Liquorice Risotto
Oh my god, I've just made one of the best risottos I've ever made. It was so good, I could have cried tears of ecstacy. A few weeks back, I read that are molecular friend Heston Blumenthal likes to combine Liquorice and Asparagus in dishes; they both contain this compound called asparagine and are therefore apparantly well suited.So, my obvious reaction was to try and come up with a recipe for Liquorice and Asparagus risotto.
Now, when you think of liquorice, you probably think of something like the candy Basset's Liquorice Allsorts (a product which was invented by accident in a sweetshop on Fargate when a tray of asorted sweets was knocked onto the floor). However, for culinary purposes, you need to get hold of liquorice root. It can be easily found in health food shops such as Holland & Barrett.
Now, I've never cooked with the stuff before. Liquorice root is basically a stick, and how the hell do you cook a stick? Well, I decided the best bet would be to simply bung a few broken up sticks of liquorice root into my vegetable stock and let it infuse as the stock bubbled away next to my risotto pan. That's exactly what I did, I just prepared a standard risotto and ladled in liquorice imbued stock, being careful not to mix any of the actual root into the risotto. To serve, I retrieved a couple of the short risotto sticks from the empty stock pan, partly for decoration, partly to increase the smell of liquorice in the dish, and partly to chew on when the dish was consumed (chewing is how liquorice root is traditionally eaten).
The results far exceeded my expectations, as you can probably tell from the way I have excitedly made a blog post about the experience.
I guess the next step is to make an asparagus risotto, and then finally work out the best way to combine the two.
Labels: risotto cooking food
1 Comments:
My goodness. Whatever next? Jelly Babies Pizza?
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