Risotto Revelation (First Part)
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| Principato di Lucedio began as a 12th century Cistercian abbey, whose monks introduced rice cultivation to the area. | |
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| Golden dunes of rice are left to dry in the ancient vaulted rooms of Principato di Lucedio | |
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| Rice fields of the Po River Valley are covered with about 18 inches of water, which is kept moving with a series of channels and gates. Photos by Dario Fusaro |
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Chefs and food writers were championing Carnaroli, another superfino, or swearing allegiance to Vialone Nano, a mere semifino.
Then Baldo, a fourth variety, turned up on market shelves, and my head began to spin.
Package labels didn't help. Every producer had different claims as to which variety made the finest vegetable risotto, the creamiest seafood risotto, the most successful soup or rice salad.
I traded up to Carnaroli, figuring that because it cost more, it might be better. But every time I replenished my rice supply, I felt that I was simply making an uneducated choice.
Recently, a friend pointed out that I would be traveling close to Italian rice country on a forthcoming trip to Piemonte. So, hoping for enlightenment, I included in my recent Italian trip a visit to Principato di Lucedio, a 1,250-acre estate that grows and packages Arborio, Carnaroli, Vialone Nano and Baldo for the American market.
The estate is part of the vast, flat rice fields of the Po River Valley, about a 90-minute drive from the mountainous wine regions of Barolo and Barbaresco. After four days in wine country, surrounded by fruit-laden grapevines marching up steep hills, I was surprised by the dramatic change in landscape.
The exceptionally hot summer meant that much of Lucedio's crop had already been harvested. Fields of golden stubble stretched toward the horizon, luring birds that come to feast on the leavings. The mechanical harvester had left neat, parallel tracks, like those on a freshly mowed lawn. Some fields had wide black bands where the rice stubble -- too tall or tough to decompose over the coming year -- had been burned.
Count Paolo Salvadori di Wiesenhoff runs Lucedio with his mother.
Their family can trace the history of the estate back to 1123, when the land was bequeathed to Cistercian monks. The monks, who built an abbey there and introduced rice cultivation, proved to be excellent farmers and astute businessmen. When the estate eventually grew to 25,000 acres, the accumulation of wealth and power so frightened the church that the Pope secularized the property.
Napoleon owned Lucedio briefly but traded it to his brother-in-law, the Prince Borghese, for one-quarter of the art in Rome's Galleria Borghese. The property had a succession of other owners -- until di Wiesenhoff's grandfather bought it in 1937.
A century ago, the property housed 1,000 year-round laborers, including a staff doctor, with up to 400 more workers at harvest time. Today, rice production has become so mechanized that a huge estate like Lucedio can function with only six workers. According to Ente Nazionale Risi, an agency that keeps statistics on the Italian rice industry, each hectare (about 2 1/2 acres) of rice demanded 1,000 annual hours of labor in 1939; now it requires only 50.
In the beginning
The fields are leveled, seeded, flooded and harvested mechanically. The rice grows in about 18 inches of moving water, propelled by a series of channels and gates. Flooding isn't essential -- you can farm rice in dry fields -- but the water helps moderate the temperature fluctuations between day and night, so the rice grows better. In the old days, women would wade into the water to hand weed. Today, if weeds threaten the rice, workers drain the fields and apply herbicides. A month before harvest, the fields are drained so they can dry out enough to support the harvester.
The four varieties Lucedio ships to the United States -- Arborio, Carnaroli, Vialone Nano and Baldo -- are all japonica varieties. Compared to indica varieties like basmati, japonica rices have a high proportion of a waxy starch called amylopectin and a low proportion of amylose, another starch. This composition makes them somewhat clingy or sticky when cooked.
The more amylose a rice variety contains, the more liquid it can absorb and the less clingy it is after cooking. Chinese sticky rice is at one end of this spectrum, fluffy basmati at the other, and the risotto varieties somewhere in between.
Of all the japonica varieties grown in Italy, Carnaroli has the highest amylose content. Chefs may not know such technical details, but the relatively high amylose content gives Carnaroli the qualities they admire -- it absorbs a lot of liquid, it offers a long window between cooked and overcooked, and it makes a creamy, flowing risotto, not a sticky one. It merits the superfino classification not because of any of these qualities but because of its high ratio of length to width. Semifinos like Vialone Nano aren't inferior; they're simply rounder.
Chefs' choice
In fact, Vialone Nano has almost as much amylose as Carnaroli and measures even lower on the stickiness charts. It is every Venetian chef's choice for risotto, probably because it is widely grown in that area but also, chefs say, because it produces the desirable all'onda (wavy) texture. When a cook showily tosses the finished risotto in the saucepan with a flip of the wrist, it rises up and breaks like a wave. Arborio and Baldo have significantly less amylose. Consequently, they absorb less liquid, take longer to cook and tend to produce a somewhat starchier, stickier risotto, although the difference may be noticeable only to those who make risotto frequently.
At Balin, the delightful country restaurant near Lucedio where we had a two-risotto lunch, chef Angelo Silvestro said his preference is for Carnaroli. Davide Palluda, owner of All'Enoteca in Canale and one of Italy's rising-star chefs, echoed that opinion.
In the Bay Area's top restaurants, chefs vote largely, but not unanimously, for Carnaroli.
"Anybody who pays attention to their risotto uses Carnaroli," says Susan Patton Fox, a sales representative for ItalFoods, which distributes several brands and types of Italian rice. She is close to right.
"Carnaroli seems to cook the most evenly, not from grain to grain, but from start to finish," says Craig Stoll of Delfina in San Francisco. "Sometimes with Arborio, you'll be cooking it and it's not done, and not done, and then you turn around and it's overdone."
Chez Panisse uses both Carnaroli and Baldo, but chefs there differ in their preferences, says Chez Panisse Cafe chef Russell Moore. "Carnaroli is the creamiest, I think, but Baldo holds up a little longer, but every batch is different."
Zuni Cafe cooks use Carnaroli for risotto and Baldo for rice pudding, but chef Judy Rodgers, like Moore, says she's open to diversity. "Rice is not this unchanging staple," says Rodgers. "It's produce, like nuts, and it changes."
Vincenzo Cucco, chef at Bacco in San Francisco, stands firmly with Vialone Nano, possibly because he cooked for years in Venice. Cucco is one of the only chefs in San Francisco to make risotto entirely to order, rather than pre-cooking the rice partway "I think (Vialone Nano) absorbs better the condiments," says Cucco, by which he means the broth and seasonings. "It's a little less forgiving than Carnaroli, easier to overcook, but it gives a little more starch." Cucco believes that starch helps produce the onda, or wave.
Having watched Cucco and Silvestro, and having experimented widely on my own, I have formulated a new risotto theory. Success with risotto has less to do with the variety of rice, I believe, and much more to do with technique. All the risottos that I watched chefs make, although definitely not all the ones I made, were superb. They were all creamy.
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Originally published on the San Francisco Chronicle |
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