The specialty of Italian cuisine is the ability to turn simple products into culinary masterpieces. From the pasta and rice here they prepare absolutely unique dishes known all over the world. Risotto is one of such dishes. It is based on rice, but thanks to the special technology of cooking risotto is very different from rice dishes that are made in other countries. Risotto is even tastier if chicken, mushrooms and vegetables are added to rice. Especially well with pumpkin risotto, which, among other things, is a very useful product. It not only gives the risotto unique flavors, but also makes its color bright and even more appetizing.
Cooking Features
In order to cook from porridge and pumpkin, not porridge, namely risotto, you need to know a few secrets of Italian chefs and follow a number of important, but quite simple rules.
- For risotto, not any rice is suitable, but only one that contains a lot of starch. This is usually round grain rice. So you can use ordinary Krasnodar rice, although ideally for risotto you need to take Italian rice from one of such varieties as vialone nano, carnaroli, arborio. They are available to the domestic buyer, as a number of companies import them into our country.
- It is not enough to choose a high-starch rice variety. To prepare a tasty and beautiful risotto, it is important to preserve this starch in rice grains. This will help you two secrets. First, never rinse the rice before cooking. Secondly, in the first stage of cooking, fry the rice until it changes its color.
- Despite the fact that the starch in rice is necessary for making risotto, as a rule, there is a desire to interrupt the starchy taste with something. Italians use white dry wine for this purpose, which is added at the second stage of preparation, that is, immediately after the rice is fried. It will not affect the consistency of the finished dish, so you can do without wine. But nevertheless wine gives a certain taste of risotto, therefore in those cases when this ingredient is indicated in the recipe, it is better not to exclude it.
- The pumpkin is cooked for quite a long time, so it should be baked, roasted or boiled before you start roasting the rice.
- Pumpkin risotto will taste better if you give it a creamy taste. Cheese, cream, butter help to cope with this task. They are added at the last stage of cooking or even when it is ready, that is, just before removing it from the stove.
- Prepare a risotto in a deep cast iron skillet with a thick bottom. If you do not have such a frying pan, you can replace it with a frying pan of a different material, but always thick-bottomed. In extreme cases, use a cauldron. In the crock-pot risotto with pumpkin, it also turns out delicious.
Any hostess can cook a pumpkin risotto in her kitchen. The main thing - to choose a recipe and cook in accordance with the instructions given in it.
Recipe for Pumpkin Risotto
Composition:
- rice - 0, 2 kg;
- pumpkin (pulp) - 0, 4 kg;
- onions - 75 g;
- garlic - 2 cloves;
- dry white wine - 100 ml;
- vegetable broth - 0, 5 l;
- butter - 40 g;
- Parmesan cheese - 50 g;
- olive oil - as required;
- salt - to taste.
Method of preparation:
- Wash pumpkin, peel off, remove seeds. Cut pumpkin pulp into small cubes (about 1 cm in size). Divide the pumpkin pieces into two approximately equal parts.
- Grease a sheet of foil with vegetable oil, fold half of the pumpkin pieces into it, sprinkle liberally with water, wrap and place on a baking sheet.
- Preheat the oven, put a pan with pumpkin in it. Bake it for 20 minutes at a temperature of 180-200 degrees. Then remove, cool, fold into a bowl blender and turn into mashed potatoes.
- Cut the garlic cloves into several pieces.
- Heat olive oil in a pan, put garlic pieces into it, fry them for 5 minutes and remove from oil.
- Put the remaining pumpkin in the pan. Cook it over low heat until soft and lightly browned.
- Peel and chop the onion into small pieces.
- Heat a new batch of butter in a clean pan, put the onion in it and fry it over low heat.
- When the onions become transparent, pour rice into the pan. Fry it for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. For this, a blade with a hole in the middle, through which rice can freely pass, is best suited.
- Pour the wine into the rice pan. Continuing to stir the rice, wait until the alcoholic beverage is completely or almost completely evaporated.
- Add pumpkin puree to rice, cook rice with it for about 5 minutes. If the mashed potatoes turned out to be too thick, pre-dilute it with broth. As a result, the mashed potatoes should resemble a very thick cream by consistency.
- Pour 100-150 ml of broth to the rice. Continue stirring the dish until the rice absorbs all the broth. Only after that enter a new portion of the liquid, not more than the previous one. So, continue cooking risotto until broth is over.
- Try the dish and salt it if necessary. Salt can only be at the end, as salty broth is added to the dish before it. If you add salt immediately, then there is a risk to over-salt the dish.
- Put pumpkin cubes in a pan with risotto, stir, hold the risotto on the fire, stirring, for a few more minutes.
- Finely rub the cheese. Together with butter, cut into thin slices, enter it into the risotto. Stir the dish and remove the pan from the heat.
- Let the risotto stand for literally 10 minutes and arrange it on plates. If desired, the dish before serving can be sprinkled with fresh herbs, pre-chopped it with a knife.
Risotto with a pumpkin must be eaten not just hot, but freshly prepared. It is impossible to warm this dish, as rice starts to stick together. Cold it will not be so tasty.
If it seems to you that the rice in the risotto is not a little fresh, do not be confused by this fact - it should be like this: the rice in the risotto is brought to the state of al dente, it should not soften too much, since you do not cook porridge.
Pumpkin risotto is a hearty and very tasty dish. At the same time it is also useful, as it combines the beneficial properties of rice and pumpkin, it does not have too high caloric content. Despite the fact that risotto with pumpkin belongs to Italian cuisine, its taste is close and understandable to our compatriots, because pumpkin dishes are also present in large quantities in our kitchen.
