Creamy Vegan Mushroom Risotto with Brocolli
Hey everyone,
One of my least favorite ingredients is actually mushrooms, I don’t know what it is but to me they’ve always been my worst food and as someone who’s never eaten meat, it’s quite a catastrophe. But I keep trying to force myself to try and cook them in new ways and I found an assortment of all different types of mushrooms, ones I’ve never even seen before so I grabbed them and came up with an idea to create a risotto.
Ingredients
Red Onion
White Onion
Garlic
Assortment of Mushrooms
Vegan Butter
Risotto Rice
White Wine
Vegetable Stock
Thyme
Tenderstem Brocolli
Olive Oil
Vegan Parmesan Cheese
Risotto can definitely be quite tricky but if you think of it more so a case of finding the right flavors before you even think about the cooking part, you’ll be absolutely fine. So the first thing you need to do is dice up an onion, one red one white. You can add carrot if you like but I wanted it to be simple so I skipped anything additional. With the larger mushrooms, I started to cut them up and added them to the pan with a cup of white wine, some salt and pepper and some thyme. Fry this until everythings softened and the liquid has reduced completely, it takes about 15 minutes on medium heat.
The way you cook risotto is actually quite an easy thing but it’s very time consuming as you have to keep on feeding the rice, that’s the phrase you use. When you’re doing it you’re wishing the bloody thing would feed you but there you have it. So you’ve prepped the onion and mushrooms, add some finely diced garlic. I used two cloves. Then we’re going to prepare some stock. So I used vegetable stock that I prebought this time, this was a good descision as I didn’t have enough home made for the whole meal.
The trick is, there is no cream in risotto, it’s the starch leaking out of the rice that creates that texture and what you need to do is really not have a set plan of what’s going to happen with quantities, just keep watching, tasting and adding more. So I prepared two half litre jugs of stock and I got through them. You first put 400g of risotto rice to the pan and you want it to crisp slightly, you need to do this before you even go in with any moisture so if the pan is not dry with the onions and mushrooms, you might get into a mischeif.
You then start after about three minutes of frying the risotto rice, to keep adding more and more stock. So you start with about half a cup, stir. Then another half a cup, stir. Is it creaming up? Is it looking cooked? You need to really keep your eyes peeled and this can take about 25 minutes. You should start tasting the rice around the 15 minute mark and when it’s perfect you’ll know.
The final step is to grate about a chunk of vegan parmesan into the dish and just stir it until the liquid has become sticky and part of the meal, and not rice floating in stock. It will be creamy and absolutely moorish.
I served with some steamed tenderstem brocolli and some more vegan cheese, this one is by vitalife and I’m not a huge fan of it, I prefered the Good Carma style parmasan which is much more similar to the real thing.
Let me know how you get on and if you wanted to adapt the recipe, what would you use? Sound off below.
