How to Make Risotto Pilaf Style

Video Transcript

"ANNE MOONEY: Hi, I'm Anne Mooney. I'm a personal chef in Orlando and Winter Park, Florida. I'm also a food columnist for "Simply The Best Magazine" out of Delray Beach Florida, and today, I'm here on behalf of Expert Village to talk about risotto. It's a classic Italian dish as simple as it can be. It's nourishing and it's wonderful comfort food. And everything required for a Risotto is something that you can have on hand in your pantry, and you can have a wonderful comfort meal food for your family in just 27 minutes at the stove. So here we go. Now, we're going to talk about exactly how you make this stuff. We're going to start out with two cups of Arborio rice. This is Italian rice that's readily available at your local grocery store. You don't have to go any place special for it but the Arborio--it is important to use the Arborio rice, and you'll see why as it cooks. We're going to start out with, actually, three tablespoons of olive oil, just like that. Let that heat up. And in the olive oil, we're going to cook two tablespoons of shallots. That's what I have here. You can also use onions or garlic, depending upon your taste and also on which you have on hand. In the meantime, back here on the back of the stove, I have five cups of broth that are heating up and it's important that they be hot. I didn't have all chicken broth available to me, so I used two cans of chicken broth and one of vegetable broth, so you can use anything you have on hand. And we'll also need a little white wine. It makes everything better. So we're going to saute those shallots until they're transparent. Don't let them start to brown. And now, we're going to pour the rice into the pan and toast the rice. Be sure--make sure that the rice gets completely coated with the oil and you can see the grains begin to turn white in the center. You can see the starch beginning to coalesce in the center of the grains. So this takes about probably two minutes or so. So stir them around like that. You can up the heat a little bit. Once again, don't let anything brown. This is just to heat it up and get it started. And once you do that, then I'm going to pour in approximately a cup of white wine. None of this is exact. You can sort of do with it what you want. But what you do want the wine to do is to cover the rice. So we'll pour it in there, like so. Make sure that all of the rice is covered by the wine. And you do have to stand here for 27 minutes and stir this stuff. It's the only drawback but it's necessary. And what we're going to do right now is we're going to let that rice absorb all of the wine. It will cook until the wine--you can see it--dry up a little bit. At which point, we're going to start with the stock. Okay, this is about ready to--for us to put the stock in. So we'll start with the stock, like so, and the thing that's important now, at this stage, is that the rice be covered with at least a film of liquid. No rice should be showing on the top. You should always have liquid on top of that rice. So that will do for a start. We'll let that cook for a little bit, and we'll come back to it."