The Daring Cooks Challenge: Risotto

The 2010 March Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Eleanor of MelbournefoodGeek and Jess of Jessthebaker. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make risotto. The various components of their challenge recipe are based on input from the Australian Masterchef cookbook and the cookbook Moorish by Greg Malouf.

I have always wanted to make risotto, however its reputation for being tricky to master has kept me far away.

The rules of this challenge were very flexible. The only requirements were: You MUST make your own stock and the risotto base. The base consists of wine, rice, oil, stock, cheese, and butter.

Make my own stock? Never done that before. I began to wonder what I was getting myself into, but I guess that is the main reason I signed up for the Daring Cooks/Bakers Challenges.

Stock was easy but time consuming. It consisted of bone-in chicken, onion, garlic, carrots, celery, flat-leaf parsley, thyme, bay leaf, peppercorns, and water.


We used the cooked chicken to make Chicken and Rice for dinner and then Chicken Salad for lunches.

P & I decided to stick with a very basic Risotto recipe and made Parmesan and Parsley Risotto. It consisted of: onions, butter, wine, rice, oil, stock, LOTS of parmesan cheese and parsley. Unfortunately we added too much stock and ended up with risotto soup, but it still tasted excellent and lesson learned: be careful when adding stock towards the end of the recipe.


Although my first attempt of making Risotto was partially unsuccessful, I will definitely be trying this one again.