A local restaurant offered a ‘quinoa risotto’ on the menu. I know what they were trying to convey. Quinoa risotto?! In the words of Will Arnet, Come On. GOB
Restaurant owners/staff get maybe a luxurious half-hour a day to work on writing a menu. The pressures of running a restaurant are mighty and draining enough, When dedicating what few resources you have to describing the menu - conveying the taste and texture of a food to a customer will always trump the purity of a definition.
Can you guess which is which?
Quinoa isn’t my favorite thing in the world. Dirt, soap, the paradoxical soap-dirt are all good descriptors of the pseudocereal’s flavor. I am not sure how a person could cook quinoa so it would get a risotto like creamy yet chewy taste, but there are more talented people than I working in kitchens.
Risotto, of course, is the classic Italian dish made from Arborio rice. Waverly Root lists about 2 dozen varieties of risotto in his classic Food of Italy: All are made from rice. Which is sensible, considering you can’t have risotto without the riso, or rice. In one of my new favorite books, Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (While gesturing with their hands and making Goodfellas references) (not actually the subtitle), author Elena Kostioukovitch spends many pages breaking down the risotto of Italy, she finds, quotes and translates a poem about risotto but does not list one non-rice risotto, probably because they don’t exist.
A quick survey of the google doesn’t exactly return bountiful pages of rice free risottos, even using different keywords in queries…there are a couple South Beach Diet options, a few more recipes for brown rice risotto and close to 2 million hits for “Quinoa Risotto”, fortunately this isn’t a quickly growing and amazingly predictive google trend. It actually isn’t a google trend at all, it is just 2 million, now 2 mil and one pages on the same topic.
A more accurate description of the quinoa dish would have been porridge. Which, you know, doesn’t have the same $23.50 for a vegetarian entrée type of élan that risotto has. Even if your porridge was just right, it still doesn't sound like something you’d want to order. If you ordered porridge in front of me and I try not to be this way about other’s food choice but I would taunt you, calling you Goldilocks and [stuff].
Calling quinoa risotto will pass, soon it will be quinoa couscous, barley polenta, Millet popcorn, food fashions are fickle, not textbook definitions.
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1 comments:
not kean on quinoa myself, but if you cook it long enough it looks like a little science project with the diaghram-like rings and the gooey inside. somehow, grains that don't actually congeal into some other state (that other state i think of as food), and stay sort of discrete grains in a way, don't really feel like food to me. and risotto seems like on the extreme end of the transformation from grain to ultimate food-satisfaction from quinoia to me. very kean on risotto. saucyman, i agree.
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