How to Make Tuscan Risotto

Video Transcript

"ANNE MOONEY: I'm Anne Mooney. I'm a personal chef in Orlando and Winter Park, Florida. I'm here today on behalf of Expert Village to talk about risotto. We've talked about the way to make a basic risotto with white wine and olive oil and shallots and rice and so on. Well, if you don't have any white wine around, you can also use red wine. And we came up with a risotto that uses about the same ingredients as coq au vin, and so we're going to call it "Coq Au Vin Risotto." Now, the ingredients, we start with the risotto rice, and the ingredients in a classic coq au vin are ham or bacon, chicken, obviously, sauteed mushrooms and little pearl onions. So we're going to add these one at a time to our risotto. And as it cooks, we're going to add red wine to it, and it will make it turn the most beautiful color. You'll see in just a minute once the rice begins to absorb that wine. Now, I've cooked the chicken and sauteed the mushroom. Everything else can just cook along with the risotto. And if you don't happen to have pearl onions, I have these frozen. Now, they've thawed but they were frozen. If you don't happen to have these, you can just use some plain old chopped onions as long as you have the flavor. You may also want to add some garlic and you may also want to add some Italian sausage if you have some on hand. I'm using the traditional ham and chicken. So we'll put those in and we'll put in our onions and stir those up. There, now, you can see that beautiful red-wine color. Let me just put this over here. Oh, I wish you could smell it. It just smells delicious. And we'll garnish it with a little parsley. And there we are: "Coq Au Vin Risotto.""