Cooking Risotto with Saffron and Lamb Shanks

Just going to cook our onion until it's translucent and the next step is we are going to add our rice and we're going to toast our rice now we're using arborio rice from the arborio region of Italy this is a short grain starchy rice so we are going to toast our rice until becomes translucent um and then until we smell it get a little nutty okay so while that rice is toasting we're going to give another minute or so i'm going to take our white wine and i have some saffron here gorgeous color we are going to bloom the saffron in the wine now you could also bloom the saffron in the chicken stock that we're going to use you can always cook risotto with water make sure to season it use some some good cheese at the end and it's still going to be delicious now as you can see immediately the white wine starts to turn a beautiful golden color that's the saffron sort of releasing its color releasing its flavor and that's going to really help it incorporate into this dish so i'm going to go ahead and for our first incorporation of liquid i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to add that saffron infused wine as you can see the rice is just covered by that wine so we're going to wait until this absorbs it's simmering once the rice becomes just not covered by the liquid that's when we're going to start with the addition of our chicken stock

i am going to start our gremolata and we're going to go ahead and add our first kind of addition of stock gremlin is typically just garlic parsley lemon and it's a perfect foil for anything braised anything grilled but again we're taking that little bit of middle eastern flair on the dish and so perfect with lamb is adding ginger to the gremolata we're going to dice our shallots i'm just kind of going to take the edges off of this ginger if you want to make this a little bit easier go ahead and use a microplane i just mixed up my shallot and my ginger i'm going to salt it first and i'm adding some rice wine vinegar and i'm just adding enough vinegar to cover the shallots and the ginger and i'm going to let this chill for a few minutes we're going to go ahead and chop our our herbs i've got italian flat leaf parsley i've got thai basil and i've got mint i'm gonna give my friend a little spin over here and because we've added you know we've added about a quart of chicken stock at this point i'm gonna go ahead i'm gonna add a little bit more salt so i kept my herbs in little separate bunches just because i'm going to really carefully shift and nod them even if i've got a few bigger pieces that's going to be totally fine

we're going to go ahead and we're going to stream in our olive oil add a little bit more salt so i'm going to add a little bit of butter and you do want to stir that butter in and can you see this and that's so beautiful i want to come to your house and make this for every single one of you i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to grab my reggiano i'm kind of a freak about using a microplane for grating cheese so it lands just like perfectly melts on top of pasta this risotto is perfect and good to go i'm gonna taste it just to make sure our seasoning is great perfect and i'm so excited for this now one of the things to notice here is you know i talked about brazing at a little bit of a higher temperature than i typically would um and you can see right here that we've got like that beautiful darkening that beautiful caramelization because we braced it with a little bit higher temp because we didn't sear it ahead of time but we're still getting that gorgeous gorgeous color on the lamb so let's plate our dish there you have our very traditional untraditional lamb asabuko with saffron risotto and ginger garmelata

ok here's the true test is it braised all the way through oh my god this is just falling apart here this is such a perfect dish it's so flavorful the textures are so great you can taste the harissa you can taste the saffron they all play beautifully together nothing no one flavor overwhelms they're all just beautifully melded together if you guys want the recipe click on the link below and come up and visit me in boston at boxing the knife or bar vault day what i do when i don't feel like doing extra dishes or what

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi i'm karen ikenowicz from fox and the knife in bar volpe and i'm here to make lamb asabuko with saffron risotto and gromolata so we're going to start off by marinating our lamb shanks we'll have some pieces that are a little bit bigger some pieces that are a little bit thinner but that's okay they're all going to braise at the same temperature asabuko is a really traditional dish from the lombardy region in italy and what i like to do is i like to take this and i give it a little bit of a middle eastern twist or a little flare it's a beautiful combination and you just get a little bit different flavor so i'm going to start by adding all of my chopped rosemary to the lamb and i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to add my rose chorizo and i'm just going to get in there with my hands and we are going to make sure that all of our little lamb shanks are completely coated there we go so we're just going to take this we're going to pop it over here and we're going to let that hang out while we work on the rest of the dish one of the things i love about braising as well as making risotto is that as a really young cook they taught me patience yes you want to stir it but you also have to learn to let it sit and let it hang out i didn't start cooking until i was in my 20s my mom liked to say before that that i couldn't even boil water and i started cooking to impress a girl i went out i like bought a cookbook i went to whole foods i spent more money on groceries than i had ever than i had ever spent what did you mean i made um pasta but i think it was very bad but i made it and i thought i was just amazing and that feeling of cooking for somebody else of making something was a big part of why i started cooking did the putinesco work well you know we were together for three years we had a cat a joint bank account so i would say that's you know that's working out in terms of what working out means in life so really this whole career that i've built over 20 years it's really just about my dating life okay so we have diced up all of our mirepoix and we're going to go ahead and start the mirepoix in this beautiful dutch oven now one of the things i'll say this is one of the few recipes where i do not sear the meat first if you try to sear the lamb with the harissa marinade the harissa is going to burn i like to start my mirepoix by toasting my garlic first and i like it to get nice and golden brown one of the things i always say you want happy dancing garlic smells beautiful it's dancing in the pan and when it gets nice and beautiful and toasty like that once you add your other mirror pot to the pan once you add other ingredients to the pan it takes away some of the heat and you're not going to burn that garlic i typically start with the celery to get a little bit of heat on it it has the least amount of sugar of the next three vegetables so it needs a little bit more time to caramelize then i start with the carrots the onions have the most sugar so i throw them in last so the next thing i'm going to do is make sure that our mirepoix is nice and seasoned so i've got some kosher salt i've got some cracked black pepper and remember not adding anything else to this right now but we are going to have all of that harissa and all that rosemary in the braise from the lamb this is just gonna hang out until we get a little bit of caramelization on it we're going to add a little bit of tomato product to this braised it's going to add some acidity it's going to add a little bit of sweetness it's going to add a little bit of body and we're going to mill those tomatoes if you don't have a food mill at home sometimes when i don't want to do dishes i will just i'll just squish the tomatoes with my hands it's totally fine it'll be a tiny bit more rustic now you see that we've got all of like the goodness the deliciousness of the san marzano tomatoes perfect it's a perfect consistency we're starting to get some really nice color on our mirror plan now so we're going to go ahead and we're going to add our red wine and we're going to add our tomato we're going to cook that down a little bit in the same way that we would if we had seared the lamb we would add the wine and we would scrape up all of the beautiful brown bits from the bottom of the dutch oven we're going to do that we're going to scrape up all of the beautiful brown bits from the mirepoix so we're really mimicking searing the the meat ahead of time we're just using the vegetables instead of the meat okay so one of the ways that i can tell when the tomatoes and the wine have reduced enough is when you smell it and you don't get the alcohol smell from the wine it's kind of cooked off and it's reduced a little bit and it's gotten a little thick got a little bit jammy so we're going to go ahead and add the lamb to the pot and we're going to add it so the little the bone is sticking right up and these are going to sit just beautifully and we want to make sure that we're not crowding it too much this is one of my favorite parts about braising it's like putting it to bed so i'm going to season my lamb now this is something that i would have done ahead of time so i'm gonna season it on the top because i didn't do it ahead of time i season a little bit more aggressively this is like a little trick this is like if i did this at the restaurant i would say i would say to my cook like do as i say and not as i do all right so i've got some chicken stock here now if you happen to have some lamb stock hanging around you could use lamb stock i don't know if too many people i don't keep lamb stock in my freezer at home and we're going to cover this so it is two-thirds of the way up most of the lamp we are going to let this come back up to a simmer because we want the braised to be nice and hot when it goes into the oven we're gonna pop it in the oven for two and a half to three hours we're gonna check it about halfway through just to make sure we're on the right track make sure it doesn't need a little bit more liquid all right so our lamb is bubbling and beautiful we're just gonna go ahead and cover that up and pop it in the oven so while our lamb is braising in the oven we are going to start on our saffron risotto this is a very traditional accompaniment to asabuko i'm going to start the risotto by dicing a small spanish onion about a tablespoon or two just to cover the bottom of the pan of olive oil to start the risotto and when i first learned to make it i made a lot of really bad risotto i think it's something that's really intimidating to people the thing is it's not that hard to be completely honest if you overcook it a little it's still going to be delicious and if you undercook it a little it's still going to be delicious so we're seasoning our onion we're just going to cook our onion until it's translucent and the next step is we are going to add our rice and we're going to toast our rice now we're using arborio rice from the arborio region of italy this is a short grain starchy rice so we are going to toast our rice until becomes translucent um and then until we smell it get a little nutty okay so while that rice is toasting we're going to give another minute or so i'm going to take our white wine and i have some saffron here gorgeous color we are going to bloom the saffron in the wine now you could also bloom the saffron in the chicken stock that we're going to use you can always cook risotto with water make sure to season it use some some good cheese at the end and it's still going to be delicious now as you can see immediately the white wine starts to turn a beautiful golden color that's the saffron sort of releasing its color releasing its flavor and that's going to really help it incorporate into this dish so i'm going to go ahead and for our first incorporation of liquid i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to add that saffron infused wine as you can see the rice is just covered by that wine so we're going to wait until this absorbs it's simmering once the rice becomes just not covered by the liquid that's when we're going to start with the addition of our chicken stock i am going to start our gremolata and we're going to go ahead and add our first kind of addition of stock gremlin is typically just garlic parsley lemon and it's a perfect foil for anything braised anything grilled but again we're taking that little bit of middle eastern flair on the dish and so perfect with lamb is adding ginger to the gremolata we're going to dice our shallots i'm just kind of going to take the edges off of this ginger if you want to make this a little bit easier go ahead and use a microplane i just mixed up my shallot and my ginger i'm going to salt it first and i'm adding some rice wine vinegar and i'm just adding enough vinegar to cover the shallots and the ginger and i'm going to let this chill for a few minutes we're going to go ahead and chop our our herbs i've got italian flat leaf parsley i've got thai basil and i've got mint i'm gonna give my friend a little spin over here and because we've added you know we've added about a quart of chicken stock at this point i'm gonna go ahead i'm gonna add a little bit more salt so i kept my herbs in little separate bunches just because i'm going to really carefully shift and nod them even if i've got a few bigger pieces that's going to be totally fine we're going to go ahead and we're going to stream in our olive oil add a little bit more salt so i'm going to add a little bit of butter and you do want to stir that butter in and can you see this and that's so beautiful i want to come to your house and make this for every single one of you i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to grab my reggiano i'm kind of a freak about using a microplane for grating cheese so it lands just like perfectly melts on top of pasta this risotto is perfect and good to go i'm gonna taste it just to make sure our seasoning is great perfect and i'm so excited for this now one of the things to notice here is you know i talked about brazing at a little bit of a higher temperature than i typically would um and you can see right here that we've got like that beautiful darkening that beautiful caramelization because we braced it with a little bit higher temp because we didn't sear it ahead of time but we're still getting that gorgeous gorgeous color on the lamb so let's plate our dish there you have our very traditional untraditional lamb asabuko with saffron risotto and ginger garmelata okay here's the here's the true test is it braised all the way through oh my god this is just falling apart here this is such a perfect dish it's so flavorful the textures are so great you can taste the harissa you can taste the saffron they all play beautifully together nothing no one flavor overwhelms they're all just beautifully melded together if you guys want the recipe click on the link below and come up and visit me in boston at boxing the knife or bar vault day what i do when i don't feel like doing extra dishes or what and i'm done i was like what did i do what did i do i got i didn't go for the white eyelid\n"