Michael Voltaggio's No-Fuss Cacio e Pepe Risotto All’Onda | Bobby's Triple Threat | Food Network

Today I'm making a cacio e pepe risotto. I'm creating a recipe for a little bit of redemption. I guess we'll take a little look at how this episode actually went for me. So for my first dish I'm making a play on mac and cheese with gorgonzola risotto. My only issue with this dish is that I like my risotto a la onda. The risotto is just a little thick. Andrew Zimmern said that he likes his risotto a little more a la onda. What that means is the wave. He's looking for that wave. He wants that risotto to sit and fall. So I've got my chicken stock here. I'm going to pour that over my arborio rice. And I'm doing this to release some of that starch off the grains of rice into that stock. But I'm not going to throw away that starchy goodness. Like I'm going to put that right back into my dish. And we're just going to let this drain for like three to five minutes. Let all that liquid come off. This technique that I'm using, although it's not traditional, it's a very easy way to make risotto where you're not required to just stand over the pot and babysit it the entire time. I've got some olive oil here. I've got a little butter. I'm going to add my shallots. I've got some chopped garlic. At this point, I'm going to add my pepper. When you're making anything cacio e pepe, you want to toast the pepper in that fat so that it releases all those beautiful aromas from the black pepper. So I've got my strained arborio rice here. I've got that stock reserved on the side. We want to get all those beautiful bits and flavor toasting on our grains of rice. We're not looking for like browning here. We just want to get the rice to wake up a little bit. Now a lot of recipes for risotto call for white wine. I've started to cook with only dry vermouth because I can get the same dry vermouth every single time. When you're cooking risotto, and we're doing a bit of a non-traditional technique here, you always want to have a little stock on the side just in case you need to adjust the texture. So now this is where you take everything that you know about cooking rice and you apply it to forgetting about everything that you know about cooking risotto. I'm going to add all of my stock except for that one cup that we have reserved off to the side. Bring it up to a simmer. When it hits simmer, I'm going to put a lid on top of it. I'm going to turn the heat down slightly and let that cook for anywhere from 10 to 12 minutes. I've got that reserved stock. Now this is where I'm going to add this back in, and this will give us that little bit of extra control to get us to that Olanda effect that we're looking for. Now we're making this cacio e pepe flavored, so cheese and pepper. You've got to have cheese. In this case, I'm using pecorino, and also a little salt. A lot of people will finish their risotto with mascarpone. I like to use whipped cream stiff peaks. This gives you that wave effect. It sits and it falls. You can see it happening on the plate. As the risotto hits, you're getting that creamy waviness that Andrew Zimmern was looking for. Little more of that pecorino romano grated right over the top. This is perfect. Look at that. I'm going to eat this whole plate.