Welcome to The Globe’s Recipe Lab, where food culture reporter Dakshana Bascaramurty explores what makes recipes work well.
The objective:
A vegetarian dinner that contains a week’s worth of greens without tasting like it.
It’s easy to incorporate lots of greens into my diet in the summer when there’s a bounty of fresh produce available, but it’s harder to pull off when autumn hits. With some shame, I admit that sometimes the only green things on my plate are hastily sliced cucumbers. At this time of year, all I want are warm, stick-to-your-ribs meals – yet I know it’s also when my body needs more vitamins, fibre and iron.
In her new book, Gather Around My Table, Kay Chun offers a dish that seems to do it all: super-greens risotto with kale and seaweed.
The first time Chun tried risotto, it reminded her of juk, the Korean rice porridge that was her ultimate comfort food as a child. She wondered whether she could incorporate more familiar Korean flavours plus a superfood into a risotto, to make something that tasted luxurious but that she could “also feel really good eating.”
Joshua McFadden’s famous kale sauce pasta (in which you make a velvety sauce with olive oil, kale, garlic and Parmesan) is a staple in my home, and Chun’s risotto struck me as a more complex, tasty evolution of that dish. I was keen to try it.
The process:
The recipe asks for one bunch of kale, but that volume of the leafy green can be bitter and overpowering when used raw. That’s why Chun asks you to blanch it, which mellows its bite and boosts its verdancy. Blitzed together with seaweed and some of the water it was cooked in, the result is a beautiful, hunter-green purée with a briny aroma. (Make sure you let the blender run a good while at a high speed so you don’t have any long fibres in your sauce.)
When developing the recipe, Chun experimented with reconstituted dried seaweed, but it made the dish too gelatinous. The dry, roasted kind comes in a perfectly convenient package (I often have them at home to put in my daughter’s lunch box) and offers that unmistakable seaweed flavour with a bit of nuttiness.
The majority of the effort with risotto is standing by the stove to stir in the liquid, which is added in several small amounts. This process gradually incorporates the rice’s starch into the broth and makes for a creamy final product without the addition of any cream. I’ve tried the shortcut method that calls for less stirring, but didn’t like the final result. Take the time to stir!
Chun offers three suggestions for broth: smoky kelp, brisket beef and a low-sodium chicken. The first two she has recipes for in her book, but in an effort to save time, I went with store-bought.
Slowly stirring in the broth took about 20 minutes. Between additions, I grated my Parmesan and ran to the garden to grab chives and basil. After all the broth was incorporated, it looked much like every other risotto I’ve made, but then I added that kale-seaweed purée, butter and peas (I used frozen instead of fresh). At first it seemed too soupy, but as Chun reassures you in the recipe, the rice continues to absorb liquid as it sits off the heat.
The idea of adding the kale in purée form at the end – rather than incorporating chopped leaves – was inspired by Chun’s days running Share restaurant in New York, where she would add puréed kabocha squash or cauliflower to risotto. When you add vegetables in this concentrated way, “the flavour is just undeniable,” she says.
The result:
The final dish was looser than I’m used to, but Chun said that’s her preferred texture with risotto. It’s now mine, too.
With every dark-green spoonful, I was reminded I was eating something packed with vitamins and folate, even though it didn’t taste that way. The peas and herbs added a bright, fresh contrast to the comfortingly smooth porridge that was the risotto. Plus, my three-year-old (who loves the aforementioned kale sauce pasta) ate his entire portion and didn’t even pick out the green peas, which he typically does.
The deliciousness continued the next day. I had always understood risotto to be an à la minute dish: You typically can’t prepare it in advance and it turns gluey and clumpy when left overnight in the fridge. So I was blown away by how well leftovers kept and reheated in the microwave for an easy lunch.
Chun theorized this was because of the purée, which released steam and liquid in the microwave, helping return the risotto to the same great state it was in when freshly cooked.
I also recommend playing around with different bases. When I made the risotto with chicken broth, it was stellar, but the version I prepared with seafood broth (sold by Gallina Blanca at specialty food stores) was unbelievable. The ocean flavours imparted by the seaweed were amplified, and I’m sure the same would be the case if I used Chun’s kelp broth, which I intend to do next time.
As long as I can keep finding kale at the supermarket this winter, I know this dish will be in regular rotation.