We’ve already shared at HuffPost UK how restaurants make everything from salads to burgers and garlic bread taste so much better than many of us can make at home.
We’ve even revealed that the pros add an extra step when prepping broccoli.
But if (like) me you’ve always wanted to know how restaurants get fresh, perfectly cooked risotto on the table so quickly, it turns out they’ve got a secret trick up their sleeve for that, too.
How do restaurants cook fresh risotto so fast?
“The secret is that the rice is pre-cooked,” James Beard award-winning chef Alan Bergo shared on his site Forager Chef.
He added, “If you’ve ever wondered how fancy Italian restaurants serve risotto so quickly, it’s because the restaurant is pre-cooking and cooling their risotto before service.”
Aside from speeding the cooking process along, pre-cooking rice can improve the flavour and texture of the notoriously tricky dish, too.
“Pre-cooking the rice gives more control to the chef, helping them make sure the rice is done perfectly, and neither over or undercooked,” the chef wrote.
It’s not simply parboiled in water, either: the cookbook author and industry expert shared that the rice gets its first bath in onion, wine, water, and salt.
That way, he explains, you go from sweating over a hot stove while prepping dinner to an “effortless” meal you can knock up in no time.
Woah. So how do you pre-cook rice for risotto?
Bergo shared that he begins by gently frying off some onion until it’s translucent. Once that’s done, he adds the rice to the pan and coats it in the oil and onions, allowing it to cook for two minutes.
After that, he deglazes the pan with a splash of wine ― you can skip this step if you like.
Then comes the stock. He adds this in “ladles,” about 170ml at a time, ensuring each spoonful of stock has been absorbed by the rice before adding the next one.
“When the rice has absorbed about half of the total cooking liquid it will be roughly half cooked,” he advised ― at that point, you can remove the rice from the heat, place it on a baking tray, and create grooves in it with a spatula or knife to help it cool.
Another sign it’s done is if the rice is “soft on the outside, but still raw and very chewy in the middle, about ten minutes.”
That’s your pre-cooked rice, which you can simply store in the fridge and re-introduce more stick to later.
Genius, right?