Who says homemade stock must be laborious? In this recipe, it’s nothing more than quickly simmered trimmings from the main ingredient. Particularly when you’re making a risotto from delicate ingredients, a “properly made” stock (meaning one you might use for a soup or sauce base) would be overpowering.
6 SERVINGS
1¼ |
pounds thin asparagus |
1 |
onion, minced (trimmings reserved) |
¼ |
pound shell-on medium shrimp |
9 |
cups water |
4 |
tablespoons (½ stick) butter |
2 |
cups risotto rice (preferably Arborio, Carnaroli or Vialone Nano) |
½ |
cup dry white wine |
|
Salt |
3 |
tablespoons freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano |
¼ |
cup snipped fresh chives |
Cut off the bottom 1 to 1½ inches of the asparagus spears. Thinly slice the bottoms and add them to a large saucepan along with the trimmings from the onion. Shell the shrimp and add the shells to the saucepan. Cover with the water and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to a bare simmer and cook for at least 30 minutes to make a mild stock before beginning the risotto.
Cut away the very tips of the asparagus and reserve them. Chop the shrimp into ½-inch pieces and add them to the reserved asparagus tips. Slice the remaining parts of the asparagus into ¼-inch rounds.
Place the asparagus rounds, 3 tablespoons of the butter and the minced onion in a large skillet over medium heat. Cook until the onion softens but does not turn color, about 5 minutes.
Add the rice and cook, stirring constantly, until all the kernels are opaque, about 5 minutes. Add the wine and stir until it evaporates. Ladle approximately 1½ cups of the simmering stock through a strainer into the rice and cook, stirring, until it evaporates. When the bottom of the pan is almost dry, add another ½ to ¾ cup stock and cook, stirring, until it evaporates.
Keep cooking this way, adding more stock as needed, until the rice begins to swell and become tender. Stir in 1½ teaspoons salt and the reserved chopped shrimp and asparagus tips. Continue cooking until the rice kernels are swollen and completely tender. Do not cook the mixture dry; the final texture should be somewhat soupy with slightly thickened liquid. This will take about 17 minutes in all.
Remove the skillet from the heat and add the remaining 1 tablespoon butter, the Parmigiano-Reggiano and the chives. Vigorously stir these into the risotto. The liquid will thicken even more. Taste and add more salt, if desired. Spoon into hot, shallow bowls and serve immediately.
Much is made about making risotto, but essentially the dish is very simple: rice, main ingredient and stock. Add a flavoring base to start things out, a little wine in the middle and some butter and cheese to finish, and you’ve covered just about every possibility. But risotto’s simplicity also makes demands.
You have to use the right rice—Arborio, Carnaroli and Vialone Nano are the ones most available in the United States—to get the distinctive creaminess. There are slight differences in the textures of these varieties, but not in taste. What makes them perfect for risotto is the way they are built. Like all rices, they are made primarily of starch: amylopectin and amylose. Amylopectin is a soft starch that dissolves readily in liquid; amylose is a hard starch that resists dissolving. Risotto rices contain far more amylopectin than most rices, although not as much as sticky Japanese sushi rice. When they are cooked properly, the soft starch leaks out and thickens the stock, forming what my friend the food and wine writer Matt Kramer calls “the sauce within.” Generally, Arborio and Carnaroli, which are graded superfine, are a little higher in amylose (though certainly not nearly as high as long-grain rice). Therefore, they remain a little firmer, although they also tend to be a little stickier (particularly Arborio). Vialone Nano, which is fine, is a little softer and thickens the stock a little less, making it perfect for the slightly soupier style of risotto preferred in Venice. (Locals refer to that texture as all’enda, meaning it moves “like a wave.”)
More important than which specific type of rice you use is the technique and the balance of ingredients. With risotto, the rice is the thing, and you don’t want to overshadow it. One of the most common mistakes people make when fixing risotto is in the choice of liquid they add. Partly this is a misunderstanding of terms: Americans tend to use the words “broth” and “stock” interchangeably, but an Italian brede is much lighter in flavor than what we normally think of. Make risotto with a French-style stock, and stock is all you will taste. It would be better to use plain water. Although a good homemade stock will certainly make an exquisite risotto, you can do amazingly well with store-bought chicken broth thinned with water (do not use it straight). If you have trimmings from the main ingredient —say, asparagus peels, pea pods or shrimp shells—simmer them in the broth to add more flavor.
The making of risotto can be broken into four stages. An Italian cook I worked with gave them the names of the appropriate infinitive verbs, making a recitation sound like one of Dante’s cantos: soffriggere, tostare, bagnare, mantecare (the four circles of risotto). This is much more impressive in Italian than in English. It really only describes four very basic operations: creating the flavor base (soffriggere, “to softly fry”), toasting the rice (tostare, “to toast”), cooking the rice (bagnare, “to bathe”) and beating in the final addition of butter and cheese (mantecare, “to beat in fat”—what a joyous language to have a specific word for that).
We’ll take one step at a time. All risottos start with some kind of flavor base, frequently nothing more than onions and butter or olive oil melted together over medium-low heat. You can add firm vegetables such as artichokes or the fat parts of asparagus at this point as well. Cook just until the ingredients start to shine. Do not let the onions brown.
Add the rice and stir to coat it with the flavoring base. Increase the heat to medium and keep stirring until you hear the rice “singing” as it scrapes against the bottom of the pan. This step sets the outer shell of the rice (mainly amylose) so that it will stay firm and won’t get too mushy. You can actually see this happening: the outer perimeter of the kernel will turn translucent.
The first measure of liquid you add should almost always be wine. It doesn’t take very much, but you do need to have some degree of tartness in the background (especially considering all that mantecazione you’re going to be doing at the end). The wine will cook away in just a couple of minutes. Now begin adding the stock. The stock must be kept at a simmer the whole time. Adding cold stock to the rice or not keeping your risotto pan at a high enough temperature will delay the cooking and result in a gummy risotto. The first addition of the stock can be as much as 1 cup or even a little more. After you’ve given it a quick stir to distribute the rice, you don’t really need to stir it again until the stock is almost gone. Add more stock when you can see a clean track in the bottom of the pan when you stir. With the second addition, reduce the amount of stock just a little. Again, once you’ve stirred the rice, you don’t need to pay too much attention. When you can see a clean track in the bottom of the pan, it’s time for the third addition. This is where you need to start paying attention. Add ¼ to ¾ cup of stock and when that is almost gone, taste the rice. A properly made risotto will be slightly chewy rather than mushy, but there should be absolutely no crunchy uncooked starch left in the kernel. Right before you stir in that third addition is also the time to add any delicate, quickly cooked ingredients, such as asparagus tips, fresh herbs, shellfish or ingredients that may have been cooked in advance. When the rice is tender but still a little chewy, the risotto is almost done—but not quite. Add just enough stock to loosen the rice, then cook it just long enough to make it creamy.
Now you beat in the fat. This should be done off the heat to form a smooth emulsion that won’t break apart. And it should be done vigorously—not only are you beating in the fat, but you’re also bruising the rice kernels, squeezing out the last bit of starch and finishing the thickening.
Finally, risotto must be served immediately and in hot bowls. This is not a nicety but a necessity—a cold bowl or too long a wait will cool the risotto and set the starch, making the dish heavy and gummy.