“Rice, say the Italians, is born in water and dies in wine”
This is a perfect summer meal. The ultimate, light, comfort food topped with fresh grilled fish, all seasoned with top quality fleur de sel and organic sprigs of rosemary.
I don’t use a recipe for risotto when I just make it for myself. This was not meant to be the word’s greatest risotto, but in true Italian fashion, it was meant to be simple, filling, and delicious. I know a risotto is delicate and can only handle a certain number of ingredients and flavours – it’s not a stir-fry where you just throw in whatever you have. I like a simple flavouring of garlic and mushrooms + one herb, in this case rosemary. I also had sage and lemon balm but sage I would probably have had to chop, and lemon balm I was worried would make it too acidic. I think the lemon would have been tasty for another time, though, especially with the fish, but it just wasn’t the flavour I was going for that evening.
So here was my easy risotto strategy, a far cry from tradition, but also a far cry from being hit over the head with a rolling pin by an Italian Grandmother:
Ingredients:
2 cups basmati rice*
2 tbsp garlic scapes pesto (just puréed garlic scapes with oil and salt)
1 small white onion or shallot (optional)
1 large package of oyster mushrooms, roughly chopped**
The dregs (about 1/3 cup) of a bottle of dry white table wine (Quebec’s own ‘Orpailleur’)
some (about 1/2 cup) sweet pho’ ga broth (leftover from some Vietnamese chicken soup)
4 cups water***
a few whole sprigs rosemary (or sage, or basil, or parsley, etc., chopped)
Some small silver fish (4-12, depending on the size), like mackerel, sardines, or sea smelt****
*I know! It’s not arborio. I just wrote an article on rice for Spezzatino magazine, so trust me, I know ALL about rice, and why I shouldn’t have used basmati here. Basically the basmati doesn’t break down into starch like arborio, vialone nano, or carnaroli, but it’s what I had, so I combined my Indian and Italian rice-making skills with good results.
**cremini work fine, but “fancy” recipes will specify porcini or shiitake for flavour. Chanterelles would be spectacular, but I went to Kim Phat, the big Asian specialty store on Cote-des-Neiges, known to be the best in the city, and got ridiculously well-priced oyster mushrooms. Everything’s just marked “fruit/vegetable”, though (even some of the meats and fish!!), so you’ve got to know your produce. There were a whole lot of things that actually were vegetables that even with a sign giving their names, I had no idea what they were. Radish? Turnip? Cucumber? Sweet? Sour? Who knows.
***I would normally use vegetable or chicken broth here but I tasted the garlic scapes and onion mixture after it had cooked for awhile, and I thought it was plenty salty for the risotto. I also didn’t want to overpower the mushrooms with a lot of sodium. Next time I think I’d go 2 cups broth, 2 cups water.
****If you want to be unsustainable, you can use tilapia or sole, but you should probably hate yourself for it. If the first three fish I listed smell fishy, they’re not fresh. The stereotypes around them are unfair. They’re also VERY affordable. Honestly, I got 12 sea smelts for $1.20. That is ridiculous. At Kim Phat you need to be very careful, but if you choose wisely, you can get very good quality, very well-priced fish. Avoid the shark…
Directions:
It’s weird heating a big pot over medium heat with nothing in it. When I added the garlic scape purée once the pot was hot, I thought everything was going to burn. I stirred, though, and it was all fine. The oil in the scapes did its job and made everything not stick. Then I added the onions and stirred to coat those in the oil too.
Yes! Made it! 5 minutes of light stirring later, I added the chopped mushrooms. You don’t want big pieces or they won’t cook evenly, but you don’t need to be too particular about the size, as long as the pieces are roughly the same.
Now the mushrooms should cook for a good 5-7 minutes to let the moisture evaporate out of them. The pot should be getting a bit dry, but nothing should be browning too much. Now you add the rice and stir it to coat in all the juices and oil for about 30-45 seconds. I had actually washed my rice Indian-style to get the starch off of it. I’d then let it soak in some cold water for about 15 minutes while the rest of the dish was cooking to this point. So I had to drain the rice and then actually let it cook for about 2 minutes to get all the water out of it. I don’t really know why I soaked it for so long. I mean, the point of that is to keep the grains separate when they cook up, but for risotto they need to kind of stick together. I suppose it was the Indian in me. Maybe in my little toe.
You have to get all the water out so that when you add the wine there’s a big cooking sound-effect: A big whoosh of deglazing aural beauty. You want the wine to boil, so you may need to up the heat to medium-high for a minute, and then turn it down to medium-low to simmer once the wine is added.
Now there’s the labour-intensive way to do this or the not-so-labour-intensive way. Traditionally, you keep the rest of your liquid, about 6-7 cups of broth or water or a mixture of both, in a saucepan on medium heat. Then you add it 1/2 a cup at a time, stirring after each addition, until most of the liquid is evaporated. Then you add the next 1/2 cup. Repeat until all the liquid is used or the rice is tender. By keeping it hot this way you don’t need to wait for it to heat up every time you add some to the rice for it to be absorbed. Adding it bit by bit feeds the rice slowly, which is what it needs to become perfectly al dente, yet creamy without becoming mushy from drowning. I figured that since I was using basmati rice, I wasn’t going to get the perfect texture anyway, so I just added the 4 cups of liquid and the sprigs of rosemary at once, brought the pot to a boil, covered it and reduced the heat to VERY low (like my Indian basmati recipes say to do) for 18 minutes (normally it’s 20, but the rice had already cooked a bit in the wine and onions).
After 20 minutes I kept following my Indian rice recipe and removed the lid, fluffed the risotto, and recovered for another 5 minutes (up to 10 if there’s a lot of liquid). If it looks dry, you can add a little more liquid, but not too much, since basmati will get mushy quickly. Gelatinous rice is not delicious when it’s supposed to be risotto.
During the first 18 minute cooking time I’d rinsed my fish, dried them, and sprinkled them with fleur de sel. That’s just a fancy name for a specific type of large-crystal salt from France. Maldon salt, kosher sea salt, anything big (not pickling salt) all work fine. Fleur de sel is supposed to have a more delicate salty flavour. I just like it because you don’t need to use a lot of it to get a lot of flavour. It’s really popular here in Montreal (it is French, after all) so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Each crystal breaks apart into a luxurious mouthful of flavour. It feels like a guilty pleasure, like I shouldn’t be eating that much salt, but it’s really not very much since the flavour is so intense. I better like it, because my small container of it will last a long time.
That’s honestly all I put on the fish. I was just going to put them on the grill, so it didn’t need any oil. You can use a pastry brush to coat your grill in oil (not the fish, the grill), but with my indoor grill I don’t it.
During the second rice-cooking time (5 minutes) I added the fish to my pre-heated grill. It took a few batches, but the first one was the one I needed to line up time-wise with the risotto. The nice thing about risotto, too, is that you can leave it covered for a little while on a different stove burner (a cold one, not one that still has heat coming from it) and it won’t burn on you, unless there really isn’t enough liquid in there. Anyway, the fish grilled in about 5 minutes. The sea smelts I used were very small so they didn’t need a lot of time. When they were browned on the outside, they were done. I bit into one, the skin was opaque, not transluscent, but it wasn’t too chewy or over-cooked. That means done to me. You just need to be careful of the vertebrae. If you bite carefully you can bite around it and then remove it without much fuss. If you try to break it, though, it gets trickier and messier.
Big scoop of risotto, a few sea smelts, maybe three crystals of salt, and a sprig of rosemary to garnish.
Summer…mmm…
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