What I Learned Today

Risotto is such a delicious, savory treat; it’s one of my favorite things to order at Italian restaurants. I’d gotten the impression, though, that it was somehow hard to make at home (and apparently I’m not alone). I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, in fact, risotto is very easy to make. The only downside is that you’ve got to stand at the stove for ~25 minutes, stirring and stirring, as you coax the rice grains into absorbing surprising amounts of your favorite broth. But regular rice takes about as long to cook (albeit without continual tending), and really, stirring is pretty low on the technical cooking skill difficulty scale.

At any rate, while cooking some risotto tonight (for the second time ever, and the first time without an explicit recipe), I found myself wondering at some of the common Risotto Rules. Why is it that you are instructed to add “one cup of broth at a time” (in some cases, “one-half cup of broth at a time”), rather than just throwing all of the broth in at once? And why is it important to saute the rice in oil before adding the broth? Technique aside, how and why does my arborio rice do that super-absorbent trick to turn into risotto?

I pulled my trusty copy of “What Einstein Told His Cook 2” off the shelf and found the following excerpt:

In recent years, several specialty rices have become popular in the United States. One is the traditional Italian arborio rice, a particularly absorptive medium-grain variety. It is rich in amylopectin starch, the branched, bushy molecules of which trap and absorb water quite readily. Arborio rice will easily absorb three times its own volume of stock or broth, making it ideal for risotto.

Most recipes I’ve seen actually have you supply the rice with 4-5 times its volume of broth, which is pretty impressive.

I found even more explanatory details from an HGTV article on risotto, including:

Sauteing rice in butter or oil creates a shell around each grain, allowing the grain to slowly absorb moisture. This will result in creamy risotto, where each grain maintains its own shape.

And how does the rice produce “its own sauce”, as advertised on my package of arborio rice? It’s the high starch content, which when brushed off the rice grains (during stirring) and mixed with broth creates a thick, creamy sauce.

As for the “one cup at a time” instruction, I pondered it while stirring and stirring and finally decided that the only possible difference it could make is in terms of the evaporation rate of the broth. Less un-absorbed broth at once means less lost to evaporation. If google is any guide, the consensus is with me on this one. (However, I did break the rule about having the broth heated before adding it to the mix. Too much work. I just added less at a time, and the resulting risotto seems not to have suffered a bit.)

Tonight I wanted to try a new recipe, but I didn’t have a whole lot of raw materials on hand. I scrounged around and found this recipe:

Potato Frittata (serves about two people)

1. Peel two potatoes and slice thinly. Boil 8-10 minutes in salted water.
2. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 375 F.
3. Also meanwhile, cut up some veggies and saute them in olive oil. The recipe suggested an onion, but all I had was a bell pepper, which turned out just fine.
4. Beat three eggs in a medium bowl.
5. Drain potatoes and add to eggs. Add veggies. Add ~1 tbsp of grated Parmesan cheese (or other cheese). You could probably throw in some spices here, too (rosemary? basil?), although it didn’t occur to me until it was too late. Mix together and pour into a greased 9-inch round baking dish (I’m sure that the shape isn’t critical).
6. The recipe said to bake for 12-15 minutes or “until golden brown”. It took 25 minutes to reach this stage, so my advice is to keep an eye on it and wait for the golden-brown-ness.
7. Enjoy! Filling and tasty!

   (From The Little Big Vegetarian Book.)

Last night, I decided to try a new recipe for dinner with a friend: Chutney-Filled Chicken and Pastry Bundles. As expected from the name, the recipe calls for chutney. I’ve never cooked with chutney before, but I found a couple of jars of it in the store and settled on some Pear-Cardamom Chutney that claimed to go well with chicken. Imagine my surprise when I got home and started the recipe, only to encounter this instruction:

Snip chutney.

Snip the chutney? How do you snip a sauce-like substance? My friend and I wondered if chutney were also some kind of snippable herb, like parsley or cilantro, and maybe I’d just picked up entirely the wrong thing. We decided to go for it anyway (did I mention that it claimed to go well with chicken?). While I continued to cook, she went and got “What Einstein Told His Cook” off my shelf. No mention of chutney, snippable or not. She then checked “What Einstein Told His Cook 2”. No luck. I mentioned that we could just google for it, but by then we were nearly done cooking and the chicken-stuffing mixture with the pear-cardamom chutney had passed several initial taste tests as is. In fact, 30 minutes of baking later, the result was absolutely delicious (I’d cook it again!), so it no longer mattered.

But that didn’t really resolve the question, so this morning I googled “chutney” to find out if it were some kind of herb. No luck there, but I found the solution when I googled “snip chutney”:

“Snipping” is a common instruction in recipes involving chutney. Since chutneys often include chunks of fruit, snipping is recommended to cut up the larger pieces of fruit.

So I did have the right ingredient, and the book wasn’t wrong, and we made the recipe correctly (the only chunky pieces in this chutney were raisins, and they were just fine full-size). And guess what: it went well with chicken!

I received a great book, “What Einstein Told His Cook 2”, for Christmas. (I’d previously read, and enjoyed, the first book.) This is a book about food and cooking, written by a chemistry professor. I hardly need say more about why it’s an engaging read, but I will anyway. I would much rather approach cooking from the science side, where there are rules and reasons and determinism, than from the art side, where there is chaos and personal taste and approximation. These books explain the whys and hows behind common kitchen practices, very sensibly, very educationally.

Therefore, I ended up finding the section on alcohol and various drinks to be enthralling, even though I don’t drink and expected it to be pretty much irrelevant. One tidbit I took away from the chapter was an explanation for why beer always comes in (opaque) cans or dark brown bottles:

Hops are an essential ingredient in beer, and not only for the aroma and bitterness. They clarify the beer by precipitating the proteins in the wort, and they have antibiotic properties that help preserve the beer. Among the more than 150 chemical compounds that have been identified in their essential oil are chemicals (terpenes) called isohumulomes, which are light-sensitive. When struck by either visible or ultra-violet light, they break down into very active free radicals that react with sulfur in beer’s proteins to produce smelly compounds called skunky thiols, which the human senses of taste and smell are able to detect at levels of a few parts per trillion. […] Beer that has been exposed to light for as little as 20 minutes reputedly can develop a “skunky” taste. That’s why beer is packaged either in cans or in light-proof brown bottles.

It had never occurred to me to wonder why beer doesn’t come in clear plastic or glass bottles, like soda. Now I know!