We cooked the risotto on the electric stove in our studio apartment. Outside our wide windows, Berlin stirred frigid and dark. I stirred too often or too little – with a risotto it is always hard to say. We bent our ears to the stovetop, The Art of Simple Food open on the gray countertop, and we listened for the campfire crackle of the arborio beads, just like Alice Waters asked us to.
“Listen to the sounds the risotto makes as it cooks.The crackling sizzle of the rice tells you it’s time to add the wine, which makes a gratifying whoosh; and the bloop-bloop of the bubbles popping signals that it’s time to add more broth.”
Risotto, unlike some other dishes, is an invitation to pay attention to time passing: the way we move from a moment not-yet occurring to a moment just-passed. The present remains fleeting, go figure. Risotto asks you to identify the moment as it arrives – now – and act. You add broth, but soon enough it will be time to add more. You stir, but soon enough it will be time to stir again. The magic moment, the present, must constantly be re-identified. All cooking is in a way like this. All cooking is a meditation on time passing and time being. A steady beating not yet, now, not yet, now.
The steps of making risotto are a series of arcs. These arcs are the trajectory that any one decision may put you (and your risotto) on. For instance, oil heating in a pan will gradually warm, become shimmery and begin to smoke if you don't provide an ingredient. The action of adding onion is an intervention in the natural arc that the oil began when you placed it in a hot pan: you have changed the future. Now, the oil will not smoke, it will cook the onion. Knowing where things are headed is also knowing where they are now.
These arcs are often visible in the kitchen, because they are central to the art of cooking, but you can find them elsewhere, too. Take a flower blooming. Time lapse videos of plants in action make visible the moment when a bloom opens, speeding up the process, recording it for interpretation. There are frames upon frames of the green bud, and then suddenly a bloom. In some ways, pinning down the frame where the bloom appeared is an arbitrary distinction in the process. It’s a way of defining “blooming” by one point in a long, extended process that is interwoven with a bunch of other processes. The bloom was well on it’s way upward toward petals appearing long before they actually appeared. Why do we only call that moment blooming? It’s an act of interpretation, a judgment call.
It’s the same in cooking. The peak of the arc is determined by your goals as a cook. Imagine the decision to add the wine, which should take place when the risotto is crackling and the grains are coated in oil. First, you place the grains in the oil and things are steady for a while – sit back, watch. The oil coaxes the temperature of the grains up higher and higher as the risotto begins the upward curve of its arc towards the moment when it wants for wine. When you hear the rice crackle a little, you know for certain they are gaining altitude on this arc and your focus zeroes in. Moments later, they are insistent and loud and you are reminded of a bonfire. Surely this must be as crackly as they will get before they begin to burn and stick to the bottom of the pan. If you do not act, the arc will complete: your job as a risotto cooker is to ensure that the arc never completes. The process stops here, now. And so you intervene, you add the wine. You act to create a new potential future.
Cooking is all about identifying that climax, that moment of potential discontinuity. Defining it for yourself, the way you might define a flower’s bloom. A good cook creates ruptures in time with confidence, noticing the moment as an invitation to decide and to act. The good cook can see multiple futures all at once: a future where the rice burns and a future where wine deglazes the pan and adds a nice perk of acidity to an otherwise rich dish. The good cook intervenes, choosing the latter. The arc is a useful tool to figure out how to act right now, it is a way of interpreting what’s going on in your pot – seeing the future in order to see the present.
Now, it hardly makes sense to claim “the onions are burning” when you’ve only just added them to a pan. And that’s because you and I both know something about these arcs: they’re all as made up as their peaks. They are not inevitable, nor guaranteed. They are a way of making meaning out of the passage of time. They are a way to imagine and then actualize our impact. We are agents in the kitchen with time-traveling powers. We are oracles and clairvoyants, able to guarantee little bits of the future: at the very least that the future will be delicious.
When we take on the task of cooking, we enmesh ourselves in the arcs and timelines of our ingredients. We work in concert with them and ultimately alter our own imaginary arcs, too. But as I’ve alluded to, this doesn’t only happen in the kitchen. It happens in the world at large, in general.
If you aren’t watching closely, or thinking ahead, you’ll miss the moments –– now –– that invite a change in plans. It’s a tricky balance, this “not-yet, now.” It’s tricky because it’s about being able to be here, now, with a view for what’s to come and what has already passed. Like with the flower, it's a matter of arbitrarily defining one moment as ripe for transition and doing with that what you will. You have options, like the good cook, between staying the course or intervening. It’s a matter of interpreting your world, your experience. Trusting your judgment.
These teensy, all-important presents become exaggerated when I am in the kitchen cooking, especially risotto. But it is helpful to bring with me that pseudo-clairvoyance and present-awareness elsewhere, too, to imagine myself as an actor in the big web of time that I live within. It was up to me to interpret those hard grains as a bowl of risotto, but it could’ve easily been otherwise.
I invite you to look and see, just what is going on in that pot on your stove. It may be comforting. It may be beautiful or disappointing. It very well may be dinner burning: nevertheless it is now, and you may want to treat it as such.
A recipe for risotto (adapted from Alice Waters & Marcella Hazan):
Ingredients
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 medium, yellow onion diced
Kosher salt
1 cup arborio rice (or other short-grain rice)
½ cup dry white wine
6 cups good chicken broth (or water, or vegetable broth)
½ to 1 cup freshly-grated parmesan cheese
2 tbsp unsalted butter
Freshly ground black pepper
Directions
Unlike with some other dishes, I like to prepare all of my ingredients prior to beginning to cook. That’s because the rice will stick if you decide to grate your parmesan or you may miss the moment when it’s time to ladle more broth. So, go ahead and prepare everything and then move onto the first step.
Begin heating the chicken broth in a small saucepan over medium heat. When it reaches a simmer, you can turn off the burner or leave it on low to keep the broth warm.
Put a wide, heavy-bottomed pot (like a dutch oven or saucepan) over medium-high heat on another burner and add oil to coat the pan. When the oil shimmers and is hot, add the onion. I like to salt onions as I add them to the oil.
After 8-10 minutes, the onion should be translucent and shiny, but not browning. Add the arborio rice to the pan, stirring to coat the beads in oil and toast the grains. They will start to look translucent on the edges, but maintain a center of white. Continue toasted for a few minutes until you hear them crackling.
Add the dry white wine to cover the rice and allow it to cook off. When the wine is completely cooked off, ladle one cup or so of the warm chicken broth over the rice. The broth should cover the rice, but you don’t want it drowning in there. Stir regularly to keep the grains from sticking to the pot, but don’t feel the need to be constantly stirring.
You’ll begin to see holes appear in the broth from bubbles – when the rice looks like it’s just about to absorb the broth, add another ladleful and salt the broth to taste – making sure to keep the rice constantly in the broth. Continue doing this for about 25-30 minutes.
It’s important to taste the rice continually because you’ll need to gauge the point when the rice only needs one more addition of broth before becoming fully cooked.
When the rice still has a little bite to it, but is mostly soft, add the last addition of broth.
Don’t let the broth absorb completely, take the pot off the heat while there is still some liquid broth and add the parmesan and butter: stir quickly. This stirring will develop the starches in the broth and rice into a wonderfully smooth, emulsified sauce. It’s like when you use pasta water to bind sauce to your noodles, but even better!
Adjust seasonings to taste and serve alongside a main dish. (I sometimes like to zest a little lemon on top or squeeze just a little lemon juice before serving).
There are bunch of different ways to brighten up a risotto by adding various vegetables – when you’ll add the vegetable depends on what kind you’ve chosen to incorporate – there are tons of risotto recipes out there, but they all will follow the same sort of basic structure. For the most thorough instructions I’ve found, I recommend Marcella Hazan’s Basic Risotto Recipe and the directions for making a risotto that I quoted above from Alice Water’s first cookbook: The Art of Simple Food.