tell you to do is put your garlic in last because it um oh we need a pinch of salt in here just a good heavy pinch always remember to season every layer of your food if you don't it's going to taste bland or too salty or whatever at the end okay so that's salt in our pepper and that sweat is going to go on we're just going to want them to be about translucent the other camera is going to pick this up here and as always i'm doing this you know live and uncut this is a mixture of thyme oregano excuse me thyme rosemary parsley and some lavender it's not a full or the provence but it is a it's a nice mix and the time in the rosemary is really what i'm interested in and the parsley because in my chicken stock i have parsley thyme and rosemary and you're going to find those three in particular in pretty much all northern italian food all right um so this guy is going along and as soon as we get um some translucence color here i don't know what's going on maybe the mailman came on a sunday who knows um what we're gonna do next okay now i never measure my rice but just for your verification this is just sort of a cup like i said before so as we can see if you can see on the other angle here you can see these started this these onions the in the garlic we cut them finely enough that they are going to start to get translucent and sweet you don't want color on them okay you don't want to saute them you don't want to get it brown because if you get it brown what's going to happen is you're going to get these burnt flavors in there and although for certain dishes that's wonderful for risotto you really don't want that so now we're going to do a step that most people don't do and this is something i think that they teach wrong in culinary schools my brief time there i saw this and also i've seen it at work as well every kitchen in northern italy i've ever seen toasts their rice okay so your rice is going to go in right now all right if you had a garnish like mushrooms you'd have put those in first okay if you're making this to serve right away obviously if you're making it to serve later you would saute these ahead of time and then throw them in all right but now you can see the translucency starting we're going to put in our rice okay now what this is going to do we're only going to do this for about a minute and a half to two minutes what what this is going to do is not only toast the rice but it's going to kind of mellow some of that garlic and some of those onions and also allow the rice to absorb liquid a little bit better and that's what we need and again more salt you don't want this super salty but that's just a good heavy pinch again but every time you add stuff to your food you want to make sure that you season every layer all right now as you can see here the rice you don't again you don't want the rice to take on any color here you just want to kind of warm it through and get a nice little toasty flavor on it we're going to turn our heat up just to smidge here to medium all right and a little bit more of this thyme mix okay now the next thing to remember is your stock should be warm and you can see i've been having this preheating over here so it's just kind of about 150 65 degrees it's about 170 actually looking at the consistency of the water and this is another mistake that i see people do all make all the time when you're making your rice most people will just put stock in it okay and then they'll put wine in it as some kind of you know flavor additive or whatever later without doing what they need to do which is you need to turn your heat up all right and then you need to use your wine now we can use one of these bottles here because that's probably enough for us today this is cavett this is what i was talking about yesterday very similar to that and besides i might want to drink that anyway so um but this is also docg from the exact same region so we've hit we've heated this we're heating this up all right and now the next thing we have to do is add our wine this will function as both our sugar and our acid in our dish we don't want to put any lemon juice in here we don't want to put any anything crazy okay just the alpine wine that we're going to use all right this is 187 milliliters or yeah this is 187 milliliter bottle so about a four ounce glass or so and that's where we're going to start okay so that four ounces of wine you may think oh my god that's a ton of wine well the thing is that is going to evaporate incredibly quickly and the rice will soak it in so the thing about the risotto in particular is that the arborio rice and the carnaroli it does absorb liquid exceptionally well just like other short grain rices like sushi rice does when you get sticky rice at a sushi place that's basically made by using rice wine vinegar in a reduction okay to get the sugar out now we're going to start ladling in our stock and we've cranked our heat up to high here okay and as soon as this comes to a boil all right we are going to just leave it alone all right we're going to stir it occasionally here and there and once you start to see and you'll see this on this camera as well once you start to see the bubbles forming you're going to see the liquid start to reduce and reduce and reduce and once that rice gets to the consistency we want that's when we're finished okay if there's no time and temperature guide there is no you know magic recipe where you put a lid on you let it steam for 18 minutes you take it off and you fluff it and it's done to make this properly you just have to pay attention okay so it may be difficult to do that at first however once we get the consistency where we want it the the finishing steps are incredibly easy we end up just turning off the heat and throwing in our cheese and that's it that's all we got to do and the thing is you'll see a lot of times that a risotto or risotto a lot of times you'll see in an american restaurant or whatever is finished with a pot of butter now for a service that makes perfect sense because you want something to coat the grains and the rice was pre-cooked and blah blah blah but that technique isn't something that you would ever see in an italian kitchen nobody does that and the reason it's taught like that a lot of times in culinary schools or to like you'll even see gordon ramsay teach this to people in kitchen nightmares it's because it's easy it's easy to remember and it doesn't take the skill to make the rice in the first place right all you're doing is basically throwing it in a pan throwing in your garnish finishing it with butter that's it now if you're a skilled rice maker you can make that amazing but that's not where that's not really what that's for that's for a consistent product so it tastes pretty much the same all the time however we're not going for consistent here we're going for amazing so if you do this right this will start to turn you can see in the other camera here now too the bubbles starting to form and we're going to like let this come up to heat and now now let's talk about something else so you'll notice that my stock here is warm now warm stock will cook your rice faster not much faster but faster you can do it with cold stock but i want to make something abundantly clear do not put cream in your risotto do not put thickeners in it do not put milk in it don't but just don't do that i have seen people do this i have seen people put roux to thicken their rice i have seen people use heavy cream to thicken their rice and if you're maybe in a banquet setting or something and you have to keep it for 10 hours yup maybe that might work but it's still not going to give you the result you want because what that cream does it has lactic acid in it and it's going to break down the rice so eventually it's going to turn into mush you don't want your rice to be mushy so stock is what you want the rice will get creamy all on its own you don't have to do a damn thing it's got enough starch in it okay so anybody who ever tells you to do that honestly just be wary there that that may be something they learned uh as a cheat a while back or you know they're from germany who the hell knows uh not a slight there but um there are certain people you should learn how to make rice from like italians and asians as opposed to uh you know germans or you know people from poland i i apologize that's not a it's not an ethnic thing that's just a factual culinary statement um anyway uh it's like it's like asking for advice on um fish and chips from people in russia like they don't make that that's not their food and i wouldn't take uh um you know i wouldn't think goulash recipes from somebody who wasn't hungarian you know anyway um so we can see the bubbles uh popping in uh and you may start to see you see that little oil uh fat bit on the top so what that is is just the cooking fat now you may think oh my god that's too much fat it's too much fat it's too much fat it isn't once the rice starts to absorb this liquid you can already see it's been reduced by about an eighth okay what we started with and that acid in the wine is going to bond with the protein and the starch granules on the rice okay and what that's going to do is create basically a suspension all right lower an emulsion a perf a permanent suspension so when this gets to your table when you add your dairy product your cheese it's perfect it's emulsified and it also keeps the next day so i'm going to go ahead and get this boiled up here now because i'm doing this live most cooking shows will skip ahead about 10 minutes from when i when this started boiling to when it's ready to go but i want you to watch every single step of the way here so um let's do more italian education so interestingly um if you get uh if somebody ever tells you they're like tuscan right um they're talking specifically about florence cuisine primarily from florence and that's the basis of it um and also chicken florentine not really florent not really from florence anything quote unquote florentine not really from florence it is a an americanization of that most of the most of the quote unquote italian food we see in this country is really not what you'll find in italy by itself for example our bolognese episode when we did the live stream it's not a red sauce at all but if you give that to an american they're gonna go like what the hell is this it looks like you know the brown chili but what's interesting too is with risotto this sort of myth has gone around where it's like this high-end sort of uh dish to eat and you know rice the reason people in the north of italy eat rice is because number one it's cheap and number two it grows well in the harsher soils near the alps so it's peasant food all right and most of the best food in the world is peasant food um you know my my great grandparents when they came over to america my grandfather was a coal miner and you know they didn't have a ton of money but they could always make rice you know rice was cheap rice was affordable and you could just do it with what was around you the local cheese the local salt the you know the local herb that you had in the garden the local butter you know local pork fat if you had pigs right so that's what it is it is peasant food and just like coco or anything else or ratatouille or in french in france or you know in a barbecue in america these are things that our ancestors made because they were plentiful they could eat them and they made them as delicious as they could because it's what they had to work with risotto incidentally has been around for a very very very long time when i said it's the quintessential italian dish i'm not kidding it goes back in if you look at roman history books the lombards who came into the roman roman empire there are references to it there okay and um the other thing is so if you've been let me let me sort of boil this down if you've been breeding a grain of rice for 2 000 plus years and making a dish a certain way or for two millennia right except for the brief uh dark age period um or early middle ages uh when you couldn't get this when you couldn't get the ingredients anymore because people forgot how to farm um then you know there are certain things that that culture kind of knows how to do almost by default it's almost like your golden retriever or lab you know retrieving a ball right it's just kind of ingrained um so you can see here on the other camera right oh the reason i love this spoon by the way and by the way this thing is at least 50 years old um the holes in it allow you to pick pick up some pasta or some or some rice and just taste it now i'm not going to do that i'm going to use clean spoons because that's what i've been teaching you and that's proper etiquette now do i do that all the time in my kitchen absolutely not but that's just at home so you can see the creaminess here now you see that that's just chicken stock and wine with the rice now the rice you can see too all right you see it's still pretty white all right now that means you can see here on the outside you can see how it's cooked on the outside but that inside of that rice grain is still all right still solid now what we're going to do just like making pasta this is by the way if you make pasta if you make fresh pasta this is a very similar technique and guess what the technique for making pasta kind of comes from this so if you know how to make rice you can make perfect pasta all right so we're going to put in some more chicken stock here all right and we're almost there so i'm going to taste this for the first time notice i haven't touched it yet okay and the reason i haven't touched it is because you have to get the rice to a certain consistency in order to be able to you know just understand where you're at how much time you got left eventually you'll get to the point being able to look at it and know how much time like i i would faster i guess i've got about five minutes left on this guy but let's take a taste okay yeah we got a little bit to go all right so we're gonna put this should be our last ladle of stock by the way when this goes back up to heat okay and then the last thing i want to do is add one more splash of wine to balance out some of the sweetness i mean some of the saltiness that we're going to be adding with the cheese later on notice we have not put that in there yet and we're not going to okay at this point if you wanted to add a garnish like if you wanted to add mushrooms okay this would be you could do it now especially if you like them a little bit firm like i do and my great grandma would do it this way okay she would not saute these ahead of time and she would take them these are kermini's by the way immature portobellos um and she would take them unseasoned she would break them like this and throw them right in the pot and i have seen uh italian grandmas do this all over the place my family when the last time we visited there i saw uh luisa do this so uh this is how i do it because if my great-grandma and grandma did it a certain way you know what and i've seen a ton of other other italians do it then i think it's a right thing to do so we're going to go ahead and bring that up to a boil now those mushrooms the cool thing about mushrooms is and i think i think we've probably covered this before you can't overcook a mushroom like unless you put it into an oven for uh half an hour at 500 degrees and it turns into charcoal you can't overcook it so you can boil these to death and it's going to give you a nice sort of um toothsomeness right that you otherwise wouldn't get so i like the mushrooms in there but that's totally up to you and again this works with anything really any kind of garnish you want to put in there that you're not doing ahead of time risotto elements interestingly enough is typically flavored with saffron saffron is pretty expensive so we're not doing that here today but when you see a saffron risotto risotto on a menu um that is that is a risotto almond see right meaning it's the same basic technique they just threw some saffron threads in it that's all they did and with saffron excuse me the thing about it and why it's so useful and why you put it in paella is that as a spice okay not only does it have the ability to change uh the color of a dish which is really cool but the way that saffron works by the time it's changed your rice yellow your rice is cooked so it's kind of like this built-in barometer and i'm kind of can excuse me i'm kind of convinced that that's why people started using saffron in the first place when they didn't have proper proper cooking equipment in the middle ages they would use that not only to wow people but uh to um make sure their food was done because you know if you only have a open flame to cook over you kind of need a you need a gauge right so all right so we're almost there now um you can see on the other camera here you can see the consistency changing um and this is almost there i would say two and a half more minutes now you may be wondering why i haven't put this in because you probably have seen on cooking shows or food food network or whatever people take this cheese and they'll throw it in at this point to melt the cheese right don't do that okay if you do that especially with the grano pidano not only will the cheese kind of screw up your emulsion in the rice it's going to end up kind of like a mozzarella stick it's going to be stretchy you don't want that that's not what you're looking for the reason you do it at the end is because the cheese ties it all together that way if you once you kill the heat and stir it in at the end the cheese will slowly melt from the residual heat and give you that nice creamy texture that you're looking for if you do it too early you're gonna end up with uh you know cheese ball rice i like to call it but uh it it can end up being kind of watery um and because the rice won't absorb any more liquid because the cheese will literally bond itself to that liquid and prevent it from going into the rice so that's not what we want all right so we have another clean spoon here and we got let's see where we're at here okay now we're almost there just a little bit longer and i'm gonna put some more cheese in here just to kind of balance that out now this is something that you know i've been making this dish since i was six years old so i can kind of do this not only by sight but by by tasting it and knowing what needs adjusted it's going to take a while for you to get there but i just want you to focus on first of all using unsalted stock if you're going to use store-bought stuff okay if you use salted stock the typical commercial stuff it is way too salty or it's just going to have way too much salt in it and you're getting more more than enough salt from the salt you're putting in it and the cheese you're putting in as well so you really do not need all that salt so make sure if you're using commercial stock to get unsalted stock okay and if you make it yourself um don't add salt to it too much unless you're using raw chicken that you haven't cooked already but if you're already using like a roasted chicken bones or something to make your stock don't put salt in it there's already going to be enough salt in that chicken so all right um now so i'm going to save this last bit of cheese for a garnish at the end oh and i want to get some parsley too um the thing about really good italian food is it's just not fussy okay um there's no real it's not like ornamental so that much um so we're gonna take some parsley this is just for a garnish just a little greenery just to make it look pretty and a couple sprigs of rosemary and it doesn't have to be fancy it just has to be good now obviously you want it to look good on a plate but you know you don't have to worry about making things look you know perfect um the other thing too is a traditional topping for this other than you know mushrooms would be scallops that typically goes with a saffron risotto on top of there also other proteins are shrimp there are some places that i've seen in liguria that put prawns into their results so similar to paella again most of the rice that you're going to get along the mediterranean coast so from let's say let's go from cordoba knockouts even barcelona all the way up to genoa in italy even in the south of france it's all basically the same food i mean there's differences here and there but uh when you make rice the techniques are pretty much the same the only difference is paella it's a lighter dish because you're not using the heavy butter and you're not using anything like that because it's a coastal thing right instead of being from the mountains um and we are oh we're real close okay can you see this here you see the creaminess coming out right so when you're looking at that okay i'm going to zoom this in all right you see that rice grain okay once you start seeing those raggedy little edges there another minute or so you're going to be done okay that is almost al dente and that's where we want it we don't want it to be um overcooked we don't want it to be mushy but we also don't we still want it to have a little bit of bite to it all right um and just like you know good pasta you want it to be you want to be able to bite through it without um without it being uh you know hard right or difficult to bite through uh so it's a it's a balance to strike but there we go all right and we are literally okay one more bring this up to a simmer one more time we're going to be done so i'm going to grab my bowl here and i'm going to use let's see which one have i been using a lot lately let me use this guy i like that guy okay back in you go all right so this is our bowl um it's always good to rinse out your plates before you plate something because you know in your cabinets sometimes stuff gets on them uh although these are you know although they are clean uh you're gonna end up you may end up with some random stuff in there so all right so you can see on the other camera here you can see that um the see the consistency there and you see how those mushrooms are just softened okay they're not um they're not you know cooked to death they're not raw they're just kind of a happy medium and that's kind of how i like them now other people like them differently and if i was at work i would probably i would saute those ahead of time but um because you have to do this in you know two three minutes as opposed to 15 or however long we've been doing this for so that's the consistency you're looking for and as soon as like i said as soon as that comes up to a simmer you're going to see this turn okay a slightly whiter color and that's when we're done okay it is kind of something again you have to just start paying attention to but what's nice about this technique that i'm giving you not only is it basic it's it's kind of removes all your guesswork because you're just going by site primarily and if you just function if you just do it you know three four five times maybe six you'll have this pretty down pat and this is basic and then we can get back to more complicated uh ways to make rice but this is really really simple and that carnaroli rice and also when i was talking uh earlier about the difference between arborio not being arborio the stuff from california for example that isn't imported it's not that it's bad okay you can use that that is fine i even have some here to show you so um for example okay this is an american product but it sees how it says italian style rice all right it's the same seeds but they're grown in america and part of the problem with that is that a lot of the soil we have in this country doesn't have the same characteristics that you'll get in northern italy and can you see that creaminess right there okay and when you grow when you transplant those seeds it doesn't always work certain things do certain things don't rice really isn't one of those there are sushi rices that can be grown in california very very well and but again some of the japanese climates and where they grow those rices is very similar to certain parts of california so it works but with the arborio it's better to just get the real stuff because with american rice you're not going to get this kind of result really okay so we are there and we're going to kill our heat and all of this is going to go in okay now the big question is since there's no heat is this going to melt our cheese oh my god we have to melt our cheese we have to melt our cheese there you go see the cheese is going to melt just fine and it's not going to get sticky it's not going to get runny and you're going to get that wonderful cheesy parmesan aged not parmesan grano padano flavor and this is also what's interesting about this because we've made that a suspension ahead of time without melting all that cheese and doing all that crap all right we have perfect rice that is not stringy that is not overly cheesy and it will not only taste great but keep well for days in the fridge so i'm going to get myself a bowl here let's present this guy okay and you notice the cheese okay so you see that it didn't change the consistency of that rice that's what using the proper cheese does if you use some of like american parmesan what happens is a lot of times you end up with something like i said looks like a you know mozzarella stick so when you see risotto on a menu a lot of times that's what they're using and it just doesn't come out the same so here we go this is our risotto i'm gonna eat some and i'll see you in a bit okay so thank you guys so much for joining me here today i know this may be a little bit of a long one for you but i promise you if you follow my instructions here not only are you going to come up with perfect rice but you are going to impress people uh because they're going to think that you've been doing this for you know 30 years anyway salute do

Channel: From Scratch : With Love

Views: 590,371

Keywords: Educational, food, culinary arts, entertainment, technique, Howto, Professional chef, Professional home cooking, Black lab, Labrador retriever, Cook with what you’ve got, Northern Italian, Celiac safe, Gluten free, Authentic Italian, Real rice, Best rice, Real risotto, Risotto, Piedmontese, Milanese, Mythical Kitchen, Food network, Good eats, Bon Apetite, The cooking guy, Babish, Ramsay

Id: qSvvp-lwc3g

Length: 50min 54sec (3054 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021