Serves 4 main course, 6 entrée

Preparation 15 minutes -1 hour total cooking time - very easy – gluten free – vegetarian option use vegetable stock and omit chicken

5g dried porcini

5g dried morels

1L water

100g + 50g butter

180g brown onion, p/w finely chopped sea salt

black pepper, freshly ground

100g Swiss brown, chopped

100g champignons, chopped

10g trompetta

100g shemeji, gently pulled apart

400g Ferron Vialone Nano rice

500ml chicken or vegetable stock, hot

300g chicken thigh, very finely sliced

50g truffle paste

Method

Soak the dried porcini and morels in the water. Put 100g of butter into a wide, shallow heavy based pan and heat until it starts to foam, then add the onion and season it and cook stirring until it is golden. Add the Swiss browns and champignons and continue cooking until they have expelled their liquid and it has completely evaporated. Tip the dried mushrooms and their liquid into the stock, bring to the boil and turn the heat off. Stir the trompetta and shemeji through the mushroom mix and then the rice and continue stirring until the rice is completely coated with the butter.

Add sufficient stock to cover the rice and mushrooms and collected the reconstituted dried mushrooms from the stock and add them to the risotto. Cook on very low heat, stirring from time to time and adding more stock as required until the rice is almost cooked. Add the chicken and stir through, allowing about 5 minutes for it to just set and remain very tender. Stir through the remaining 50g butter and truffle paste, taste and adjust the seasonings and serve immediately.

Tips

1. Risotto is generally best cooked at home as very few restaurants will cook it from scratch and the result is rarely as good as you can get at home. It is very difficult to make a good risotto with cheap Arborio rice because the risotto will go gluggy and the liquid and rice separation known as ‘ooze’ is almost impossible to achieve. The Ferron rice is more expensive but absorbs more liquid than cheap rice, so it is actually less expensive than it at first appears. It is also much easier to judge the stages of the cooking with this rice because the degree of cook is apparent in the grains.
2. Want to turn this into a cheap dish, buy cooking mushrooms and add a couple of cups of cubed, roasted pumpkin right at the end with the chicken.