Risotto Cooking Class Montreal: Seafood Risotto and Wild Mushroom Risotto

Slowly. Stir. Breathe. Stir.

Blending hot stock into wine, letting the starch create a thick sauce as you coax it from the grains, making sure the bottom doesn’t stick. This isn’t Korean bibimbap. This isn’t Indian biryani. This isn’t Chinese congee.

There’s nothing like this, nothing else that makes you truly believe that rice is born in water and dies in wine.*

Subscribe to its gospel.

You can’t rush risotto. It’s long food. Every recipe says a riotto cookd in 15-20 minutes but I’ve yet to have one cook in under 25 thanks to a cold kitchen that sucks the heat from the pot like joy from your spirit during a Montreal winter. Vitamin D3 and Vitamin Sunshine are powerful in the face of it. But what we in cold climates have in abundance is patience. Why else would we not run from the cold? I hear Peru is lovely this time of year…Thailand, Vietnam. Bali, Java—take your pick.

But when you’re stirring this pot, surrounded by good people, salivating over the meal to come, the world makes just a little more sense.

I made this for a risotto cooking class I gave just before Christmas. We did two traditional risotto recipes: the first, seafood risotto with lobster, scallops and fresh calamari.

The second, wild mushrooms with raw sheep’s milk Manchego cheese. Seafood risotto isn’t usually served with cheese, as per the Italian tradition of keeping seafood and dairy separate, but don’t tell that to the Milanese who believe everything goes with butter. The wild mushroom risotto, however, is fair game for all.

Both recipes were adapted from Bonnie Stern’s HeartSmart: The Best of HeartSmart Cooking. In the class, participants learned to clean squid tubes (never frozen, only fresh), avoiding the black ink (or saving it for coveted squid ink pasta nero if desired), not overcook the seafood, and stir just fast enough to prevent sticking but also prevent too much evaporation of the stock.

The wild mushroom risotto was a lightened-up winter comfort food favourite with dried porcini, shiitake, and other named mushrooms (the package was a gift from Germany and my German is surprisingly bad considering my excellent highschool German teacher (“English is a bastardized language!”). The Manchego—a gentle sprinkling added after cooking to a perfect al dente—remained unpasteurized, and the taste and salt weren’t lost to the heat. The trick? Dry white wine. Unoaked. Clean. Good enough to drink, and you should drink a glass with it—it’s the perfect pairing.

You should cook risotto. You should take my risotto cooking class so you learn to do it correctly.

But I’m running. A woman at the Mile End epicerie asked me today why my fingers were blue.

“They just are,” I said. “Always.”

“What about hot water? Can you fix it? How do you fix it?”

“You go to Thailand,” I said.

And that’s what I’ll do in just over a week. I’m running away from risotto and winter comfort, much as I romanticize both. Hypocrisy taste delicious—like mangosteens fresh from the tree. Like papaya smoothies. Like bitter cresses, sour limes, numbing peppers, and salty shrimp.

Like adventure. Like escape. Even if there’s a part of you that feels it’s finally strong enough to stay, that wants a reason to stay, that just can’t find one yet.

 

*Quote from the great book, “Much Depends on Dinner.”