Mushroom & Chorizo Risotto

Ever since I was a kid, on a cold, blustery night, I have always found a bowl of risotto a hearty, comforting meal.  There's something about its thick, rich flavours and textures that can always make me feel at home, safe and warm in doors. 

 

This is a recipe that a friend suggested years ago when we were all at university.  A bunch of us had rented a wee cottage up in the Highlands, in a beautiful little town called Portknockie and had spent the time wrapped up warm against the bitter December / January frosts.  I've played around with it a bit since then, but the basic premise – marrying the spicy, Moorish flavours of chorizo with the earthy goodness of mushrooms endures.

 

Ingredients:

 

½ to ¾ of a chorizo (get the real thing, the whole sausage, not sliced spicy salami)

250g chestnut mushrooms (button chestnuts work best)
25g dried mushrooms

1 white onion (I've used shallots only because they needed eating up – normally I'd use an onion)

2 garlic cloves
300g risotto rice
187ml white wine (that's a weird number but it’s conveniently – and by no means coincidentally – exactly one of those little, single serving bottles)
500ml chicken stock (or a bit more if you have it to hand)
50g salted butter
100g parmesan (plus a bit more to sprinkle on top, if that's your thing)

 

1. First, put your dried mushrooms into a jug and pour over plenty of boiling water – at least 300mls – to rehydrate them.  They need at least 10-15 minutes, so do this at the outset.

 

2. Now, chop the onions finely and the garlic very finely.  Slice the mushrooms.  Chop the chorizo into matchsticks, about a half centimetre across – you could also cube it, but I prefer matchsticks. 

 

3. Stick the chorizo in the largest frying pan you have.  It doesn’t need to have a lid.  You really, really don’t need to add any oil – I know this sounds unnatural, but very quickly the fat in the chorizo will melt out, and that's all the oil you're gonna need for this dish.

 

Once the chorizo is browned off, and lots of fat has been rendered out, remove it from the pan with a slotted spoon and put to one side. Resist the temptation to eat it as much as you possibly can. Leave behind all of the fat.

 

4. Soften, but don’t brown, the onions.  When they're almost there, add the garlic too.  The paprika from the sausage will give the whole pan a wonderful orangey hue.

 

 

5. Whilst the onions are softening, it's time to deal with your now somewhat less dry mushrooms.  Now, you want to preserve the liquor they've been in as far as humanly possible because it tastes phenomenal and we're going to use it to cook the risotto.  However, the problem you have is that dried mushrooms are covered in grit, so you want to separate that from the water (and, indeed, the 'shrooms).

 

So, first, strain the mushrooms using muslin or (in a pinch) a coffee filter paper.  I've even known people to put it through a cafetiere, but I'd be worried that (a) the mesh isn’t fine enough and (b) the mushrooms will end up tasting like coffee.  When the liquid has drained give the cloth a really good squeeze to get as much flavour out as possible. 

 

 

Next, stick the mushrooms in a sieve and give them a quick blast with water from the kettle.  You can lose this water – it's there simply to wash off any residual grit.  Put the mushrooms into the rinsed muslin / a new filter and give them another squeeze, this time preserving the water.

 

Once that's done, you should have some rehydrated dried mushrooms and a jug full of mushroom liquor.  Chop the mushrooms up medium finely.

 

 

6. Once the onions and garlic are soft, add the sliced fresh mushrooms and dried mushrooms to the pan and soften, but again try to avoid browning anything.

 

 

7. Reintroduce the chorizo to the pan, and introduce it to new friends mushrooms, garlic and onion (I actually forgot to do it at this stage, but it was far from critical).  Add the risotto rice and stir everything in, so that the rice is covered with fat.  Turn the heat all the way up for a minute or two.

 

 

8. Leaving the heat up at its highest, add the wine – all in one go.  Without stirring or even touching the rice, let the liquid cook off. 

 

9.  Now, the long, boring part.  Turn the heat down to about one-third.  Ladle by ladle (or slightly more if you like) add all of the mushroom liquor, stirring the whole mix up with each addition and cooking off each time.  At its most liquid, you should get tiny, simmering bubbles.  Once the mushroom liquor is used up, start adding the stock.  Taste it from time to time – it should take all the stock, and you may even need more / some boiling water from the kettle – but there's no harm keeping an eye on it all.  You want it just al dente. 

 

 

10. When the risotto is cooked and at your preferred level of bite, turn the heat off completely and add the butter and parmesan.  Season well with pepper, but remember that the saltiness of the stock and the parmesan will have added a lot of salt, so taste before seasoning.  Mix it all up so that the cheese and butter are fully melted and combined. 

 

 

Serve sprinkled more cheese if you like that kind of thing.

 

 

This makes a great dish for four hungry folk, or sits nicely in the fridge for a few days if you want to make something to eat through the week.

 

 - GrubsterBoy -

Sloe Gin

It's properly November now.  Winter in the air, temperatures dropping, the heating is properly on (yes, it needs more than an extra jumper), hot drinks are de rigueur,  Christmas lights are blinking into action, and we’ve had the first frosts of the year.

 

What's that you say?  First frosts?  Can only mean one thing: sloe-gin-making-season is upon us.

 

 

Making sloe gin – in fact, making any kind of liqueur, pickle, jam, chutney, conserve, etc – I find remarkably satisfying.  There's something so wonderfully homey, so fantastically back-to-basics, down-to-earth about using some ancient and time honoured tradition to preserve flavours and fruits, creating a whole new concoction from the raw materials you have to hand at the time.

 

A few weeks ago I did damson gin.  This recipe is basically the same, albeit with sloes and a little less sugar.  Both recipes are adapted from the Cottage Smallholder blog, which is fantastic and a must-read for anyone looking to make fruit infusion liqueurs. 

 

What's more, this has been a bumper year for sloes.  We wandered off to a blackthorn bush we know of nearby and found it positively drooping under the weight of all the fruit – the amount I've made was not the total of the bush's produce; it was the amount picked by the time the pickers got fed up.

 

 

Ingredients:

 

450g Sloes
75ml Gin
150g Sugar
Small handful of blanched almonds (Sadly, GG is allergic to nuts, so I left this out – but it's generally accepted that this brings a touch of magic to sloe gin.  Also, you can add three drops of almond essence on bottling, if you prefer.)

 

1.5 litre kilner jar for steeping

 

First thing first – I just made the requisite amount from the sloes I had (1,456 grams...) so the pictures show a quantity far outstripping the amounts above.  I just keep the proportions the same.  Second, this will produce a less sweet and sickly concoction.  If you like it sweeter, taste it after straining and add sugar to fit your preferences. 

 

Second: Choice of gin is not too important.  Don’t go for really, really cheap gin – it's flavoured artificially – so what's the point in making flavoured gin if all you're doing is masking artificial flavourings?  But don’t spend too much on it.  I generally use supermarket brand gin, which is good enough (although having said that, it's probably artificial...).  I also had a rummage around the spirits cupboard and found quite a few almost-empty bottles to use up.  Someone will probably say you shouldn’t go mixing gin, but meh.  Also, vodka works equally well with both recipes – last year we made damson vodka, not gin – but we went for gin this time around.

 

 

1. Pick your sloes.  As ever, please don’t go stealing fruit from other people's trees – you never know whether they plan on doing exactly the same thing, and there's nothing more depressing than going to a carefully nurtured patch only to find that someone's nicked all your fruit.  Just ask the landowner – you can even offer a bottle of the finished product by way of payment, if you're feeling generous.

 

Sloes are seriously beautiful fruit, too. 

 

 

And perfect for Instagram-ing...

 

 

Before you go any further, now's a good time to clean them thoroughly.  Pluck out their little stalks and remove all the leaves.  I forgot to do this, and it turned into a bit of a nightmare later on.  Remember, if you leave this stuff in it will infect the flavour of the finished gin.

 

2. Freeze the sloes overnight.  This does one thing with two bonuses: It the freezing juice bursts all the little cells inside, leading to: One, the release of more juice; and two, it simulates the frosts, breaking down the cellulose inside which (I understand, although only vaguely) improves the flavour.  This year the sloes came early, so I couldn’t really wait until they'd been properly punished by the frosts.  Fiona at Cottage Smallholder ran an experiment to see what produced the best sloe gin – sloes frozen by the frost, sloes frozen in the freezer, or sloes unfrozen altogether.  The result was the frosts, but the freezer in second.  So unless you're in a position (a) second guess what the weather might do; and (b) be on hand to pick them as soon as the frosts have arrived, this method seems the best bet.

 

I simply packed them all into freezer bag and lay flat in the freezer for overnight.

 

 

They came out looking fantastic.  You can almost taste the wonderfully, Christmassy spirit already. 

 

 

 

Whilst they're frozen they're like little marbles – they're the right size, and they sound, look, feel and roll like little marbles.  Ever so cool.

 

3. Defrost them thoroughly.  Laying them flat on a baking tray helps speed this up. 

 

4. You need to prick your sloes.  Some people say that freezing them does this for you, but I'm not really satisfied with that, to be honest.  So get out a cocktail stick (or several), put on an apron and get picking.

 

They are squirty little blighters, so be careful – don’t do this kind of work over an antique table whilst sitting on a cream coloured sofa.  Like we did.

 

 

Once you're done, you should have a bowl full of sloes and they're juice.  Don’t waste anything by washing up the bowl now.  I pour a glassful of gin in there, give it a rinse, and add it to the steeping jar to capture all the – but I'm getting ahead of myself...

 

 

5. Tip all the sloes into the jar.  Add the sugar and your almonds (if using them).  Pour the gin over the top.  Keep the bottles – you'll see why below. 

 

 

Seal and give it a shake.

 

 

6. Now go stick it in a cupboard, shaking daily for the first week or so, until all of the sugar has dissolved. 

 

7. Leave it alone.  Seriously.  This brew needs a good six months, minimum.  Leaving it too long will ruin the flavour, sure, but that's unlikely to happen until they've had a year or more. 

 

8. At the end of the steeping time, strain and bottle (told you you'd need those bottles).  Strain it through a fine cheesecloth or muslin.  Don’t be tempted to squeeze the bag – it won’t do any good, and will only add sediment, which you don’t want.  If you have the time, leave it to drip overnight.

 

I actually did last year's batch a few weeks back, so here are some pictures of that process.

 

After ten months in a cupboard...

 

...strained...

...and bottled for maturation.

 

9. Now it needs time to mature – sorry, but really does.  Leave it another six months, minimum.  Remember – you're making sloe gin for next Christmas, not this Christmas.

 

10. Drink.  A fantastic cocktail is what a friend of mine calls the Sloegasm: A measure of sloe gin topped up with Champagne or prosecco or Cava or English fizz – basically, an English Kir Royale.

 

 

 

 - GrubsterBoy -

 

PS: As a quick note: This sloe gin is made by simply steeping the sloes in gin for a long time.  There is an alternative method that involves fermentation.  But I'm saving that for next year.