Adventures in Cooking: Wild Mushroom and Asparagus Risotto

The one word to describe preparing this dish: deceptive. Risotto is one of those foods I’ve always enjoyed at a nice restaurant but had never tried to at home. I was perusing Alton Brown’s recipes on Food Network, and ran into this recipe.

The deceptive part comes into play in the preparation. It’s very simple to make; or so it would have you think. Essentially put the rice in a pan, add some stock and wine, a little heat and let the rice take its time soaking up the liquid.

The recipe indicated that I’d be done in about 40 minutes. An hour later or so, it looked like it was finally done. However, upon tasting, it still had just a hint of a mealy taste, so I think it needed to spend even more time in the pan. Or perhaps I wasn’t using enough heat?

The other downside of this dish is that I didn’t have access to wild mushrooms and used regular instead. I know that really is no substitute, and it definitely came across that way when tasting.

I’d like to be able to rate this recipe, but I can’t, simply because I don’t think I prepared it right. It was still good enough to eat, but I didn’t have seconds and ended up tossing the rest of the batch. I’ll give this another shot in the near future and let you know my results!