The dish I fell in love with

The risotto. A dish that still excites me to make to this day. It is such a labour of love. Although I'm not a father yet, I sometimes feel like I am nurturing a small (and far less significant) child before my eyes as I watch the pan develop from some rather unspectacular specks of white rice into the oozy, comforting, glossy dish that is a risotto cooked right.

It was the very first dish I learnt to cook solo, unattended, with free reign in the kitchen. I remember thinking "wow, I've got free reign here to do what I like!". The version I chose back when I was 13 was a butternut squash risotto. Simple, but beautiful and I can still to this day remember cooking and then eating that dish. It literally blew my mind how delicious it was and I had cooked it!

Our first homegrown butternut squash!

Recently our garden veg patch has been going wild and at last, our first butternut squash were ready to harvest. So what better dish to celebrate it than that first risotto. This time with roasted butternut squash puree, butternut squash crisps and crispy sage leaves.

Since then it is a dish I have come back to time and time again, I cooked it throughout my university days and it was a firm favourite with my housemates. I taught my mum to cook it and then had every variety under the sun during university holidays! And more recently it was one of the first dishes I cooked on the MobGroup Live cookalongs, a beetroot and goats cheese risotto, one of my all-timers. If I'm ever unsure what to rustle up this Italian classic is never far from my mind, and arborio rice is one of the few cupboard staples I always have in (along with eggs and peanut butter).

Fundamentals for a top risotto

There are some fundamentals I really believe in when making a good risotto, things I have picked up along the way from chefs far superior and qualified to me! These things have worked for me every time and each builds another element into the dish. Be warned though that risotto is truly a labor of love, your eyes should never leave that pan from the moment you start cooking it until the moment you serve.

Fundaments for a good risotto:

1. Don’t rush to soften your onions. This process of softening the onions before the rice goes in is crucial for building flavour and bringing the natural sweetness out of the onions. Take your time, allow them to go translucent, soften beautifully and then you're good to go. With a healthy dose of butter to boot too.

2. Toast your rice. Not in an actual toaster, but in the pan. This has a two-fold effect; one it creates a lovely nutty flavour to your risotto. Two it cracks the outer layer of the rice ever so slightly allowing all that stock and goodness into it to inflate quicker and more effectively. Try not toasting it and compare your end results.

3. Use a wide pan. As is the same when you're roasting or trying to crisp something up, rice like it's own room. It's own surface area to do its thing. Respect that. A nice wide-based pan, like a frying pan, works perfectly and gives all of the grains of the rice equal opportunity to come into contact with the stock and each other during the cooking process, meaning an even cooking method.

4. Keep your stock on the heat. A lot of people will make up a batch of their stock and then leave it on the side, adding it in as they go. When we do this you reduce the pan's heat a tiny bit each time, as the liquid temperature is cooler than what is already in the pan. There is then a brief period where the risotto has to come back up to temperature and we end up with this yo-yo effect. By keeping the stock on the heat we ensure an equal temperature between the two environments and a quicker, more even cook.

5. Keep your rice moving. Once the rice is in the pan, and you're adding stock, your eyes should never really be leaving the stove. Move the rice around, stir, scrape, add more stock if you need to. When you leave it alone is when you get stodgy, unevenly cooked patches of rice. Not good. I remember this being one of the first tips I picked up and still swear by it.

6. When you come to adding your parmesan grate it on top of the rice, turn the heat off and place a lid on. This allows the residual heat to melt the cheese and means you'll get a universally cheesy dish, rather than pockets of cheese balls. The same applies if you're adding cheese to a pasta dish. A little patience goes a long way! On the topic of parmesan, don't scrimp on it, both in terms of quality or quantity!

I hope you give the risotto a crack if you haven't before, they're truly an amazing dish to watch come together!