Butternut Pistachio Risotto w/goat cheese + thyme
BY CHEF PAULA MCCARTHY
Servings: 4-6 as main course
The prep:
A day or two before needed, prepare these 2 ingredients. They need to chill thoroughly.
For the rice:
3 cups vegetable broth
1 1/2 cups arborio rice
1: Bring broth to a boil.
2: Add rice, stirring only once.
3: Return to a boil, reduce heat to low, cover, and cook until just barely tender ( 20-22 minutes).
4: Remove from heat immediately and spread out in a thin layer on a large platter or cookie
sheet.
5: Refrigerate until thoroughly chilled and transfer to a gallon storage bag until needed.
For the squash:
20oz cubed butternut squash
1/2 TBSP olive oil
Salt & Pepper to taste
1: Toss squash with oil, salt + pepper.
2: Spread out on a cookie sheet and toast @350oF until barely tender, about 20 minutes.
3: Cool thoroughly and refrigerate until needed.
Cooking:
3 TBSP butter; plus 1/4 cup cubed
1 small sweet onion, finely chopped
1 TBSP fresh thyme leaves (plus garnish)
1/2 cup dry white wine
3 cups vegetable broth
• pre-prepared butternut squash
1/2 cup chopped pistachios (plus garnish)
1/2 crumbled goat cheese (plus garnish)
1: Melt 3 TBSP butter over medium heat in a 12-inch skillet and sauté onion until softened.
2: Stir in thyme.
3: Add wine, raise temperature to med-high and simmer until wine mostly evaporates.
4: Stir in vegetable broth and bring to a simmer/boil.
5: Stir in squash + pistachios and return to a simmer/boil.
6: Loosen up cooked rice by squeezing a plastic bag and crumble rice into the simmering broth
mixture.
7: Stir gently and simmer as rice begins to release starch and reaches a creamy consistency
(like molten lava).
8: Mix in 1/4 cup cubed butter and Parmesan and remove from heat.
9: Finish with crumbled goat cheese, stirring lightly to incorporate.
10: Pour into shallow soup bowls and garnish as desired.
Thank you for joining us here tonight on this kind of raw, kind of yucky night. My name is Paula McCarthy and I am a recently retired longtime local chef. I’m also an avid home cook and that’s the perspective that I’m approaching this from tonight with using pro tips and tricks to make it easier. I promised you a dish that was seasonal, local, vegetarian, and weekn night friendly. So, seasonal. We’ve got butternut squash. We’ve got nuts. We’ve got fresh thyme from the garden. So, those are the things that are seasonal. As far as local goes, I had planned to get my squash at Pquett down here. They grow butternut squash nearby. They are three weeks behind on their crop this year because they got such a late start in the spring. So, I wasn’t able to get it from them. This comes from the Reeves Farm in Baldwinville, New York. So, it didn’t come in a truck from California. It’s a next state over. As far as vegetarian goes, there’s no meat, there’s no fish, there is dairy, and weekn night friendly. That’s the rub. People say, “Paula, risoto weekn night friendly? Are you kidding?” And traditional risoto is not particularly weekn night friendly. It’s labor intensive. It requires your undivided attention for an extended period of time like 30, 35 minutes. You are there stirring and you can’t do anything else. And it’s built from the bottom up. You start with your fat and then your aromatics. And then you put your rice in, your raw rice in. And then you delaze it with the wine. And then you start the process of broth and stir, broth and stir, broth and stir. A half a cup at a time of the broth. And you’re using three, four, five cups, whatever it takes for you to get the molten lava risoto that you’re looking for. Sometimes you order risoto and you get it and it’s stiff and it’s not. It’s like any other rice dish. It’s supposed to be almost liquid. It’s supposed to be like lava. And that’s the recipe I’m going to show you tonight is not from the bottom up. It’s from the top down. We’re going to get everything going in our sauté pan first and then we’re going to use this magic rice which we have made earlier. The way to get this done in 20 minutes on a week night is to do a couple of steps a day or two beforehand. You’re in the kitchen anyway, you’re making something else. Roast some squash for 20 minutes. Boil up some aoreal rice for 20 25 minutes. Chill it, stash it, and when you’re ready, there you are. So this rice, the rice, the the starch is trapped using this method. The rice is trapped inside and it releases when we put it into our sauté pan that’s got all of our goodness plus the the hot broth in there. The starch starts to release. So, it’s only going to take maybe five, maybe seven minutes for it all to come out and it’s going to get that texture of risoto that you’re looking for that you get with the stirring and the broth and the stirring and the broth and the stirring and the broth. But instead of spending 30, 35 minutes to get it, you’re going to get it 5, 7, 9 minutes. This is on the top of page two. The first page covers the prep, the squash, and the technique to cook this, which is just the technique you cooked to your regular old rice. Two parts liquid, one part rice. Don’t just stir it once when you put it into the pot. Leave it there for 20 minutes. Spread it out on a cookie sheet or on a platter because you want it to cool. You want it to be really well chilled. And then you put it in a plastic bag. Why do you put it in a plastic bag? I’ll show you when we get there. But what you want to do is squeeze it to break it up when you’re putting it into your molten lava wonderfulness in the pan. That’s going to enable you to have it all broken up instead of trying to, you know, smash away at it in the pan. So, I have it cooked on this particular induction burner that we have. This is a risoto stick. This came from the province of Tantino in Italy in a town called Pinsolo. It’s way way up in the Alps and palenta is well it’s their their starch and I like it to use riso to make risoto with because it gives me that same stirring action that that gets everything in the whole pan. You know, we have there’s many different starches that are provincial in Italy and much of the Italian-American population in our area are this is Italy are calibres or bashelari or from Rome’s Naples from Rome south. So their cuisine is based on pasta and red sauce. But when you go to different places like my family is from Tuscanyany. So they are manga fajoli. They are bean eaters. So if you get something that’s tuscin it has white beans, it has spinach, it has sun-dried tomatoes. Then as you go up north to Lombardi to Milan, they are the rice eaters. Risoto alamelanise is a very famous and probably the beginning of the creation of risoto. And then up in TanTino it’s palenta. So we have our butter is melted and we have added this is a sweet onion. This is a vidilia. You can use an empire sweet. You can use any yellow onion. I would avoid white onion because they aren’t quite sweet enough. And I would avoid red onion because I don’t want the color in there. So I’m just going to get a good sizzle going on that. And when it starts to soften up, get a little translucent, which this is a very efficient burner. This isn’t going to take very long at all. So once you get a good sizzle going on that, you’re going to add about a tablespoon of fresh thyme. The fragrance of this is so wonderful. We’re going to delaze. This is a half a cup of white wine. This is a pino grigio. You can use whatever white wine you like. You can use white vermouth if you like. That’s a nice dry white wine. And then you’re going to let that simmer. I’m going to turn this up just a little bit because we want to get a good sizzle going on that now. We want to burn off the alcohol. And if you choose not to use alcohol in your cooking, just use an extra half a cup of the broth. You can smell that time already. Do you use cooking wine or just for wine? I use cooking wine. The other day I was in the market and they had a special on uh Marsala cooking wine and it was a really good price. So, I grabbed it. You know, is as I was talking about earlier, if it’s not in the supermarket, we’re not going to get it. We’re not going someplace else to get something else. And we also don’t want to How much money do you want to have tied up in a bottle of Marcala sitting on your shelf that you’re going to use a half a cup for twice a year? So, we’re burning off and reducing this down. Almost burning off all the liquid because we want to get all the essence of that. We don’t need all the liquid of that. You can see it’s already almost done reducing. And this will help also soften the onion. And pour in three cups of vegetable broth. You can see that I’m using store brand vegetable broth. Don’t have to. At home, I like to use the uh Better Than Bullion, but I didn’t want to mess with that here with us tonight. So, I picked up some store brand and it I’m I’m happy with the result. We’re going to bring this to a nice brisk boil. So, I’m going to turn this up nice and high. And after this comes to a good rolling simmer simmer slashbo boil, you know, when it when it gets good energy going on it, then I’m gonna put in the squash and the nuts. So, I’m building it all the things that I want to have in our finished dish. I’m putting in pre instead of post as you do in the traditional preparation. Just starting to come to the boil now. So when you roast your butternut squash, you’re going to till it’s just just tender cuz it’s going to cook a little bit longer, a little bit more in the boiling stock. So, you don’t want to have this already too tender so that it’s mushy. The nuts, I’ve chopped them coarsely. Um, you can leave them whole if you like. Get a little bit more mileage out of them if you’ve chopped them coarsely. So, that’s what’s going to go into our rolling simmer stock here. So, we’re going to stir in our just barely tender butternut squash. And if you chose not to get the 20 oz package of um the pre-peled and cut, just weigh it out or use two 2 and 1/2 cups. And so that returns to the boil. We put the pistachios in. And as soon as that gets really, really, really going, I’m going to get our bag of rice. And we’re going to squish it up so that it’s broken up a little bit when it goes into the pan. So we’re not fighting with it trying to get it to be unclumpy while we’re getting to this close to the final stage here. And then the magic starts to happen. It’s boiling nicely. the starch starts to release from those short grains. You It won’t work with a longer grain rice because they’re not starchy enough. So, this short grain Italian aoreo is a perfect texture for this. And you start to see how it’s thickening. It’s giving up the starch. You can use high, you can use medium high. it it really can’t get away from you at this point. You know, when you were in the beginning stages, you wanted to use a medium heat because you didn’t want to scorch what you have going on. But this is this is boiling. So, this is there’s plenty of liquid in here. And you see that your ratio of filling or um add-ins to rice is what you want, too. You want everybody to get every everything in every bite. So, these quantities will enable you to do that. It’s starting to get starchy. It’s starting to look like risoto instead of plastic bag full of rice. Like, who is this lady with plastic bag full of rice? What’s she doing? I’m going to turn that down a little. Maybe medium high. Just nudge it gracefully along for your five, seven minutes instead of your 35 and you’re battling the thing and kids are screaming, the dog’s barking, you’ve got to go to the bathroom and and you can’t leave because you are married to this pan of rice. But this one, the five, seven minutes, you’re off the hook shortly. And then we take a traditional step. If if we had gone from the bottom up instead of the top down, we would still get to the same point where we have all this stuff going on in the pan. And we’re going to finish it with the butter and the parmesan. That’s a pretty much classic finish of any risoto flavor, no matter what you have, is usually you’re going to have a half a cup of parmesan and four tablespoons of butter. I’ve cubed up the butter so that it just will blend in nicely. We won’t be spending a lot of time trying to get that to be homogenized in. But if you want to see, I can’t really tip this cuz it’s quite full, but you see how it’s all starchy now. See how this looks like risoto? And as soon as it gets to the consistency that you like, I like to have it a little bit more creamy than it is right now. But because you didn’t cook the rice to death your first time, it still has a little texture to it. It still has a little bite to it. And I’m going to turn this down a little bit more because it’s nice and brisk now. Okay. So, now we’ve got this going on here. And this looks like it’s nice and creamy. You can still see the grains of the risoto, but you can see where how all the starch has released. So, then we’re just going to put in our butter. and our parmesan. We’re going to get that in. We’re going to take it off the heat. And then I have lovely goat cheese here. Once we get the butter and the the parmesan all incorporated, we’ll get it off the heat. Then we will just top it off lightly. We’re not going to stir the goat cheese in the way we’re stirring in the parmesan and the butter. We’re just going to kind of let it just mingle a little bit when we get to the that stage. And and you can see the butter is disappearing. And as soon as your butter disappears, you’re where you need to be. You notice I did not put very much. I did not add any salt while we were here. I did salt and pepper the squash before I cooked it. And there is salt in the broth. The cheeses are salty. The nuts are salty. I don’t like a lot of salt in my food. I know a lot of people don’t want to have a lot of salt in their food for other reasons. I just don’t care for a lot of salt. So, I you you can put in as much salt as you want. And you can always add salt at the table. Although, I don’t even put salt and pepper on my table. And it it seems kind of pompous, but this food is seasoned. So, you just stir in your goat cheese. And then I’m going to get a little bit of go get a couple of cups and some spoons. And oh, look at how that goat cheese. This is going to be so delicious and you’re going to get to try it right now. I would like to say thank you to the Shbury Public Library for all the resources that they have here. I’ve recently rediscovered the library in retirement. I come every week. I get a bag of books. I can get as many as I want. There’s this beautiful Charlie cart device that we can share information. There’s the cookbook club that I belong to. This and many, many things that are available that I don’t quite avail myself to yet. So, yes, thank you to the library for just being here. Good night.
Dining and Cooking