- We're here to have fun and make food for people.
Hey, guys, I'm Antoni Porowski from Netflix's Queer Eye,
and I'm here to teach you how to make sartu di riso.
I learned about this recipe on a treadmill
at 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. when I was at the gym,
and I was watching one of my favorite people in the world,
Giada De Laurentiis, and she was making this.
It's actually a Neapolitano classic.
Doing 40 minutes of some kind of cardio, which is terrible,
if I'm watching a good show, an hour can go by very quickly,
and before you know it,
you've burned 900 calories and you know exactly
what you wanna make for dinner that night.
So, it's kind of like a double whammy.
Bay leaves are so important, it's just a layer of depth.
You'll never taste anything and be like,
'oh, yeah, this is really bay leafy right now.'
It just makes it taste like grandma, that's what it is.
♪ Don't stress out, we're just makin' food ♪
♪ We're not savin' lives ♪
Ted Allen taught me to put parmesan rinds in my sauces.
You just bury it in,
and it's just gonna flavor it with its goodness.
And even just 30 to 40 minutes of this,
and that's really all that you need.
We have our bay leaf, parmesan rind, and the basil,
which it kinda doesn't get much more Italian than that,
but those are the three things that you also wanna remember
because we're gonna be removing those as well.
We're using Arborio rice, which is a very short grain,
and might I add, very accessible rice grain as well
that I don't think is used that often,
and people think that it's only for risotto.
And we're gonna cook this the way you would regular rice.
It really couldn't be simpler.
That's the thing,
with this dish I wanna show that you can make something
that looks so beautiful and complex,
but the essence of it is really...
If you break it down, it's actually very simple,
and anybody can make it.
Food was never really something
that I planned on pursuing in a professional capacity.
I had toyed with the idea in the past,
but I had sort of other ideas
of what I thought my life should look like,
and because I think cooking is such an intimate thing,
it's something that I do on a personal level
in my relationship, for my friends, for my loved ones,
that I never really associated it
with sort of a public thing that I could actually
work on or make a career out of.
My father and my mother would travel
and they would go all over the world
and they would come back with these amazing recipes
that they would try out on us.
The thing is, with my mother,
she's such a perfectionist in the kitchen, not unlike me.
I was actually never allowed to participate in the cooking,
and I'm the same way.
I don't let anybody help me with my prep or any of it.
So, I kind of understand where she was coming from.
So, I would sort of sit at the other end of the counter
and just watch her prepare everything,
and I learned very much by studying it,
which I think is actually a really good way to go about it
because you really get to pay attention to the details.
By actually watching it,
you get to see things that sometimes you won't learn
during a conventional lesson.
So, with the mozzarella here,
what I'm doing is by tearing it into really smaller strands
it's gonna be a lot easier for it to melt.
We want it to really be sort of melty
and oozey and have that effect.
So, this is perfect consistency,
it's beautifully reduced, it's thick.
If you go with a little more rice on the bottom,
it's totally fine because when we flip it,
it's gonna have a nice solid ground
for the whole thing to sit on.
So, there's gonna be a little note here
that says let cool for 10 minutes.
- Yeah. - Great.
When Queer Eye, when we were wrapping our season,
on our last day I thought I had this vision
of how nice it would be to sort of prepare
a family meal for everybody.
I made three or four of these,
which was insane and took me a whole day to do,
but when I get an idea in my head, I just can't get it out,
and I spent like 3/4 of a day in my kitchen
and then put them in the trunk
and then we brought them to the production offices
after we had wrapped our last day,
and the crew came back and we had these,
like three or four of these guys, ready.
I just wanna eat this!
Guys, dig in.
- [Crew Member] I'm gonna get a few beauty shots of that.
- [Antoni] I'm just having one more bite.
(all talking)
- [Andrew] Oh, yes!
(jazzy music)