Around the Kitchen Table- Risotto an Italian Classic

Hey everyone, I'm Chef Dennis Littley and welcome to Around the Kitchen Table. It looks like Susan's gonna miss this episode. She's getting ready to move into a new house and I don't have to tell you how that is. It's just crazy. So if she does pop in, we'll be happy to see her, but if not, I'm sure everyone can understand everything she's got going on. A lot on her plate today. So speaking of a lot on your plate today, I'm gonna make one of our favorite dishes that we learned to eat when we first visited Italy, and that's risotto. And a lot of people shy away from risotto because they think it's a lot more difficult to make than it really is. It's pretty simple. It's just that it takes a little time. It's not something you can just— like regular rice, you can put on the stove, put it on simmer, or turn it off and just let it cook. It needs attention. So for that reason, a lot of people don't make it to because you have to stay at the stovetop. So this is a dish that you want to make while you're in the kitchen anyway. Alright, if you've got something else to do in the kitchen, you know, it's really simple to make. Like I said, it's just that it needs a little attention. So we're going to start it up right away, and I want to say hi to everybody that's here while we're at it. And Coach Moore is in the house, and Elena Bellamonte is in the house. In fact, Elena is saying hi to Coach. Loretta Sebastiani is coming by today, and she's curious about my recipe because she is Italian. This is Elena, and I always feel a little nervous when I'm cooking in front of authentic Italians and not the fagazy style like I say so many of them we have in this country. But anyway, risotto, speaking of that though, is one of those recipes that is just like anything ethnic. There's going to be as many variations on it as you can find Italian grandmothers, and none of them are wrong. They're just different in ways that they learn to prepare this dish. So I'm going to show you a really simple classical way for making risotto. And, you know, there's— like I said, there's plenty of other ways to do it, but this will give you a start. And one thing you want to learn about risotto is it's very adaptable.. So you can add a myriad of other flavors into it. But today, we're going to, like I said, we're going to start with our basics. So I'm going to turn my pan on. And in the pan already, I have a little, like a tablespoon of butter. And I'm actually going to hit it with a little bit of olive oil too. You can go straight butter. You could go straight oil. It depends what your flavor runs, how you want to eat. Again, I put this in your hands. It's nothing that's truly etched in stone. There are guidelines. You choose to follow them, that's fine. If you want to make them up as you go, that's fine too, because it's about what you want to eat, it's about what you like to eat, and it's about enjoying what you're cooking. So what we're going to do is we're just going to let this melt a little bit and get hot, and then we're going to sauté some onions up with it. So as we put the onions in, we're just going to let them cook briefly just to get a little bit of a head start to cooking. A little translucency to them. Sweat them down just a little, and then I'm going to add in the rice. Now, the difference with risotto is the type of rice that we use. All right, now I'm using— grab it and show you— and most grocery stores have this, but it's Arborio. All right, there's 3 varieties, and I don't know them all offhand, but Arborio is probably the most common you'll find in this area. So we're going to put the onions in. Let me switch cams for you so you can see that a little bit better. And I'm using a wooden spoon because the classical recipe calls for it, and I don't— it's not something I've used a lot because in commercial kitchens we tend to stay away from wood in cooking because it is a little harder to clean. When you're serving the public, you have to really be careful about what you're doing. This is just going to start a little bit, and if you have any questions as you're going along, don't hesitate to ask, or any suggestions on how you prepare the dish, that's fine too. The onions, I'm starting to get a little smell from them. It's not taking too long. You don't have to overcook them. You just want to always start an aromatic like an onion— you want to give it a head start in cooking, because if you dump it just into boiling water, it's never going to get that really good flavor. You're never going to give it a chance to start cooking. Now, we're not going to caramelize these, we're not going to take them that far down, but we do want to get that essence of cooked flavor to an onion because that's really where the sweetness and the flavor is. That's where it really starts to spread all those other flavors in your dish. So now I'm going to add add my Arborio rice. Put that in, and I'm going to coat it really well with my oil and butter mixture. And if it doesn't look— you know, this rice will, just like many things, will soak up the fat. So if it looks like it's a little dry to you and it's not coated well enough, just hit it with a little more oil. It's definitely not going to hurt the dish. Dish. But what you want to do when you cook risotto, and even when you cook any kind of rice, is you want to put it in the pan with— even if you're not cooking it with onion or anything— and if you have the time, just sauté that rice just a little bit. Because what it does is, as it's cooking, you'll start to have like a nutty, a aroma to it. I've been told it helps cook it faster because you are sautéing it just a little bit, you're heating it up. But for me, I think it gives it a little bit more flavor. It's just like when you roast seeds. Whenever you roast seeds, when you put them in the oven and you roast them, they get really flavorful and aromatic. Well, it's the same thing with rice. We're definitely not going to eat it in this state, and we don't want it to brown. It's okay if a kernel here or there gets a little brown, but you just want to heat it up and just work it around the pan just for a few minutes. Again, not leaving it in one space too long so it doesn't tend to get all brown. A little fleck here and there is fine. Once you've got that, just a little sauté on it, we're going to start adding in our liquid. This is chicken stock. You could very easily use vegetable stock if you like. I'm going to start with 2 ladles. You always want to start with hot stock because the hot stock will get this going a lot faster. I'm just going to turn this down just a little bit because I don't want it to just boil away. I want it to cook. I'm going to put it on a low-medium. I still want it to be nice and hot, but like I said, I don't just want the liquid to boil away. This is pretty much what we do at this point is we get the liquid in there. We get it cooking, and then as the liquid cooks in, we just keep adding more liquid, more liquid into it. And it's pretty simple from this point. And now it's just a matter of a waiting game while we get it there, and it's going to take about 20 minutes. So as it's cooking, I'm going to talk a little bit about— we'll leave this camera on, but I'll talk so you can hear me. And I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the different risottos you can make. One of the nice things, like I said, about risotto is this basic dish can— and Coach Mori asked about the heat. I've got it on probably a medium, straight medium heat, not medium-high, just medium, maybe a notch towards medium-low. It is still cooking pretty hot, and you can see pretty much the liquid's evaporated. At this point, I'm going to add another ladle. I'm a little bit more of a hurry-up kind of guy, so sometimes I tend to put a little too much in at a time. We're going to try just a ladle at a time and let it cook in. As you're stirring it, one of the things about this is this is called glutinous rice. It's not quite as sticky as Chinese rice, but We're letting— and it's not gluten, so you don't have to worry about that. It's not like you're eating gluten, but it's just a term that is like gluey kind of rice. And this isn't as bad, as I said, as the Japanese sticky rice would be, but it's still— you're working the starch out of this. An important thing not to do with this is not to rinse it because you want all that starch. I know with regular rice we always rinse it first. But with this, we want the rice to have all that extra starch, and by stirring it more, you're actually going to make it more gluey, more glutinous. You're going to make it have more of an appearance of creamy. If you just let it sit, it'll pretty much just cook. It'll remain— the grains will kind of remain the same.. But the more you move it around and the more you get it moving and the more you get that stickiness to come out of it by moving it, it will have that kind of risotto that you can pretty much form with a cup if you were going to put it on your plate, or that will stand up. Because the risotto, while you want it to be crunchy, you want it to have a little bit of a crunch to the rice. It's not going to get soft like white rice.— it's going to have a little crunch to it, but you don't want it to be just dead hard and you don't want it to be liquidy. You want it to be creamy but something that will stand up a little bit on the plate. We were talking about different things you can do with this. I have asparagus in the refrigerator. Asparagus risotto is wonderful. I have mushrooms. Mushrooms, mushroom risotto is really good. When you think of mushroom risotto, let's think about adding in something other than just plain old household white mushrooms. Let's think about, and not just portobellos because they really don't have a lot of flavor either, but maybe some ceps, maybe some porcini. If you like shiitake, some shiitake mushrooms or a blend. You want to get like a woodsy blended mushrooms in here. Something that's really going to have some flavor. We know the rice, except for the stock we put in it, is not going to have a lot of its own flavor. It's important to get something else in there. When you're thinking about flavors, cook— now, if I was going to do them, I would not— you could start and put the mushrooms in here with the onions. I would say not to. Because it's going to interfere with the cooking, or whatever other vegetable is going to interfere with the cooking. So I would take whatever I'm going to add into it, and I would sauté it on the stove separately. There's another portion of butter that's going to go in at the end. I would use that butter to sauté mushrooms, asparagus, broccoli, shrimp, crab meat. I was actually thinking I might make a lot lobster. I got some really nice lobster meat at Restaurant Depot and make a lobster risotto. You want to take that separate, and that's going to go in in the very last step as we add it in. Okay, and then let's see, we have some questions. Let's see what we have here. Let's come back. Coach Moore is asking, could you tell us who makes your burner that you're using? It is a Burton brand, Coach Moore. It is Max Burton, and I got it on Amazon, and I think it was about $96. It really was not expensive, and they have some more high-powered ones, but you really don't need it. I've had this on 5. I have not turned it past 5 since I've had it. It goes up to 10. It heats really, really well. It boils probably faster, as fast as gas, if not faster than gas does. If I was to put a pot on here, it really does crank some BTUs out. The only thing you need to remember is if you're using a pan on it, you need a tri-ply pan that is magnetic. I'm trying to think of the brand name of this one. I can get that for you later. The pans are really good too. And these— this is like one of the heaviest sauté pans I have. I think I paid about $35 for it. Was insanely cheap in the world of tri-pie pans. Now they don't have a lot on there that I could use. I ended up buying my other round, the small rondo that I use, and that was closer to $100. But you know, sometimes you just got to get what you get for— oh, Nazim's in the house! Hey Nazim, good to see Good to see you here. I'm sure you've had some good risotto in your life. And Mona Holmes is asking, how on earth do you set up your camera device kitchen for a demo? Well, Mona, it's really not that difficult. I've got 2 laptops running, 2 cameras running. They're both on tripods. The one I'm looking at— get rid of this— the one I'm looking at straight ahead is in front of me over top of my main laptop, and that's focused on me. And then I have a small boom arm running right up to about here, coming straight down on the pan, and with another camera— that's this one— see, we're getting to the point where we need to add a little more stock. And they're both plugged in hardwire with wires going to my router. I have some 25 and a 50-foot long cable that go back to where my router is, so that makes it easy to plug in. And it is important, you know, if you're using two cameras on a setup where you could get away with Wi-Fi on one, with two you really need to have at least one of them hardwired in. So that's something to think about. As for the rest of the setup, they're Logitech C920 cameras. Get them on Amazon for about $70. This bad boy is a Blue Yeti, and that's about $100 on Amazon. Really good sound, and you can set it for going straight forward, to the side, to side to side, front to back, or everything. It's got some really good settings that will help you with the camera. Elena Baccellamette is— Porcini, truffle, or seafood? Absolutely, a little truffle oil in here would be wonderful. And again, that's something that you would put in, the truffle oil, towards the end, because if you use it at the beginning, I think a lot of the flavor would be lost. Whenever you want flavors of something, you want to put them in towards the end of the dish because that's when you're going to taste them the most, especially if they're expensive ingredients. Nazim is saying his favorites are mushroom and Seafood Risotto. Perfect. Coach, don't worry about that. I make spelling errors all the time. This is really pretty simple. You can see— let me put them— Loretta has asked, she joined late and wants to know about the "Quality of rice we're using, what's most common in USA for risotto?" Loretta, the most common that we find, or that I seem to find, is Arborio. That's what I'm using. I know there's Carnoli rice, and there's another brand, and I have found the Carnoli, if I'm saying it right, from time to time. But for the most part, we can find Arborio in just about any grocery store in the US. So that's generally what gets used, especially in commercial, unless you're dealing with a really good vendor. I would get 25-pound bags of Arborio at school to make risotto, but that was about all I could get. What do you use, Loretta? What are you using to make your risotto with? Okay. Like, I didn't expect you were gonna answer me right over the, over the microphone. I know you gotta type it. Although I do look at it sometimes like I am expecting it. So forgive me. We're gonna add a little more stock in. And this is the only thing, again, that gets to be tedious. It does take a little while for everything to cook down. But again, that's part of the process of getting this to be creamy. Otherwise, you know, the rice could be liquidy, but it won't be creamy. That's what we want. That's what makes it special. That's what makes it so flavorful. I was looking at a recipe to use for lobster. One I found uses some tomatoes with the lobster, so I'm thinking I might play with that and do that another day this week. For this post, this is going to be plain. We're having, we're having barbecued slow cooker ribs tonight, so we're going to have risotto, kind of a plain risotto with it, and some fresh asparagus. That's going to be dinner. But, you know, anything you want to put in here would be wonderful. Pumpkin risotto is like really a very popular dish in Italy and goes over, you know, especially this time of year, you know, something with a squash or pumpkin, very popular. I know I've seen some desserts, sort of like dessert risottos too. Black squid ink risotto, we had that one place we were at. Foscino is a very common dish. It is in Italy referred to as a prima piatta, if I'm saying it right, piatta, as would be your first course where you'll generally have spaghetti, a pasta of some type, or risotto of some type as your first course. Your second course will then be your protein, your meat or seafood. So you know, you you want to order properly and in stages and take your time and really enjoy your meal. This today we're using as a side dish. It can be a side or it can be an entrée, depending upon what you want to eat and how you want to eat. If you have leftover risotto, I love it in soups. In soups it is just wonderful because it's almost a little bit of a thickening agent. It gets the soup creamy. Then also, you can make arancini, which translates to little oranges. What they are is you take a piece of mozzarella, and you put it— once the risotto is cooled, and it's day-old risotto, and you form a ball, and you put a piece of mozzarella in it, and you bread it. Then you either have to freeze them a little bit or get them really good and cold, and then you fry them. They are just wonderful. We'll serve them with a little bit of a spicy tomato sauce. Good. And Loretta is saying, "Carnoli also." And then Elena has put down— let's see if I turn that on— "Risogallo, risottotte, and carnioli." Okay, good. And Loretta is saying— The Arborio and again the Carnaroli. So good, good to know that there are some different brands and I'm using— and Coach, you did ask about Royal brand and I have not seen that, but that doesn't mean, you know, it could just be typical to your part of the country. So I know this type I have seen, the one that I held up, RiceSelect. They make all different kinds of rice Linds, and it seems to be something that is constant in supermarkets on the East Coast that I've been to anyway. When I go to an Italian market, then that's usually when I can start looking out and about. Or my Wegmans— oh, I love my store, my Wegmans up north. They generally had a couple different kinds as well. But down here I haven't found them yet. Doesn't mean they're not here. I just have to get out and look a little bit more. I was all excited. I thought I found an Italian specialty store and I went in and it was just pretty much a deli that was selling some pastas and a few other things. I'm like, "Ah." This is one thing Philadelphia had was it had some Italian specialty stores that would just make you cry when you went in them. They had so many wonderful things. So this is working really well. Let's see what the time is. It's been about 18 minutes, somewhere around there, 15 minutes. It's starting to look— but again, with this, looks are a little bit deceiving because it'll start to look like it's done, needs just a little bit longer than you might think, and it's still going to be a little bit crunchy. Let's just take a little taste and see. Yep. A little crunchy. Very tasty though. And generally risotto is finished. Like I said, if you were using something other than plain risotto, if you wanted to add in, say, some seafood or some vegetables of some kind, you have them cooking on the stove, cooking to whatever consistency would be good for it. Again, you don't want to add much to it, but you want things to be cooked. And then as the risotto is finished cooking, we generally put in more butter, some parsley, and a good handful of grated Romano cheese to give it some flavor. So based on that, you can make your adjustments from that point on what you want to add to it. You know, you could add a little cream to it If you wanted to give it a little bit kind of a texture, I wouldn't advise putting too much in, but a little bit of cream will really creamy it up and give it a different kind of flavor. You could probably add in a little Greek yogurt, although I've never tried it, and get a little tang to it and add a little bit of flavor. Now, don't be afraid to play with it. Don't be afraid to try and come up with some good, interesting flavors. That you'll enjoy eating and that are different. You want to caramelize some leeks and put some leeks on it. You want to add a little bacon into it, a little pancetta if you want to go Italian. Peas at the end, make some risottisi. There's so many things. Anything pretty pretty much vegetable-wise that you can think of to put in it, you can put in it. You will come up with a really tasty side dish, like I said, or an entrée. You could serve a nice shrimp scampi over this if you wanted to. It would be wonderful. You can use this for stuffing. If you want to let it chill down and you want to stuff some flounder with it or stuff another kind of fish or just mound it up and bake it a little bit. There are so many There's different things you can do. It's a very versatile product. Other than doing this, you're seeing it. This is not really difficult to make. It's just plan on being in the kitchen, bring a book, make some sauce, do something else so your time is well spent. This would be the perfect dish to do while you're making a big pot of sauce for red sauce. Because you're going to be in here while it's cooking and getting the temperature right and getting it hot so it doesn't burn. And same thing with this, you can watch this. Or if you've got your TV in here and you want to watch a little TV while you're doing it, again, that works well. Or your tablet, looking up other delicious recipes. And this works perfectly for me because I am now— I haven't been mentioning it too much, but I've started a gluten-free diet, and I'm on that now for— this is actually day 10 of my gluten-free diet. So because there is no gluten in this, it works out really well for me, and it's a delicious dish, and it's very, very adaptable. And thanks to the Italians, I found a wonderful Gluten-free pasta. Barilla now makes a gluten-free pasta with corn and rice flours. It's really pretty hard to tell it isn't real pasta, or wheat pasta, I should say, not real pasta. So that's always fun. Yeah, Loretta, I guess it is dinner time for you. It's got to be, what, about 8 o'clock, 8:30 there? See, that would be past dinner time for us, but in Europe that is dinner time. Elena's saying arancini from Sicily. That's correct. I've never been to Sicily. That's one place I do want to get to. And Loretta is saying her favorite risotto is made with cabbage. Wow. Beans and salami. Oh my God, that sounds wonderful. Thank you, Loretta. I will definitely look that up. That sounds like a very interesting flavors in there and a very hearty risotto. I love cabbage, and I never would have thought actually of putting that in here. What kind of beans are you using on that too? That's a question I would have. Cannellini beans, or— Coach is asking Nazim if the olive oil harvest has started yet. That's a good question, Coach. Love me some olive oil. Although as a chef, butter has always got a very special place in my heart. Let's just hope it doesn't take up too much of the heart, give me problems. Stuck. This is doing really well, and thank you for bearing with me through this cooking adventure. It's starting to get creamy, though. Put the pan cap back on. It's got a little bit of liquid in here. It's got to cook down, but I can start to see a little creaminess happening. The grains are nice size. I did go to one place and They were just a little too crunchy. So you want to find that fine line between being hard and crunchy good and hard and crunchy just a little too much. That's something you'll learn as you cook it. And as you cook it, I mean, I pretty much always use hot stock to do it with, but this has been off the stove for a little while, so it's not boiling, it's not quite as hot. But the reason you want to use the hot stock stock is it'll keep the cooking temperature going. It won't slow it up and it won't take even longer. And Coach is asking, have I ever looked at Chromebooks? And Coach, yeah, I have looked at Chromebooks, but I don't— I think for viewing and for pretty much doing everything normal that you would want to do, they would probably be great, but where I worry about is when— one of the reasons we use an external camera is because the internal camera sucks up so much power. Hangouts are very heavily resourced item, part of Google+. The Hangout itself takes up a good amount of your resources in your computer. So then when you end up using the camera that's on the computer, it has to do a lot of work to get everything translated into the picture and all that. With an external camera, with the C920, all the work is done in the camera, so the signal is just going to the computer. So that ends up helping with resources. So again though, but you still need a little bit more power when you run a microphone and a camera on it. It's going to drain it a little bit more because I do have a small— it's not a Chromebook, it's an Asus, but it's sort of that in that style, a small one. That's what I'm running the PanCam off of, but there's no microphone on it. So I just did get a new tablet too. I got a new Samsung S series tablet that was a late birthday present. We hadn't figured out what I wanted, and then I finally decided my old tablet wasn't working with Netflix anymore, so— and I love watching Netflix. We got that. And that, I want to try and use it for some Hangouts as a second camera to see how that might work too, or maybe even a third camera. You never know. I have not tried it for that yet. This is getting nice and creamy now. See that? Nice and creamy, that is. And Loretta, you're using Borlotti beans. Thank you, Loretta, I appreciate that. I'm thinking, are those like cranberry beans in the States? I don't know if anybody knows. I'm trying to remember. Let's see how this is. Oh yeah, it's right there. Okay, so So now it's basically done. At this point, we would add a little bit more butter to it. I'm going to add a little bit more butter to it for that flavor. I've actually turned it off right now. Melt that butter in. I want to melt the butter before I put the cheese in so it doesn't clump up as much. And you know, if you don't want the cheese, you can leave the cheese out. It's not a big deal. This is classically how it's made. Some black pepper in here. It's got plenty of salt already. I do love black pepper. Never been a fan of white pepper. Even when it calls for it in dishes, I put my black pepper in. Anything you would add now, this is the time you would add it. Your mushrooms, your seafood, your asparagus, different items. Now I'm going to put a handful of cheese in here. I'm going to throw some parsley in. Nice and creamy. Okay, that's looking good. Excellent. Wow. Alright, so let's show you what it should do. Okay, now this is really hot, so it's not going to form, but you'll notice— I always never remember to put this— you'll notice how it is sitting up on the plate. Okay, it's not running. It's not flattening out. It's got some substance to it. That's what you want when you make risotto. Thank you, Elena. Thank you, Coach. Loretta has said adding butter or other fat in Italian, mantecare il risotto. Grazie, Loretta. Grazie. I'm always happy to learn authentic facts about foods that I love because for the most part, you know, it's trial and error for me and trying to remember all the things that I learned along my culinary journey. And sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not. Sometimes those facts are so far back I can't get them. But again, remember, cooking is about— is about what you enjoy. Cooking about is what you like to eat, ingredients that you like to eat, and making it a way to make it your own. Recipes are guidelines. Recipes are great to follow, and, you know, maybe the first time you want to make it exactly like it says. But once you learn your way around, and once you start to enjoy cooking and start to see all the different things you can do with that one dish, then you can start having some fun. Making it your own. And just like I said, use that recipe as a guideline and enjoy your food and have a great time around your kitchen table. So thanks so much for coming to me. Sending— I hope everyone sends best wishes to Susan getting ready for her move. And I will see you next Monday around my kitchen table. Bye-bye.