Oh....I just may indulge myself and have risotto for dinner. Here;s how I do it. Into a heavy pan, put: 1/4 cup finely chopped onion and 1/2 cup finely chopped mushrooms. with 1 1/2 T. butter and 1 1/2 T olive oil. Sautee slowly until the onion is soft and translucant Add 2/3 cups of arborio rice, and a clove of garlic minced, and continue to sautee slowly until the rice is translucent. Then add 1/2 cup of a dry white wine. If you are not a wine drinker, use white vermouth the rest will keep well in the regrigerator. Then begin adding the chicken broth ( or beef broth) a cup at a time, stirring and cooking until it is absorbed. Keep adding and cooking and stirring until the rice is tooth tender...that is without a hard spot in the center. When it reaches that point, you can turn it off while you get the rest of the dinner ready ( but not for more than 20 minutes) then turn on the pot again and when it's hot add another cup of broth...and after about 3 minutes of simmering add about 1/4 cup ( or more) fresh grated parmesan. Ana at this time you could add chopped roasted red peppers, chopped shrimp, chopped fresh spinach, chopped fresh parsley, small pieces of steamesd asparagus and some grated lemon rind... The sky's the limit. And remember....risotto is only as good as what you put into it! Home made chicken broth will make an amazing difference! Linda C

That's it!!! Marigene. I KNEW there was something great to be done with leftover risotto. It's lunch time and I'm gonna just heat some slowly with seafood stock (no wine included Linda) but will remember the Arancini which I love but have never made. Now that I'm over my fear of the pc again (I seem to forget that it's ok if I don't use the little darlin' for about 6 months....) I'll have to make some risotto just for leftovers. I love this place..you ask a question, go to bed, and Voila! the answers appear in the am. ;-) Thanks! Maureen

FOAS, I will always look at the name Thomas Keller and think of Hubert. Plllog, I know risotto is not a difficult dish to make. But I would love to tuck it in the SV and go on about my business until the timer rings. As I read the Modernist Cuisine chart I posted above, they cook many risottos (I was not aware that that was a generic term which did not apply only to an arboria rice dish) sous vide, but NOT arboria rice, which is the one I want to do. I am confused by terminology and exclusions. I can make spelt, oats, and pine nuts risottos sous vide, but not arboria rice risotto? I am confused (Yeah, well, that ain't unusual), but I am going to try the Sous Vide Supreme recipe for arboria rice SV. I'll report on it when it's in my tummy. And, congratulations on becoming a sous vide cook. I have really enjoyed my SV Supreme, which I bought years ago on a super special package on eBay (Er, actually, which I convinced DH to buy for me as a birthday present.) It was my introduction to vacuum sealing as well as SV cooking. Thanks to Dcarch, I think, I got in on the Anova innovative deal and bought two of their new units for a great pre-production price. One went to my brother and sister-in-law, who keep telling me how WONDERFUL chicken is in SV. Please post your experiences with SV cooking. And please, has ANYONE cooked risotto (with arboria rice, which I did not specify), in a SV setup? And if you did, how did it work, what would you do next time. . . all that stuff.)

Interesting article. (Kenji is always interesting!) I appreciated his pointing out the difference between arborio and carnaroli (the name I can never remember. Plus the Spanish one which I'll ignore because I've never seen it but I'll take his word about it). I didn't realize that the toothier risotto I've eaten was actually carnaroli. I get why he prefers it, wanting it to be more regular ricelike, but I much prefer the arborio for its creamier texture. When made correctly (BTW, I have often had it made correctly in fine restaurants which is why I order it, but I just get peeved when it's all wrong), arborio has substance, but not chew, so it's clouds of softness in the broth of shed starch. The risottos of carnaroli are fine, and were obviously made right, but the firmness prevents the transcendence that arborio gives. Had to laugh about the grandmothers requiring constant stirring. I've never had to constantly stir the risotto. If I need to work on something else, I do. I just pick up the spoon every so often and stir between adding liquid and stirring more. Without agitation the starch doesn't shed properly. You can use trickery to imitate the end product imperfectly, but stirring every couple of minutes just isn't that hard! See, at the end of his description of the old school method, Kenji says to add cream, butter or parm to halt cooking and add creaminess. WRONG. You put in something at the end to add flavor. Period. If you need it to make your texture right, you're doing it wrong. You can halt cooking by putting it in a cold bowl, but we like it piping hot and it's more about eating it than cooling it. :) I have no opinion about the heating of the stock. I've never used cooler than a warm room temp (over 70° F). I'd think that the effort you save from heating the stock would be found in a greater cook length on the rice while the pan reheats from the cold stock, but whatever. Maybe there is enough of a time savings there that it's worth it to him. It's the liquid with friction from stirring that makes the starch shed, and that the warm pan is for making the rice cook. I have no argument with his wider pan theory. I actually do that. The only reason for a tall risotto pot is a small stove with no more room to give over to just the rice. I still think you need to stir to get the broth right, and I can say from experience that adding too much stock at once interferes with this. It just makes it take longer--the water has to steam off before the rice pulls together enough to start abrading again. It seems to me that he's trying to divide the cook into cook rice first then abrade. It might work. I toast rice for paella, not risotto. I do not believe that the starch is all on the surface, because I've cooked arborio risotto down to nubbins so it was mostly broth with just some little rice hearts in it (maybe you can't do this with carnaroli?). More and more starch rubs off. Kenji's desire for toasty flavor in risotto, which is not traditional but is not a bad innovation, has led him to this make starch water first pursuit, but just looking at the picture of his finished dish proves that the starch to rice balance is "wrong". He calls it "creamy". I call it wet rice. NOT a quality risotto. It might be great tasting wet rice, but it's not the same thing at all. Especially with nuttiness and chew. Conclusion--you can make interesting rice dishes with arborio and carnaroli rice, taking advantage of their tendencies to release starch which are not really risottos.