Video guide to making mushroom risotto
Hi, I'm Matt, I'm going to show you how to make a delicious mushroom and roasted butternut squash risotto. If you don't have time to make the home-cooked version of this, don't worry, we've done it for you. It's available as part of the Tesco Finest range.
This recipe we're doing will serve two people. We're going to start off by making our roasted vegetables. We've got 100g each of diced butternut squash, red peppers, cut into lovely wedges nice and chunky, and again, red onion in nice chunky wedges. Preheat your oven to 185 degrees C. Get a nice flat roasting tray, just pop the veg on there. Get them all scattered around. We've got some lovely herbs to put on, a good sprig of rosemary and just strip the leaves off, sprinkle them over, you don't have to be careful about this. And also thyme as well, just strip the leaves off that, really fragrant, get that flavour into there.
Then we've got, pre-chopped here, we've got half a red chilli and if you like it hot, you can add more, you can take it out if you don't like any at all, clove of garlic nicely chopped and the zest of a lemon. Little bit of salt and pepper, always good, get those flavours out and then we give it a little drizzle of olive oil to help roast up in the oven, not dry out. Just give that a good mix with your hands, get all those flavours around, that chilli, you can really smell the lemon zest coming through and the rosemary.
So I want to get these in the oven for about 20 minutes, until the veg is just cooked through, little bit of colour at the edges.
Cooking the risotto
So now we'll get the risotto on. First thing to do is get your pan on a medium heat, put a bit of olive oil in your pan. Now we've got two cloves of garlic chopped up finely, get those in. Little bit of a sizzle, you don't want it to go too hot. One onion nice and finely diced. So give the onions a bit of a stir, keep an eye on them, we just want them to soften down, not get any colour on there.
In this pan here, we've got a litre of vegetable stock just simmering away. That's one of the really important things about making risotto is to have your stock to hand, nice and hot so you're not cooling it down through the cooking process.
Now, as this onion becomes nice and soft, we'll add a little pinch of salt, little touch of pepper. Keep stirring it around.
Now we've got 200g of Arborio rice, which is the right kind of rice to use for risotto. It's very starchy, the starch will cook out into the dish which will give you that creaminess. We get this into the pan now. When you've got your rice stirred around, nicely coated in the oil, looking lovely and shiny, we've got 125ml, or one standard wine glass, of white wine. I'm using Sauvignon Blanc, it gives a nice acidity, fresh flavours in there, any dry white wine will do. Get this into the pan, got a lovely sizzle there. You get all the alcohol burning off so you don't get any bitterness. This is where you start giving it a nice stir and the starch will start coming out of it.
Over here, we've got some dried porcini mushrooms, we've soaked them in a little bit of boiling water, leave them for about 10 minutes, you can see all that water's gone a lovely deep rich brown colour, it's going to give you an amazing mushroom flavour. So we stick these in at this point as well.
Again, just give it a stir. You're massaging the rice grains and all the starch will start coming out and you can start seeing that it's getting a lovely texture to it. Now, at this point, when the liquid's just about reduced out of the pan, this is where we start adding our stock. You want to add this bit by bit, maybe a glass at a time. Add a bit of stock, give it a stir. That's why we need to keep the stock hot, otherwise if you put cold stock in, it just stops the cooking and you're never going to get anywhere. As you can see, it's starting to come together, the starch is starting to come out. Add a little splash more stock in there and leave it ticking over. Now we can get on with our mushrooms.
So we've got our mushrooms over here. We're going to sauté these and put them on at the end of the dish. This way you get more texture in there, you don't get your mushrooms cooking in risotto and soaking up all that liquid, going a bit soggy. So we've got a mixture of mushrooms: a lovely big flat mushroom there, some chestnut mushrooms, common-or-garden button mushrooms, most people have those in the fridge. We've also got these lovely mixed wild mushrooms that are absolutely beautiful, they give it a real punch of mushroomy flavour.
So we'll get our pan on, a nice medium heat on there. We've got one large nice flat mushroom, I just want to slice it across in nice strips. This is going to give you some real body to the dish, really meaty texture to them. Then again with the three chestnut mushrooms, give them a nice slice up. Keep them quite chunky because they lose a lot of moisture in the pan. Similar with the button mushrooms.
So the wild mushrooms I won't chop up, I'll just tear them into the pan towards the end of the cooking. So get a little more olive oil into our pan. Here we've got a chilli diced up and a clove of garlic, so we're mirroring the same flavours we've got on the roasted vegetables. Get those in, should have a bit of a sizzle. Turn our heat up a little bit. You can have your heat a bit more fierce with your mushrooms than you do with your risotto because you want to get them sautéed. Obviously not forgetting to stir our risotto as we go.
Get those mushrooms into the pan now. Sprinkle them in. The mushrooms will soak up the oil but that's fine, it'll come back out at the end of cooking. You don't want to keep adding oil because they're like sponges, they'll just soak it all up and you'll end up with a really greasy finish to your dish. Last one of those in. Turn that heat up a bit more, these will take five to 10 minutes to cook, depending on how hot your pan is. Again, we've got some more rosemary, some more thyme to get the really punchy herb flavours in there, mirroring what's on the roast veg. Just tear those in, don't need to be delicate with it, just get those in. Strip the leaves off the thyme, sprinkle them in. I don't mind a bit of stalk in there, they're nice and soft.
Just keep turning these over, little pinch of salt and a little pinch of pepper. They're just starting to change a bit, the water's coming out and they're starting to soften up. They're looking less like a raw mushroom. Just turning these over, you can see they're starting to go nice and golden brown round the edges.
It's about this point I start putting my wild mushrooms in. So as I said, we'll just lift them up and tear them in, it'll break the mushrooms up beautifully. Give those a stir and we're ready to turn the heat off on these and finish our risotto.
So they'll just stay nice and warm in the pan. Our risotto's ready to be finished so we'll just add a little bit more stock to loosen it down, we don't want it to be too stiff. We want it to run over the plate. So at this point, we can turn the heat off under the risotto and this is where we add our fromage frais and crème fraiche. We've got two tablespoons of fromage frais and one tablespoon of crème fraiche to go in there. Give it a little stir through. As you can see, that's really starting to look lovely and rich, the fromage frais and crème fraiche in there has brought it all together.
We're just going to add a tablespoon of truffle oil. Truffle and mushroom is just a magical combination, really help pick those mushroom flavours up, little splash of mushroom ketchup, which is just an intense mushroom seasoning. If you can't get hold of it, don't worry, it's just to give that extra little mushroom kick to the dish.
Everything's ready here, heat's turned off, let's go and get the veg from the oven.
Looking lovely and caramelised so we're ready to plate up. Get hold of a lovely big white plate, always makes food look really good. Start off with the risotto, just need to spoon a bit into the middle of the plate, a good portion. This is going to be the base for all our lovely other flavours and colours.
Next we'll go with our mushrooms, nice pile of mushrooms on there, all those herbs and chilli flakes you can see in there giving some lovely colour. And our vegetables, start off with the butternut squash, chunks of pepper, red onion really brings that colour through, lifts it from your ordinary grey mushroom risotto.
We'll just finish it off with some parmesan and some basil. So we'll just tear a few basil leaves over the top, you can be as generous or as shy with these as you want. I like quite a lot, I think the green really sets off the dish. Tear some lovely chunky basil leaves over the top. Take a lovely chunk of parmesan, take a peeler and we can just shave some parmesan shavings over the top, there we go.
There we have it, mushroom risotto with roasted butternut squash, absolutely delicious.