Sausage and Asparagus Risotto
I had a taste for risotto. The plan was to make pasta with sausage in it, as I was recording a podcast that night and needed to get dinner into everybody quickly and then not worry about it. The problem is that I have a streaky and largely-unreliable attitude toward keeping stock around.
Sometimes I dilligently keep mushrooms and bones and scraps around and turn them all into stock and am happy all the time, and this is one of those times where I’m….not doing that. Now, risotto forgives many things*, but I still had to improvise.
Since I had some sausage anyway I decided to poach it and use the liquid to cook the rice. I got it in the pan with a whole onion cut into thick slices, a few smashed garlic cloves, a lemon cut into slices, some peppercorns, some allspice and a couple of bay leaves. To make it more stock-ish, I also added a carrot cut into big pieces, some celery done likewise, and a handful of dried mushrooms.
I added them later because I wasn’t entirely certain about what I was doing, and I didn’t want the sausage to come out all weird and vegetal. As it was, I figured the sausage would stay sausage and I could blame any rogue vegetality on the stock itself. That seemed like a good plan. As it happened, there was no rogue vegetality anyway, but it’s always nice to have a plan.
I simmered the sausage in there for awhile, then pulled them when they were cookd through and let the stuff simmer while I did the rest of the prep for the meal. That way it was already kept warm, so it wouldn’t need to change temperature when it hit the rice, and also would continue to extract some business from the vegetables and spices.
The rest of the prep, then, involved dicing an onion, then sweating it in some butter. I chopped some celery fine to get those in there as well, then added some crushed garlic to the pan. I got the rice in there and toasted it, and this is all just regular risotto stuff right here. Deglazed with some white wine, then added the “stock” a ladelful at a time, stirring it a bit to get it all in there and then finishing it right before it was the correct texture so that carryover would get it the rest of the way**. Then I added some cheese to it, because I wanted cheese in there.
While all that was happening, I also heated up the grill pan (I love this thing, man. I seriously am going to marry it). While it was heating, I dunked some asparagus in the boiling poaching liquid (I brought it to a boil for this purpose, and also emptied the sausage out of it), and then I threw the blanced asparagus onto the hot grill pan until it had a nice charred flavor. When the asparagus came off, I also used the same grill pan to brown up the sausage, which I then laid aside to rest. When the cheese melted, I chopped the asparagus into little inch long lengths and then stirred them into the risotto.
I plated the risotto, then cut the sausages into thin slices and laid them over the top, followed by a thin chopping of parsley. It was fantastic, and did all the risotto work I wanted it to do, and I would happily make it every day, except that I’m trying to curb my meat consumption***, and won’t be doing that.
It was good tho. Good job, sausage risotto.
* the lie that is perpetuated that risotto is a finicky, unforgiving, hidebound format that will punish people for doing even one thing wrong is super weird to me - bad risotto can be pretty bad, but it’s also extremely rare. Most risotto bottoms out at “pretty good, actually”.
** the fn previous to this talks about how people make risotto in too fussy and too concerned a manner, and this is none of the more modern ways - no pressure cooker, no not-stirring a la Cooks Illustrated, none of that. I suppose it’s because I wasn’t thinking and was making it on the fly, and just made it the way I was taught and have made for most of my life. Mea culpa. I know I should be more rebellious about these things.
*** this is a paradox, given that I’ve only written about meat things for the last, like, several entries. Here’s why: I have a bunch of meat in a freezer, and I want to use it up rather than throw it up.