Hello and welcome to Freshly Served the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight
we’re gonna make a Mushroom Risotto which is fun. I haven’t done a risotto since the
very first show when we did squash.
And tonight we’re gonna do mushroom which is another really excellent one. Now when
you look at a recipe for risotto, you’ll often see that it calls for arboreo rice or
some other Italian style rice.
Now, most of the time I can’t find these as a brown rice they’re just the white kind
which means that the fibre and a lot of the nutrients have been removed from the rice
grain so I always like to use a brown rice and in this case you wanna use a short grain
rice.
Ok. If you use a long grain it’s not gonna absorb the liquid the same way and the starch
is not gonna come out which is the key to making the risotto creamy especially if we’re
not using any diary.
So what I’m gonna do is I put my one cup short grain brown rice in my pot here. I’ve
got the heat up to medium high and I’m just gonna heat the rice grain up before I add
any liquid.
I’ve got three cups of water heating at the back here and I’m gonna keep this just
below boiling so that as I add it to the rice it doesn’t shock cool the rice.
So that’s going there and as soon as the rice gets a little bit of heat going I’m
going to start by adding some wine as the liquid. Now while I wait for that to heat
up a little bit I can chop up my mushrooms which I’m going to soothe separately.
So I’ve got a pan back here, I normally don’t use this many dishes but because risotto
takes a long time and mushrooms take a long time to cook I’m gonna soothe them while
I do the risotto.
And as this pot heats up you wanna make sure that the rice doesn’t sit on the bottom
and burn. Most people are using oil at this stage which you can but you don’t need to.
If you don’t use any oil what happen is the rice will toast instead of fry and bring
out the flavour of the rice.
So, I’m gonna add some wine at this point because it’s nice and warm. It will sizzle
a little bit and then you want to stir the rice around and wait until it has absorbed
all of the wine. I’ve just didn’t put quite enough in there, here we go! (I’ll
finish that tomorrow, why not?)
So keep stirring this rice to make sure it absorbs the liquid and as that heats up I’ve
got a tiny bit of olive oil back there and we’ll throw the mushrooms in.
Alright! And the key to a good risotto if you haven’t done a risotto before what is
it is a creamy rice and the way it becomes creamy is the starches come out of the rice
grains into the liquid and the way it does that is by cooking it slowly, letting the
water absorb slowly and by stirring.
So as you stir the rice, the starches are going to come out so this is a fairly long
process. Now that the wine is absorbed I’ll add some water. So this is the kind of dinner
where you need to hang out in the kitchen but you can make it fun. Get some music going,
get a glass of wine going, make it fun. Ok!
And all you do, it might take a while but it’s a very simple process. As soon as the
water is absorbed you’re gonna add a little bit more and as it’s absorbing you just
wanna stir it back and forth.
Every so often, flip your mushrooms and that’s really all there is to it.
So this is the rice with the last of the water added here, you can see it’s a little bit
softer than your average rice that we would have steam and a little bit moist, it’s
looking beautiful.
Now the mushrooms on the back when they finish cooking, I’ll just added some lemon zest
and lemon juice to them, flavour them up and they’re now gonna go in with the rice. Drag
all those little mushroom bits.
I’m also going to season things with a little bit of salt and some black pepper, keep things
real simple here and the last thing I’m gonna add is some chopped fresh parsley which
adds some lovely green and also a whole ton of nutrients.
Parsley is so so nutritious more than just a garnish; it’s got loads of antioxidants,
phytonutrients in there, all of which helps to keep you healthy, fight cancer, all those
good stuff plus it makes things pretty.
So once you get everything stirred together, you’re ready to served and I’ll just get
some in a bowl here, top it with a little bit more parsley. Ready to go!
You can find the recipe for the Mushroom Risotto recipe at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m Heather
and this is Freshly Served.