In Argentine, we know this dish as “arroz con azafrán”. It’s not exactly the same, but I would say it’s pretty close. I’ve eaten it many times, with and without chicken (before becoming vegan). The vegan version of this risotto replaces the usual butter and parmesan cheese with olive oil and nutritional yeast flakes. Following Nico’s suggestion, I also added a bit of cornstarch to make it creamier, without adding extra oil, cheese, or vegan butter.
I wonder if using coconut oil instead of olive oil for the mantecado at the end of the preparation would make a significant difference. I am curious! I’d probably try that on my next try. I added a bonus recipe: risotto al salto. It’s pretty much a rice tortilla/omelette. I thought it could well with vegan cheese inside, so I added some 😊.
Recipe of the Week: Risotto allo Zafferano
One of the best things about preparing this risotto was the homemade broth. I rediscovered the importance of celery in a veggie broth. This one also used carrots, onions, and bay leaves. Simple but effective. The preparation of this risotto doesn’t take a lot of time, but it calls for doing several things simultaneously. For example, preparing the broth, getting ready the saffron threads, then pre-heating the rice. Well, it’s not all at the same time, but almost! 😁
A couple opportunities for improvement: next time I’d like to try extending the mantecado (the whiskying at the end of the cooking process, after adding the fat matter) for a couple minutes. This time I forgot about the instructions of doing it for 2-3 minutes, and I did it very quickly (less than a minute). I think I could have added some more broth at the end to get a creamier consistency. Those are a couple things to improve on the visual aspect. The taste was pretty good, though! 😃
I presented the dish mixing ideas from a couple YouTube videos 🙂.
Bonus recipe: Riso al salto
The day after preparing the risotto I wanted to try the riso al salto showed in the second part of the video. I added a few slices of vegan cheese between the layers (that was not in the original recipe! 🙂).
New Vocabulary
I added 17 new cards to my Anki deck, based on new words and expressions used on the YouTube videos used for this recipe. There were some words in this list that I already know, but I want to reinforce them. I used the Google Chrome extension “Learning Languages with YouTube” (from the same creators of “Learning Languages with Netflix”).
That’s all for now! 😊
