Chestnuts and pumpkins are some of autumn´s treasures and a great idea for a healthy risotto
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 4 € pp)
- 8 chestnuts peeled
- 120 g pumpkin
- 240 g carnaroli rice
- A small glass white wine
- 1,2 litre vegetable stock
- EV sunflower oil
- 1 medium onion
- Salt
- 40 g butter
- 40 gr Parmigiano or Grana cheese
- Fresh tarragon
When I was a child my ideal meal was as first course chestnuts, as second sweet potatoes and as dessert mandarines. So you can imagine how much I love today´s basic ingredient.
Chestnuts have two disadvantages:
a) They spoil very easily. So right after you buy them, you have to put them in the fridge in a paper bag. Room temperature or closing inside a nylon bag will provoke worms in the chestnuts in some days.
b) They are difficult to get peeled. There are many techniques for peeling them (a cut at both sides, a cross at the base) but the more important is that chestnuts must be hot, very hot. In Greece there is a fixed phrase “΅Who is gonna take the chestnuts out of the fire?”, meaning that something is too hard to try it.
So, the trick to peel “easily” the chestnuts is to boil them in batches (after have cut them on sides or base) and to peel them immediately they come out of the pot.
Pumpkin is the other basic ingredient of today´s risotto. It is a universal (can be used in cooking and pastry too) and very easy to cook material. It does not require a particular treatment, just a little attention during peeling, because it has a very hard exterior part which can drive to self-injuries.
Let´s start preparing today´s risotto:
As always, we begin by preparing a sofrito. We cut in very small dice the onion and the pumpkin. We gently sauté them in EV sunflower oil for 5 minutes.
In a small pan we lightly toast the rice WITH NO FAT AT ALL and when it is so hot that we cannot touch it in our hands, we pour it into the sofrito pan. We add the wine and then we start cooking the risotto, adding a ladle of very hot – boiling stock, when the liquid starts to get reduced. Five minutes later we add the half amount of the chestnuts, previously chopped.
While the rice is being prepared, we grind finely the cheese, we chop some tarragon leaves and we cut the rest of the chestnuts in halves.
When the rice is prepared (al dente of course) we remove the pan from the stove. We taste the salt and, if needed, we add some more.
Stirring constantly we start adding the chestnut halves, the butter and the cheese. We continue stirring until we obtain a very creamy result, we cover the pan with a lid and we let it stand for 2 minutes.
We decorate the risotto as shown with the tarragon leaves and we serve.
