Prawn and porcini risotto – my virgin attempt at a dish that everyone seems to fear making, but it really wasn’t as tricky as I imagined it to be. In fact, it was dead easy despite the constant stirring/shaking of pan required was a little cumbersome. But hey, all in the name of good food.
I’ll write more about my experience later, but for now, I’ll leave it to the pictures to paint the thousand words for me, while I head straight to bed now.
Goodnight, one and all!
Which became…
Coming from Melbourne, the land of great Italian food outside of Italy, it would be unthinkable to not have had risotto ever. Well, yours truly has achieved the unthinkable. I’ve never had risotto before (except for a spoonful or two I stole from my dinner companions once, and it was rather forgettable anyway) until today.
Fuelled by my recent curiosity over the dish that has received a lot of attention (and flak over how it should be cooked), I took the plunge and ordered my first ever risotto during lunch today. To add some more thrill to that, it was at some untried and untested cafe that I had lunch with two girlfriends today.
I couldn’t decide what to eat and time was ticking fast; with exactly thirty minutes to place my order, wait for my food, and scoff it all down, I jumped at the safest bet – the classic mushroom and onion risotto. I barely waited five minutes before my lunch was served, and spied the mound of grains on my plate with reasonable caution (and suspicion!) as they placed it in front of me.
The verdict? If not for the fact that risotto is basically a whole plate full of CARBS (and the fact that I wasn’t exactly starving), I would’ve wolfed it all down in 10 minutes flat. With my limited knowledge of risotto, I thought it was pretty good. It was done pretty much al dente, not at all starchy, and actually very easy on the palate. It had a good balance of parmesan and white wine in it, with the tartness of the wine cutting through the creaminess of the cheese beautifully.
It was a wonderful experience, quite unforgettable in fact, and will now go down in my books as a dish to behold with great respect (because I can foresee many more risotto experiments and I’d expect gluggy ones along the way). And on that note, I recently stumbled upon a book that had a tip on how to cook risotto (I can’t remember which one though). The trick, apparently, is to shake the pan and not stir it so that it doesn’t become starchy.
So there, I’m pleased to report on my first risotto experience…and many more to come!
Epicureal Epiphanies 