Tips and Tricks for a Perfect Risotto

Risotto! Who doesn't love it? For some reason, risotto has a reputation of being time-consuming to cook and you will ruin it if your broth is lukewarm or if you leave the stove, even just to pick up the phone.

It really is not like that.

I made risotto for my first time about a year ago. I used long-grain rice, knowing that it would be a challenge, but otherwise went with a recipe similar to this one. The result was a taupe purple-gray, and took about 1.5 hours and sink full of dishes to complete. It tasted okay, but was not worth the effort.

Serendipitously, it was not long after that failed experiment that I met my boyfriend Matt. Matt is ridiculously good at making rice dishes. I still have not tried his paella, but if it is anything like his risotto, then I am one lucky girl.

Here are Matt's risotto tips! Although he made the risotto you see in the photos, he walked me through my own risotto just a few weeks ago. The worst thing about my second risotto ever was that it was a little too buttery.  And honestly, when that is the worst part of your meal... the situation cannot be half bad.

Our caramelized pear & bleu cheese risotto:

I am not providing a recipe here, just to be clear! We bought special short grain rice and blue cheese for this particular risotto, just because we were bringing it to a potluck, but all you really need is any rice (preferably short grain), a little veg like onion, and cheese (although vegans are free to say and do otherwise).

Tip #1: Risotto is an elegant way to clean out the fridge.

The Ingredients. Nescafe is not one of them.

Invited a hot date to your place for dinner tonight? But you don't have anything to cook, just rice! And an onion, half a zucchini, and some parmesan cheese. Oh, and that leftover brie cheese you had with that bottle of wine yesterday. And butter and olive oil, of course. Guess what you are making.

Tip #2: Get into a homemade broth habit.

What I mean by this is to start making your own broth. All you have to do is save all your vegetable clippings in a container in the fridge or freeze- onion skins, zucchini ends, lettuce stubs, overly dry herbs, anything like that. You can even add hard cheese rinds. If you eat meat, you can save the carcass of a chicken dinner to make chicken stock, among many other stock and broth techniques. Vegetarian or otherwise, this is a very easy ingredient to make and the flavor is incomparable.

Homemade or not, heat your broth before you start your risotto, then set it aside. It does not need to be boiling at all times, but your risotto will cook much faster and more evenly with hotter broth.

Our broth is cloudy because we made pasta the night before, and we added a cup of starchy water to it.

Future broth.

Tip #3: Chop your onions as finely as possible.

TWICE as fine as this.

Those little guys cannot be finely chopped enough! Tiny pieces of onion will contribute wonderfully to the texture of your risotto. Matt’s brother, who lived in Italy for four years, always tells him to cut his onions smaller and smaller.

Tip #4: While sautéing your onions and/or garlic in oil, sauté the rice as well.

There is a good 1/4 cup of olive oil in this rice.

Sauté whichever vegetables you mean to cook for the entire duration of the risotto- onions, garlic, mushrooms, squashes, and some herbs should be added here. In Chile, rice is always sautéed in oil before water is added to the pot. Matt actually sautés the rice before adding the onions. In any case, let the rice absorb a good amount of oil, but do not let it brown!

Tip #5: Stirring is your first priority from here on out.

This does not mean you need to stir constantly. The most important thing is to make sure all of the rice gets an equal amount of heat, and does not even get the chance to stick together. Another thing to watch for is pieces of rice and vegetables that stick to the higher walls of your pan or pot. Make sure those get pushed back in. A figure-eight style of stirring works well.

Bear all of this in mind through the very end, and keep the rice moving as much as possible in the early stages. However, after you start adding cupfuls of broth, you can just give the risotto a good stir every minute or so, and it will be just fine.

Tip #6: Make sure all of that alcohol burns off.

Good Chilean wine is so cheap, we drink and cook with the same bottle.

Before you even start adding that broth, remember this fun step. Do not be afraid to pour plenty of white wine into the rice at this point, and do not worry about heating the wine up beforehand either. Just burn off all of the excess liquid, and the flavor will stay in harmony with the rest of the dish. Red wine is trickier due its color, as I learned via error. You can also use Chilean Pisco instead of wine, if you find it in the imports section of a liquor store. If you have been to Chile or Perú, you probably already know about this grape brandy as it is everywhere.

Pisco Alto de Carmen runs like water in Chile, and Trader Joe's has its own brand too.

(sources: Weinquelle and WineHarlots, respectively)

Tip #7: Butter has flexible timing.

You can use butter for your initial sauté, or add it for the creamy, salty taste as you go along. Make sure it does not burn. This is all we added for this risotto:

Most of the liquid in this photo is wine.

Tip #8: Add the broth one cup/ ladle/ spoonful/ splash at a time.

Whatever instrument you prefer to add broth with is fine. Stir the rice, watch it absorb the liquid, then add more broth. Try not to lose the boil- check for those bubbles. Taste it as it starts to look done. Put in just a tiny bit more broth than you think you need at the end. Your risotto will keep absorbing it after the heat is turned off.

Our starchy broth yielded an uncontrollably creamy risotto, which was still good! I would suggest using starch water in risotto, although I doubt we will try mixing starch with our broth again. They may be interchangeable as an ingredient, but they are just not that versatile when combined.

Tip #9: Add remaining ingredients and cheese at the very end.

Before turning that heat off, add any ingredients that did not need to be sautéed and cooked back in Tip #4. For us, that was the caramelized pears. Raisens, tomatoes, rosemary, and other fruit and herbs work well at this point too.

We caramelized the pears while making the rest of the risotto.

And of course: cheese! Matt believes it is never necessary to add cream to risotto- just use a creamy cheese. I am not sure to what extent this belief is founded in fact or tradition, but there it is, and I agree with it. We used roughly chopped bleu cheese in large chunks. We used a little fresh parmesan as well, but our starch-broth had already made our risotto as creamy as it needed to be.

Tip #10: Serve to your loved ones as side, or as an entrée with a nice veggie dish.

At this point we were running late for the potluck, so a pretty picture of the plated dish was out of the question. Here it is though:

Too tardy and hungry for a good photo.

It tasted incredible too, very rich. I may have had too much fun at the potluck to take any pictures, but here is a bad selfie to make up for it:

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That’s that! Feel free to comment with any other tips and tricks you know about risotto. I am not exactly the recipe-using type, but some risottos I would love to try include this sweet strawberry risotto or this fancy truffle concoction. My favorite online cooking inspiration, Thug Kitchen, even posted a vegan whole-food risotto recipe recently.

I love cooking, which is a fairly recent development in my life. The biggest thing that led me to this hobby, aside from the presence of cheap quality ingredients in Chile, was an unwillingness to view any delicious thing as "difficult," just "demanding of more attention," or something like that.