Risotto with wild mushrooms and shallots

Risotto is a really classic Italian dish of rice with stock slowly stirred into it to make it super creamy. It is usually finished with some kind of cheese such as parmesan. Below is a recipe that I tested out the other day that turned out really great. If there isn’t a specific amount of something in the ingredient list, it’s because I added it to taste. I didn’t add salt and pepper to the list either, because salt and pepper should go into almost everything. When I made this, I was really proud of how it turned out, so I thought I would share it.

So the first thing to do with ANY recipe is to gather your mise en place (Meese-en-plahs), which in French means “everything in place,” more commonly known as prep.

Here’s what I used for this dish.

Arborio Rice (1 ½ cups)

Stock (Chicken- 6 cups)

½ medium onion, small dice

Enough butter

¼ cup parmesan cheese, grated

crème fraiche

Wild mushrooms (black trumpets or hedgehogs are preferred)

1 Shallot thinly sliced

2 cloves garlic, fine mince

Thyme, Tarragon, Finely Chopped

The first thing to do is put your stock on to boil. Once it boils, reduce it down to the lowest setting to keep it hot, but not simmering. It is really important for the stock to be hot, or it won’t absorb properly into the rice. In a separate pan, melt about 4 tbsp of butter and make it hot. When it is hot and totally melted, add the onions. They should sizzle when they hit the pan. If they don’t, let your butter get hotter.

You want to do this over medium heat so as not to brown your onions. You just want them to sweat and get translucent. When they are translucent, add your rice. Let it absorb the butter and get a little toasted. When all the fat is absorbed, add 1 cup of the stock to the rice and stir constantly until only a couple of tablespoons of stock are left. Don’t rush the rice. This process will take you about 15 minutes to complete.

Keep adding stock in this manner until you have added 5 cups of stock. Taste the rice. If it is still too firm, crunchy, or hard, add more stock. Alternatively, at this point (right before it is done) you can spread out the rice into a shallow pan to cool, saving it for later, ready to finish up in just a few minutes. This is what a lot of restaurants do, to make the cook time of the risotto much shorter for service.

The last thing to do before totally finishing the risotto is to cook the mushrooms, shallots, and garlic. Add about 4 tbsp of butter to a sauté pan and make hot. Add the mushrooms and cook them until they are caramelized (nice darker golden brown color). At this point add the shallots (making sure that they are THINLY sliced-see picture below) and garlic. Cook for about a minute until translucent. If the garlic is brown, the heat was too high. Set aside the mushroom mixture.

To finish the risotto: When the rice is cooked through, remove the risotto from the heat. Add parmesan cheese, 2 tbsp of butter, and a dollop of crème fraiche. Stir in to melt. Fold in mushroom mixture and serve hot. The risotto should spread out slightly when place on a flat plate, but should not be runny. This is what it should look like when it is finished.

My chosen service vessels today were little demitasse cups on plates with adorable little doilies. I garnished with some reserved sautéed mushrooms and sliced chives.

I know that it’s a complex looking procedure, but really, it’s pretty simple once you get the hang of it.

Have fun.

-Tim

If you are new to the blog, check out the archives for older posts

Spring Duck Prosciutto

Today at Blueacre, some friends of the chef came in, so my buddy Eric and I did a little something special.

rolled duck prosciutto, with fresh herbs, shaved pickled beets, crostinis, and parsley oil.

So the food is a lot simpler than it looks.

For the duck prosciutto, we cured a duck breast in curing salt and spices for about 3 weeks. We then popped it into the freezer for a bit so that we could use the meat slicer to get nice thin slices, which we then rolled into what you see up above.

After we had the meat all prepped out, we started the meticulous work of picking chervil off of it’s stem to make them look like miniature trees-very cool.

The product of my labor- a chervil stem

The leaves.

You see, the whole idea of the dish was to make it seem life like and “springy,” using spring colors and herbs and scattering them around the plate.

We also picked dill, tarragon, and made parsley oil.

For the beets, we took some raw yellow beets and shaved them paper thin (this way, they weren’t as hard to eat raw). After that, we just put them in some pickling liquid for 5 minutes or so to let them absorb some of the flavor.

 Beets in a sweet pickling liquid

And here comes my favorite part. After the plate was arranged, we spooned some parsley oil and vinegar into the prosciutto cones to form something kind of like a vinaigrette. We didn’t do this for flavor, but the idea was that when you picked up the prosciutto, the green would spill out onto the plate.

Thought that was awesome.

See you next time.

-Tim 

Creativity, passion, and commitment. like a triangle.

Just the other day, I was talking with one of my instructors (Chef David Wynne), and brought up creativity. At first he sort of rolled his eyes, but as we got deeper into conversation, he shared some really great insight.

Chef Wynne was an artist for near twenty years, which is a good chunk of life if you ask me. The market turned over, or perhaps the economy failed and he had to make a career change. See, for him, cooking is the same as sculpting or painting, only instead of clay and paint, the materials were flour and semolina (that was a terrible metaphor).

Anyway, the point of our conversation was, first, creativity isn’t random. Creativity may start as an idea that just sort of popped into your head, but it takes skill and planning to execute it. Observe the photo below.

Vegetarian “Pot Au Feu”

This is play-dough. We made the play dough of course, but we are also doing more than just screwing around-we are planning out an entire five course tasting menu, without actually making it.

See, without visualization before the execution of a dish, you will get a very muddled, half-ass looking plate or mediocre food. At least that’s my opinion. I’m sure that others share it.

At any rate, the play-dough not only helps us plan what we are going to do and cook, but helps us visualize. I think that this was one of the best lesson plans I have had at the art institute.

Next on the menu, we have the thing that fuels your creativity. Passion.

Some people will say some stupid things, like, “Oh, I’m really passionate about knitting,” “I am so passionate about food,” or, my least favorite, “I am so passionate about [insert political issue here].” The problem with most of these “passionate” people is that, well, they aren’t passionate. Passion takes commitment.

For example, to be truly passionate about wine, you have to commit yourself to learning things like where the wine is bottled, where the grapes come from, what they taste like, what the word terroir means, and many other things that come with a topic as complex as wine. The people that say that their favorite wine is merlot probably don’t know what they are talking about. The guy that says his favorite wine is a ’76  cabernet sauvignon that was bottled in napa valley in ’79 probably knows what he is talking about. He knows about wine and is committed to learning about it.

To be passionate about anything, you have to commit yourself to it. And from passion, comes creativity.

I just thought I would share my thoughts about that with you. Here are some more pictures of the things we are doing for our tasting menu, inspired by (link)Heston Blumenthal(/link).

Licorice Poached salmon with asparagus and vanilla mayonnaise

Raw Oyster on rock salt with lavender gelee and  lace tuile.

Sole with black truffles, parsley foam, champagne gel and crisp parsley and grapes.

Cauliflower risotto with cauliflower cream foam

Thanks for reading. You can check out other, older blog posts if you click on the

archives button on the right middle of the page.

-Tim Chambers

P.S. in a couple weeks, I will be actually executing these dishes with REAL food. Stay tuned to see how they turned out.

Where To Start, Where. To. Start.

I wasn't Quite Sure where to start (as the title implies), So i figured that I would give you a little bit of my background.

I began being really interested in the culinary profession when i started watching the old Japanese version of Iron Chef. It was ridiculously dramatic and over the top, but at the core of it, there were some astounding chefs with amazing abilities. I began looking into possibilities for a culinary education.

I decided to attend a culinary class in high school to get my feet wet. this was one of the best decisions I ever made. I was taught a lot of things about the cooking industry by Chef Instructor Kevin Blaylock (now a certified executive chef), and instructor Tony Poplin, who taught me a lot about life in general, and is still a good friend of mine.

I really excelled in the program there and graduated high school with a huge cooking scholarship and several other awards under my belt.

My first choice of college was the Culinary Institute of America, however, being limited to washington state by my scholarship, and the fact that I was Freaking poor, I chose to apply grants to the Art Institute of Seattle's cooking program (Still expensive, but local, and it was compatible with my scholarships). I also Just finished interning at Rover's Restaurant, probably one of the nicest restaurants in seattle, if not america.

Currently, I am finishing up my last quarter of school and am working as a line cook at BlueAcre Seafood, an upscale restaurant in downtown seattle. I am really liking it there, and am learning a lot from the chef, but I still want more. In posts to come, I will share with you some of the things i have done, am doing, and want to do.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned

-Tim

Welcome

Hey Everyone,

Welcome to my blog. I'll keep this pretty short and sweet. The blog is going to be about food, because right now, that's my life. I live it, breathe it, and create it, and want to share my passion with you.

So stay current! More blog posts to come as soon as I find a good place to start.

-Tim