Food Goes In Mouth

You may remember a few weeks ago I posted a recipe that didn’t interest me. I failed to adequately point out why.

It didn’t have anything to do with the pork recipe itself. I made and ate it with roasted barley, and the potential I saw in that had me 209472789 times more stoked on playing with the barley than even eating the tenderloin. So now that I’ve had time to toss it around, this is what came out.

It’s vegan (I know, a bit out of character) and packed with that fifth flavor, umami. I’m guessing I got the umami part down right, because I would eat a forkful and think, “Weird…” and promptly shove three more forkfuls into my face. It has a disturbing addictive quality.

What I Used

• Arborio Rice, 1/2 cup.
• Barley, 1/8 cup.
• Fresh White Corn. 1/4 cup of kernels.
• Fresh Shiitake Mushroom, 1/4 cup diced, 4 mushrooms left whole.
• 2 Medium-sized Shallots, fine diced.
• Kombu (dried kelp) Sheets, 15g.
• Extra Virgin Olive Oil, 2 tablespoons.
• Fresh Italian Parsley.
• Fresh Tarragon.

What I Did

1. Spread the barley out on a baking sheet and dry roast at 425°F for 5 minutes. Set aside for later use.
2. Take equal parts of fresh parsley and tarragon and finely chop. Set aside 1/4 cup of this mixture.
3. Make kombu dashi by following these four steps. (Clean the kombu by wiping it with cloth, soak it in water, heat that water to just below a boil, and remove the kombu.) For the amount of kombu I’ve listed in the ingredients you will want to use ~8 cups of water.
4. 
5. Keep the heat on the kombu dashi so that it stays just below a boil. The dashi will be our stock for cooking the risotto.
6. In your favorite skillet heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add shallots and some salt and cook until translucent.
7. Add the Arborio and roasted barley. Stir, coating the grains in oil and keep cooking over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for two minutes.
8. 
9. Kick the skillet to high heat. Pour a ladle of the dashi into the skillet. Start stirring.
10. Whenever the bottom of the skillet is visibly dry, bring another ladle of the dashi over. Always keep stirring. You’ll notice things start to get creamy and thicker almost immediately.
11. After 10 minutes of this, add the corn. Continue with the cycles of adding dashi.
12. After another 8 minutes (18 minutes total now) add the diced mushrooms and continue.
13. At 25 minutes, make your next liquid addition your last. Things should be al dente at this point. If not continue the cycle until you reach al dente.
14. During the last addition, salt the risotto to taste. I avoid adding salt before this because with all the liquid reduction going on, it may become easy to overdue things.
15. When the bottom of the pan is nearly dry, add the whole mushrooms on top of the risotto, cut the heat, put a lid on the thing, and walk away for 3 minutes while the mushrooms steam a bit.
16. Remove the lid and stir in the fresh herbs.
17. Serve up a pile of risotto and top it with one of the steamed shiitakes.

Oh yes, also: Hello Evernote users!

If you are here by way of the Evernote Blog, welcome, and take everything I say with a grain of salt. A grain this size should do.

For those of you who don’t know about Evernote, it is an online tool for capturing…well, anything. Cool webpage you want to remember? Just a few lines of text? Random thought in your head? Pictures? You can put all of that stuff on Evernote. Then you just install one of their applications on any computer or phone you use and all the notes you’ve made are available to you anywhere. It’s the 21st century version of a 3″5″ memo book. On crack. For somebody like me who’s plugged in 29hrs a day, it’s quite useful.

Sometimes I’ll be sitting at work and recipe ideas will pop into my head. So I create a note, and if anything else comes to mind later I just update the note. Then when I finally make it to a kitchen I can look over the note and start trying things out. In fact, here’s what the brainspew that led to this recipe looked like:

What will I do now that I’ve posted this recipe? Delete the note. It’s just my preference to get rid of it once it’s served its purpose.

That’s all for this one. Just a few little extra tidbits to be aware of:

• The umami sources are the mushroom, corn, and kombu. In a normal risotto Parmesan cheese packs the umami punch. Huge piles of free glutamate in that stuff.
• Don’t throw away the kombu. What you’ve created is ichiban dashi (the first brew), but you can reuse the kombu to make niban dashi (second brew) as well as cut it up and put it in other dishes to be eaten.
• Are you not vegan? That pork + garlic shallot sage butter goes great with this. :)