April 13, 2021

Just Keep Stirring

Do you feel UNHINGED? Like a DOOR somebody REMOVED from its FRAME and then threw down a long flight of STAIRS? Does THIS [short clip of a man checking the news, tipping his head back, and watching a large cloud of black smog appear from his own mouth] ever happen to YOU? Are YOU preoccupied with the FUTILITY of EXISTENCE? Do YOU vibrate with the effort of holding back your SCREAMS all day?

Luckily, there’s help. Try “making a big fucking pot of risotto and then eating off of it like a gremlin all week” today! STIR all your worries away, and then STIR some more, and then CONTINUE TO STIR until it is done. You can’t control the world, but you CAN control risotto!

SPRING RAMP AND SAUSAGE RISOTTO:

INGREDIENTS:

• One bunch ramp greens [like a good solid handful; you can use the bulbs too but it’s better to leave them in the ground so they can grow more ramps. If you don’t have ramps (which are a wild allium, onion/garlic situation) to pick in your area, or access to someone selling them, you can double the onion below, throw in a few cloves of minced garlic about 30 seconds before you add the rice to the pot, and stir in some arugula right after you take the finished risotto off the heat. The arugula will wilt as you stir it in, and the texture and peppery flavor will fill in nicely, though not perfectly, for the ramps.]
• 1 to 1.5lbs mild or hot Italian sausage, whichever you prefer (though you want to make this vegan, you can use roughly chopped oyster mushrooms seasoned with salt, garlic powder, and red pepper flake here to similar effect)
• 2 cups medium grain risotto rice (Arborio, Carnaroli, etc). DO NOT RINSE. DON’T.
• 6-8 cups chicken stock (or use veggie for vegan)
• Half a yellow onion, diced
• Neutral or olive oil

STEPS:

1. Wash the ramps carefully, as they can be a little difficult to get clean, and then chop them into roughly 1 inch pieces. Put them in a bowl; it will look like a lot, but they’ll cook down significantly. Set aside.
2. Put stock on the stove to warm. Risotto is nowhere near as hard as people make it out to be — it’s pretty forgiving, by and large — but the stock does need to be kept warm the whole time. Especially if you are new to making risotto, I would heat up the full 8 cups of stock for this; you may not end up using it all, but it’s better to have too much than too little here.
3. In a large, heavy bottomed Dutch oven over medium heat, add sausage and cook until fully done. You likely won’t need to add fat for this step, as the sausage will render out its own fat, but if you’re subbing in the oyster mushrooms here you will want to add some olive oil or butter to the pan. Once the sausage (or mushrooms!) is done, put it in a bowl, cover the bowl with foil, and set aside.
4. Remove the sausage grease from the Dutch oven. This does not have to be perfect, and you will definitely end up leaving some behind in the pan, which is great for flavor! But if you leave all the grease here, instead of subbing in a bit of neutral/olive oil, the risotto tastes so overwhelmingly of sausage that the delicious, delicate ramp flavor gets totally drowned out.
5. Add a small amount of neutral oil to supplement the remaining sausage grease and then add the ramps to the pan. Stir them around until they’ve cooked down and turned a darker green; it won’t take more than a few minutes. Add the cooked ramps into the bowl with the sausage and cover.
6. Put a little more oil in the pan, add the onion, and sauté over medium heat until softened.
7. Add the rice to the pan with the onion — yes, the rice first — no, there’s not any liquid in there yet — yes, this is fine. With risotto you want to sauté the rice briefly before adding any liquid, just until it starts to turn translucent. Recipes always try to tell me this process takes about five minutes, which is, in my experience, an absurd lie; it usually takes about 30 seconds, a minute tops. You’ll be able to tell the rice has started to turn translucent because the outside edges will have… well… become kinda translucent, but you’ll still be able to see the little white speck of each grain’s germ inside. Once this happens:
8. IT IS NOW RISOTTO TIME. There are a lot of competing schools of thought about the best way to do this, but the most important thing to know going in is that making risotto is basically taking the process of making rice (where you add a bunch of rice to a bunch of liquid and heat until the rice absorbs the liquid), and drawing it out real slow and long so the rice will release all its starches, and so those starches will bind to the stock and make a nice little sauce. The reason this matters is that it helps you, the cook, understand what you’re actually doing. You don’t have to stir risotto constantly, but you have to move it around pretty often, or the rice on the bottom of the pan will burn as the liquid evaporates. You want to add more liquid when it starts to get dry, but you don’t want to wait until it gets TOTALLY dry, because that liquid is the sauce, and if you boil it down completely you’ll lose it.
9. Okay sorry that last instruction was just randomized risotto advice, here are your actual instructions: Add your warm stock to the rice roughly one ladleful (that’s like 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup) at a time, slowly, while stirring, over medium heat. Continue to stir as the rice absorbs the liquid. When most of the liquid has been absorbed (the spoon will leave a trail when pulled across the bottom of a pot; or, if you think like I do, you’ll find the rice begins to look unfriendly towards the other rice, as though it does not want to hang out), add another ladleful of liquid. Repeat this until the rice is cooked (taste it. is it crunchy? keep going) and you’ve gone through most of your stock. This will take anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes.
10. Add a little more stock once the rice is about where you’d like it to be, just enough to slightly loosen the sauce, and then add your sausage (or mushrooms) and ramps back into the pot. Stir, let it heat through together for a moment, and then remove from heat. Add some freshly chopped parsley if you like, or a squeeze of lemon if you like, or, I guess, some parmesan if you must, but I promise you it does not need it.
11. Serve. Revel in the comforting and complex flavor you have produced, the warm embrace of a meal you could only have created in this specific season, with your specific efforts. Let it sustain you through another day in this messy, difficult world. Like life, risotto has a reputation for being very complicated but is, once you know what’s what, pretty simple. Unlike life, it makes five large servings or six smaller ones, but doubles well, provided you have a large enough pot.