Wild mushroom risotto: immeasurably comforting

I don’t know about you, but I’m finding it a little hard to get out of my own head, these days. I’m trying not to think about how long life has felt stalled, how many days we have spent inside the same four walls, save for a daily constitutional, how many more we have to do. Those projects of early lockdown – jigsaws, learning a new language, finally reading Moby Dick – have lost their allure. There’s little to define the days, or break them up; the weekends feel the same as the weekdays.

In an attempt to get close to culinary mindfulness (or mindlessness, I really don’t mind) I’ve found myself reaching for dishes that don’t require a lot of thinking, but do need attention. Risotto is meditative: anyone who knows anything about risotto knows that it must be stirred for ages. But it’s more than that: to make a risotto properly, you have to pass through a number of stages, one, two, three, four, five, six, something I find immeasurably comforting. Perhaps it’s the treadmill nature of the days, weeks, months bleeding into one another, repeating themselves, but the predictable progression of a risotto is soothing.

So, the stages: il soffrito: the gentle frying of the base until soft and translucent, usually onions or shallots, sometimes garlic, carrots and celery. The second stage is la tostatura, when the rice is toasted in the oil in the pan: this toasting stops the rice from becoming mushy when the liquid is added. Next, lo sfumato, adding the wine to the pan. The sigh that the wine makes as it hits the hot pan is more cathartic and more stress relieving that a sports massage. I physically feel my shoulders fall a couple of inches when it happens.

Now, the main event, lat cottura, the gradual adding of stock and cooking of the rice, the stirring, the checking.