Over the past 20 years, risotto has been a constant dish in my life, a recurring milestone in appreciation and flavour. But what I’ve learnt recently has changed the way I cook this Italian favourite forever. Here are my risotto game-changers.

It’s not all about the cheese

Growing up, a risotto loaded with chicken livers was my personal favourite of my mother’s eight-dish repertoire. Sure, it was a risotto so dry it was almost a pilaf, but the addition of lots of parmesan – shaken from a strange-smelling cardboard container – helped make it delicious. After leaving home, I’d often attempt to make it, but it always seemed a gluggy disappointment when compared to the ease of cooking the perfect bowl of pasta. I would only learn how to avoid this 25 years later.

I’ve discovered the success of this dish depends, at least in part, on the cheese – parmesan stirred vigorously with cold butter at the end of cooking, perhaps with gems of milky goat’s cheese folded in. But it isn’t everything.

It’s not all about the stock

It was 20 years ago, during a food festival masterclass held by Italy’s great chef Gualtiero Marchesi, that risotto started to make sense to me. It was here that I first heard his theory that risotto was all about the rice rather than the ingredients that flavoured it. He eschewed using a good chicken stock (as the cookbooks of the era compelled), instead recommending nothing more than salted water. Why? You want to taste the flavour of the rice, not the stock. 

It is about the type of rice…

It was a one-stir risotto at that very same food festival that made it into my first book in 2012. It can be made with the simplest stock or just salted water, but the secret is to use a higher starch-quantity rice like vialone nano or carnaroli. The extra gelatinised starch brings the texture, which means that creating that signature ooze and creaminess is far easier when you vigorously stir in your cold butter and grated parmesan, knocking the surface starch off the rice. 

…But also about your timing

The other secret is to stir the risotto at exactly the right time – when it’s past chalky but still has a little bite. This is when the starch at the centre of an under-cooked grain of rice splits into three smaller white points. You can see this transition by pressing grains against the back of a wooden spoon with your thumb.

Of course, when you’re toasting your grains, it’s as important to ensure all the rice cooks evenly and consistently by stirring it to avoid hotter spots in the pan, and adding warmed stock. Cold stock can shock the rice where you pour it in, slowing down the cooking of that particular patch of rice. At least, that’s the theory.

It’s not really the “death dish”

By the time I was on MasterChef, my own days of gluggy risotto were thankfully behind me. But after a number of risotto missteps by contestants – such as a savoury strawberry risotto in season one and a number of other risottos that failed dismally – I dubbed risotto the show’s “death dish”. It was a name that stuck, as it claimed a number of promising cooks both on MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules. 

Risotto seems to sense fear and then misbehave accordingly, but at its heart, good risotto boiled down to two things: cooking the rice for the right amount of time and using a high-starch rice (or adding lots of butter and parmesan to fake the creaminess). The new rule of risotto below, however, will eliminate one of these.

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The bold new risotto idea

US recipe writer J. Kenji López-Alt – one of my all-time favourite gastronauts – has thrown the whole risotto process into chaos by asking one simple question: should you wash, or not wash, the rice before toasting it in the pan prior to adding wine and then the hot stock?

Some recipes call for the rice to be rinsed before cooking. Others argue that you should leave the starch dust on the rice to help make the risotto creamy. However, López-Alt explains that the rice’s surface starches are denatured during the toasting process that starts all good risottos in the pan, which means they add next to no creamy/starchy benefit to the finished product. Instead, he suggests, why not rinse the rice and then keep the leftover starchy water to add back into the risotto at the end of cooking to make it extra creamy? 

It’s a genius idea…if it works. So, I had to test it.

In my first attempt, I rinse the rice (just a bog-standard supermarket arborio) in water – about a cup of water for each cup of rice – several times. The water gets starchier each time. I add this water to the rice when the rice is almost done. And yes, it makes it much creamier.

I tried it again by rinsing the rice in some stock instead. This adds even more flavour and the same creamy boost, so I can afford to add even less parmesan and butter for the same oozy result. This won’t please the dairy farmers of Italy’s famed Emilia-Romagna region, now that the same creamy outcome can be had for a few dollars less. 

It’s rare to get a tip that changes how you cook a classic you’ve been perfecting for 20 years. López-Alt’s risotto trick is one such gem.

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