Cook's note: You can use five to six cups of liquid depending on the rice you use, and whether you like a drier risotto.
We brought down with us, on the airplane from New York, a cooler containing filets of beef, wild quail, risotto, dried mushrooms, a selection of fresh fine herbs, coffee beans and a grinder.
An Arctic char special was also cooked correctly, but its asparagus-wild mushroom risotto was dry.
My fillet steak was tender, the vegetables fresh, but my companion's saffron risotto rather dry and salty.
Sautéed mushrooms were a little dry, and a pumpkin risotto, which was both too rich and undercooked (the interior of the rice chalky), was frankly disappointing.
Whole, grilled, Mediterranean "loup de mer" was beautifully cooked and presented, but lemon risotto was dry and chalky, served in a cylinder of cooked Parmesan that was too thick to be crisp.
Most of the recipes include at least one exotic or unexpected element: rambutan fruit in Indian curry; King Oyster mushrooms in tagliatelle; maracujas in tomato-bread salad; dried flower petals in risotto.
This was served with risotto and dried porcini mushrooms that had been reconstituted.
Dry polenta, rather than classic risotto, accompanied this stringy cooked-out meat.
I'm not often a fan – I think they can be quite dry and disappointing compared to risotto – but this was a beautiful golden sphere, so saffrony, and when you opened it up it had bone marrow in the middle.
