The Rice Man Cometh

On a chance encounter in Italy, the author meets a true risotto master and learns the meaning of mastering herself

Laura Fraser

Every once in awhile, a guru crosses your path, one who can reveal meaning and mystery. We have to be ready for these moments of grace that can stir the soul—or in my case, the risotto.

Gurus don’t usually announce themselves. You wouldn’t expect, for example, that the driver who picked you up at your hotel on the way to visit a winery in Piedmont, Italy, would be a guru. But life is short, and you never know just who is driving your car, so you might as well ask a few questions.

Angelo Fornara, a friendly and outgoing man, was surprised I speak Italian, and for the first moments of our 45-minute drive, we exchanged pleasantries. Then I asked him where he is from.

“Vercelli.”

Vercelli may mean nothing to you. If you are not a devotee, like me, on a quest, the most you may know about Vercelli is that it is a handsome city of about 45,000 people in the Piedmont’s Po River Valley. But to one who is searching to understand the mysteries, “Vercelli” means much more. It means carnaroli. It means, to a lesser extent, arborio. It means, in short, risotto. The best rice and the best risotti in the world come from Vercelli. People there have been stirring risotto since medieval times, when the Arabs brought rice north and some enterprising Italian flooded the Po River Valley and planted a few hectares.

Search for Perfection

For over 10 years, I have been trying to make the perfect risotto. It sounds easy, and a lot of Italians make it look easy: You sauté some onions in a little butter or olive oil, toss in some rice, glaze it, add a splash of wine, then broth, one ladle at a time, stirring all the while, until the rice absorbs or your arm gives out. When it’s almost ready, you throw in a few condiments (mushrooms, shrimp, asparagus, fresh peas, pancetta, whatever), and grate a little cheese on top at the end. Voilá. Risotto.

But risotto can go terribly wrong. You could use brown rice, for instance, and end up with a dish that not even the hippies in your college communal house would eat when they were stoned. You could use bouillon cubes instead of real stock and produce gruel that tastes thin and metallic. You could cook it too long and make glop. You could forget to stir, wander off to check your e-mail, and ruin your pot along with the risotto. You could add the condiments at the wrong time, making them tough and over-cooked, or raw and crunchy. You could use old wine that had turned bad and wind up with risotto that tasted like old wine that had turned bad. You could add too much cheese, or the wrong cheese, and it would come out stringy. You could undercook risotto and crack your teeth. You could, as most restaurants do, cook it halfway, then fire it up before serving it, ruining its consistency.

Risotto is all about learning from failure.

Risotto is a practice, one that requires patience, letting go of regrets about past attempts and expectations of the future. To make risotto, you have to be in the moment. You have to be alive to the ingredients, honor and understand them, and wait while their true natures are revealed. Risotto is egoless. To the degree that you have mastered risotto—and there is no perfection, only striving—you have mastered yourself.

Guru Wanted

That’s why I had long been searching for a risotto guru. I don’t want to brag here, but I already make the best risotto in San Francisco, at least among people with no Italian blood, so there was no one to take me to that next level of transcendence. Now that I’d met someone from Vercelli—my culinary Mecca—I could barely contain my excitement.

“So,” I asked Angelo, nonchalantly. “I guess you must eat risotto if you are from Vercelli.”

He took his hands off the wheel for a moment to give me one of those fond Italian gestures that means, Of course, you idiot. The car swerved and he righted our direction just in time to avoid an oncoming car.

“So I suppose you make a pretty good risotto yourself,” I ventured.

Angelo shrugged, with a little beatific smile on his face. Then he couldn’t resist. “There are very few things in this world that I can say I am competent at,” he said. “Risotto is one of them.” He went on to add that his friends considered him perhaps the best risottoist of their acquaintance, but he could take no credit for it—that was all due to his grandmother, who learned to make risotto from his great-grandmother, and etc., back to whomever in the Po Valley first had the wits to stir the rice and let the broth absorb slowly, releasing the creamy starch, instead of just putting the pot lid on and letting it cook.

I told Angelo that I like to make risotto. I’m no expert, like someone from Vercelli, but I like a nice asparagus version in the spring, maybe a butternut squash in the winter.

“Zucca e gorgonzola,” he said. Winter squash and gorgonzola. This was getting interesting.

Riddle Me This

For the next half hour, I peppered him with questions about the whole process. Do you use butter or oil in the soffrito (the sauté with the onions)? Alas, he never had an easy answer to my questions; they were always more like a riddle. Butter is better for some risotti—the heartier ones—and olive oil for the lighter, summer ones; often, however, he uses a mix (the proportions of which depend on the type of risotto). You just have to know your risotto.

Okay. Red onions, white onions, or leeks? Again, it depends—but he tends to use scallions. Scallions? I had never used scallions. Really? Then I wracked the Italian side of my brain and realized: scalogni. Not scallions. Shallots. My next risotto nearly destroyed by one of those linguistic falsi amici, or “false friends.”

So after the soffrito is nice and golden and the shallots are transparent, you add the rice. Angelo uses only carnaroli rice, which is a short-grained rice that is more absorptive even than arborio, which is acceptable, and more commonly used. (Carnaroli rice is not cheap. You will think you are buying the truffles for your risotto, not the rice.) Using any other kind of rice, Angelo said, is barbaric. Call it Chinese or Indian food if you want to use some other kind of rice, but don’t call it risotto.

Then comes the wine, to sfumare the rice. This is the first time I have heard this term, a verb particular to risotto, and I am delighted. There is a whole verb that means infusing the rice with wine. I would run around for weeks afterward singing (to the tune of “Volare”) “Sfumare, oh-oh-oh-oh.”

Wine Dining

But which wine? Angelo, it turns out, works at Batasiolo, a Piedmont winery famous for its Barolos, Spumantes, and Barberas, so he has quite a choice. There is no using up old bad wine for Angelo. He conceded to me that perhaps you could use a flat spumante, but nothing that had truly gone off. Wine is an essential ingredient in risotto, like anything else, and all the ingredients have to be excellent. It’s all about the “material prima,” the prime materials. That’s what makes risotto good.

So…red or white?

He shakes his head. Have I learned nothing? It depends. If you are making a delicate risotto with zucchini flowers, would you use red? Of course not. A nice frog’s leg risotto? White! If it’s winter and you have some meaty mushrooms? Maybe. Quail risotto? Barbera. White beans and sausage? Red.

Okay, now we have sfumated the rice. It is time to add broth. The broth, of course, must be hot. If you have cold broth, it will shock the rice or something. It will not absorb properly. It will make glue.

“Che schifo,” I said. How disgusting. He nodded. I was catching on.

But, I wondered, what kind of broth? Chicken? Beef? “I suppose it depends,” I said.

He nodded. In general, he said, he uses veal broth. They have very good veal in Piedmont, so naturally, the veal broth is very good.

“Pollo?”

With a lighter risotto, yes, he might use chicken – but actually no. He would only capons for his broth.

Capons.

Yes. Capons, he explained, are roosters with no palle, so they develop without sex hormones, which give the meat a vaguely nasty taste. Capons are more flavorful than hens, also because the flesh is a little more fatty, which makes it more tender.

I do not know where to get capons. It was becoming clear that my risotto broth was going to cost as much as flying to Italy. I asked if I could get away with putting a chicken carcass in water with some celery, carrot, and a bay leaf, boil it up, call it stock, and use that for risotto. When I tell people in the States that I make my own stock, instead of pouring it from the cardboard box, they are impressed. Angelo gave me a look that said, You poor Americans.

The White Stuff

I asked him about contorni, the stuff you put into risotto. “There are so many risotti that this discussion could go on for the rest of our lives,” he said. He pointed to a hill in the distance. “We’re almost there.”

I had only a few more minutes to get answers to some essential questions.

Al dente or creamy? Definitely al dente, chewy in the center of the rice. Texture is everything with risotto.

Cheese? A good Parmigiano-Reggiano, or even better, a salty sheep’s cheese, a Sardinian pecorino.

Do you add a little cream at the end? Angelo gave a look of disgust. “Anyone who adds cream to risotto doesn’t know how to make risotto. Risotto is creamy if you make it right.”

We came in view of the hotel, a gorgeous, modern, five-star luxury hotel called Il Boscareto. I only wished that I could actually watch my guru make risotto, and taste his risotto, but I knew that was unlikely. I did actually hint about that, in case he wanted to invite me over for dinner. Then I thanked him and said, “ciao, ciao.”

Mystery Chef

The next day I was invited to eat with the owner of the winery and hotel and some friends at Batasiolo’s Bofani vineyard. A table for 20 was set outside a villa, underneath some trellises overlooking hillsides covered with the best Barolo grapes anywhere. I suspected we were going to have plin for lunch, the little raviolis that Piedmont is famous for. The owner, Fiorenzo Dogliani, invited me into the kitchen to meet the chef.

To my surprise, there was Angelo, sfumanding the risotto. He had braised some pancetta with the shallots, reserving other pancetta to add at the end, for some difference in texture. He showed me his big pan, then shooed me out of the kitchen. I wanted to stay, but he insisted I go drink some spumante instead. I begged. But he was not about to give up all his secrets to any American who walked into his kitchen—or for that matter, to anyone.

In about 20 minutes, Angelo appeared with a beautiful ceramic platter filled with golden risotto. This risotto was his nod to spaghetti carbonara—a risotto carbonara, with egg yolks, parmesan, pancetta and pepper. The risotto was perfectly creamy and al dente at the same time, with both crunchy and soft pieces of pancetta. It was amazing paired with a Batasiolo Sovrana Barbera d’Alba 2007.

“Non é male,” I told Angelo. It’s not bad. His face fell a bit. “It’s the best,” I said.

“There is one secret ingredient,” Angelo told me.

I raised my eyebrows. I knew better than to ask outright.

“Passion,” he said.

For everything I had learned from Angelo about risotto, what remained, after the last grains of the second plate of risotto were gone, was that all I knew about risotto was how little I really knew.

I could give you Angelo’s recipe, but it wouldn’t matter. It would never turn out like his. Besides, I’m sworn to secrecy.

Risotto is all about learning from failure.