This past weekend was another very intense one, full of excitement and satisfaction. We were in Lucignano, in the province of Arezzo, for the final of the Risate&Risotti Contest. In the kitchen, I had to invent a recipe with the ingredients found in the mystery box. The result? My Tuscan Risotto.

The result was a fantastic risotto made with simple ingredients that feature the flavours of Tuscany… hence the name Tuscan risotto.

We won’t tell you anything in advance about the tale of these two days of cooking, good food and lots of laughs, you will find the story in the next post. Today we want to reveal the recipe that has given us so much satisfaction!

Tuscan risotto

25g carbohydrates per 100g risotto without bread croutons

Ingredients

• 1.3 litres of previously prepared meat stock
• 320g Maremma rice
• 120g Pecorino Toscano cheese
• 120g green part of courgette (approx. 2 large courgettes)
• 50g bread** Tuscan type
• 40g slices of Tuscan bacon*
• 40g cherry tomatoes
• 30g spring onions
• 1 clove of garlic
• 30g butter
• extra virgin olive oil, meat stock, salt and pepper

**Ingredients specific for celiacs

*Ingredients whose labels must read “gluten-free” (or, in Italy, present on  Prontuario AIC)

Preparation

1. Wilt the finely chopped spring onion in a saucepan with a little oil and the garlic clove. Add the green part of the courgettes, cut with a coarse grater, and a ladle of stock to cook the vegetables.
2. In the meantime, remove the crust from the bread and cut it into cubes. Put a little oil in a non-stick frying pan, add the chopped cherry tomatoes, sauté them, then add the bread, a pinch of salt and pepper and fry until crispy.
3. In another non-stick pan, put the bacon in pieces so that it becomes crispy.
   Toast the rice in the saucepan with the courgettes after removing the clove of garlic (I took 3 minutes to have transparent rice grains with a white part in the centre), then start cooking the rice with hot stock. When it is still al dente, add the grated Pecorino cheese and stir in the cold butter.
   Plate and serve with a sprinkling of toasted bread and crispy bacon.

I repeated this risotto at home and did not have sliced bacon on hand, so I used 60g of diced bacon sautéed in the non-stick pan without adding anything to make it slightly crispy.