Recipe Results: Risotto with Seven Wild Herbs (Actually Four)

This is the second recipe I’ve made from this book:

So far, neither recipe (other was Risotto with Arugula and Gorgonzola) has really been to my taste, but I still think this book has potential as the actual risotto base was nice even if I didn’t like the flavorings.

For this recipe, you make a standard risotto with Arborio rice, wine, veggie stock (more delicious Mark Bittman roasted vegetable stock for me) and seven million shallots. 

At the end, you add a “handful” of chopped herbs.  She recommends sage, parsley, basil, thyme, mint, oregano, and marjoram, but says you can use any.  I used sage, marjoram, thyme and rosemary.  Sounds tasty, right?  But I think I messed this up in a few ways specifically related to the addition of the herbs.

For one, if you use a fewer number of herbs, you will be using more of any one herb which opens the door for the individual herb flavors to be more assertive than she probably intended. This was the case with the sage I used: it made it just taste strongly of sage. 

Natalie Goldberg, my favorite writer who writes about writing, once wrote something to the effect that even if you are writing about something very dramatic, the writing itself should be calm, so that the big subject doesn’t “bolt upright like a rodeo horse and run out of the sentence.” This is the phrase that came to mind when tasting the risotto because the sage was definitely bolting out of the risotto like a rodeo horse. 

In addition to the issues with herb selection, I think I also might have minced instead of chopped, which creates more open surface area and ergo stronger flavors.

Unlike the arugula and gorgonzola, this also did not improve in flavor when made into a risotto pancake the next day.  Still just a bunch of creamy-textured sage kernels.  Not wholly unpleasant, but not what I was aiming for.

So I would recommend and make this again, but would also do the following differently:

1. Actually use seven herbs.
2. Use a smaller proportion of especially pungent herbs like sage.
3. Make sure I chop the herbs, not finely mince.

Overall, the dish as made was probably a two, but I’ll give the recipe a three-star rating because I think it has potential.

Picture here.