Food, Home & Lifestyle

Pumpkin Risotto

Lesson time 15:05 min

Massimo teaches you a unique approach to risotto, using fresh orange juice and roasted pumpkin purée rather than the traditional white wine, butter, and onions. It turns out like a dessert, and you can riff on the recipe any way you’d like.

Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars

Topics include: Adding the Pumpkin Purée

Massimo Bottura

Teaches Modern Italian Cooking

Massimo Bottura teaches you his take on traditional Italian cooking—from risotto to tortellini—and shares techniques for reimagining your own recipes.

Preview

[MUSIC PLAYING] MASSIMO BOTTURA (VOICEOVER): We're going to make pumpkin risotto. What I love is this kind of creaminess that, for me, is pure pleasure when I eat it. So we're going to serve this as a dessert. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. - So we are making a risotto. Look at this. Beautiful rice from the Modena country. It's called vialone nano. You can find everywhere in the United States. This comes from my memory, when one of my favorite meals was pumpkin. [MUSIC PLAYING] So we start by making a pumpkin puree. First, peel a pumpkin. Then cut it into medium-size cubes. Then place the pumpkin cubes on a baking sheet, and put in the oven at 80 degrees Celsius, and bake for 8 hours until they are melting. Then, put the cooked pumpkin into a blender. Add apple mostarda, which is candied apples in mustard syrup, and some amaretti cookies. Then, blend all together. And we create this amazing, creamy, tasty, sweet sauce that we're going to use in cooking the risotto. We're going to use fresh orange juice, freshly squeezed from organic orange from Sicily. So let's start. You see, there's no onion. There's no white wine. We just go into the soul, the deep soul, the pureness of the flavor of the rice. So we're going to add a little bit of extra virgin olive oil to the pan, but just a little touch. Look, just a touch. And we're going to start with the rice immediately. We will toast the rice. Instead of toasting and saute in onion and then add white wine, we are going directly on pure rice, toasted to get that crunchiness. You can already feel the rice is toasting. At this point, we lower the temperature of the pan, adding some water. Water, always water. And you know why? Because if we add the orange directly into that pan, the orange will burn. The back taste would stay forever there. So we with this kind of preparation, we have to lower the temperature, and we're going to start adding the orange. So the rice is going to absorb your mood, your way. You're going to take the rice to the journey to that, to where you want to go. But the point is-- that is a very important point-- why orange? Pumpkin is from north of Italy, and orange is from deep Sicily. Because it's this. This is telling you where to go. And this is telling me that orange and pumpkin-- they match perfectly. But you can go in many different directions. Maybe it's summertime and you have grapefruit, and you can mix it with other things. Or you can go with pomegranate juice and Turkish spices. It's up to you. And the more you are exposed, the more you travel, the more you open your mind, the more options you're going to have, because you are expressing yourself, your experiences inside the risotto. Risotto is something that you have to love it, because you have to spend 15 minutes, 20 minutes, with your pan, with your rice. Hug him. Touch him. Listen to him. Understand what he's saying to you. Lower the temperature. Add some liquid. Tak...

About the Instructor

Massimo Bottura, chef of the three-Michelin-star Osteria Francescana, treats his world-renowned restaurant as a laboratory of ideas. In his MasterClass, he shares how he transforms classic, regional Italian recipes into exciting modern dishes. You’ll learn how to make rich, flavorful tagliatelle al ragù, pumpkin risotto, and a MasterClass-exclusive Emilia Burger recipe. Develop your palate and embark on a culinary adventure.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Massimo Bottura

Massimo Bottura teaches you his take on traditional Italian cooking—from risotto to tortellini—and shares techniques for reimagining your own recipes.

Explore the Class