Risotto Fritters

Both of my roommates cook a mean risotto. They usually put various combinations of chicken, onions, mushrooms, broccoli, zucchini, spinach, and Parmesan cheese in it. It's always a great dinner, but the whole process is a little too labor intensive for my liking. As a result, I've never cooked my own risotto, but I am happy to act as the sous chef when they decide to make it. I'm excellent at cutting vegetables, grating cheese, cleaning up, and stirring/tasting as needed.

One area where I could chip in legitimate culinary expertise, however, is by deep frying some risotto fritters. So, one night when Dan was making risotto, I suggested just that. The deep fryer had oil in it and was ready to go, and I expected these to be pretty easy to make, since the process is the standard flour, egg, and breadcrumbs that has worked well for so many other deep-fried specialties of mine.

While the risotto cooked, I started off by making a batch of mozzarella sticks. This time I had mozzarella and cheddar sticks, but I've realized that cooking a batch of cheese sticks has basically become my warm up routine for deep frying now. If there are cheese sticks in the house, I'm probably going to start with a batch of them. Frying a few of these allows me to practice my breading form, and it gets my confidence up, since they are always amazing. I'm not sure how my doctor will feel about this, but I've always been told a proper warm up is important in preventing injury.

After enjoying the warm up exercises, Dan got the risotto totally prepared and ready to eat, so we were ready to make fritters. If you already know how to make risotto, just follow all those same steps; no need to do anything different for deep frying. If you don't already know how to make risotto, look it up somewhere. All I know is it involves a lot of adding chicken broth and stirring. This particular dinner happened a while ago, but it looks like this batch of risotto had chicken, onions, mushrooms, spinach, Parmesan cheese, and maybe broccoli.First, we let it cool down a little, so we could actually scoop it up in our hands and shape it into balls. We aimed for each fritter to be a little bit larger than a golf ball. I read some recipes recommending that we wait until the following day to turn leftover risotto into risotto fritters, because after being refrigerated it is very easy to shape into fritters. We weren't willing to wait that long, however, and once it was cool enough to hold, it could be shaped just fine.

Then we rolled them in flour, dipped them in egg, rolled them in breadcrumbs, and repeated those last two steps for a nice, thick coating. We fried a couple at a time at full heat (375F). They sink, so when I first drop them in, I move them around in the oil for a few seconds, so they don't stick to the basket. After a couple minutes, they were ready to go.

Things that sink in the oil always get such a beautiful even coloring with little work required on my part. That's always a plus.

These were absolutely molten on the inside, but really delicious. It didn't change the risotto in any way, though; it just added a nice crispy shell to the outside. These were also a pleasure to cook, because they stayed together nicely and cooked cleanly without creating any sort of mess in the oil. Since our risotto was still warm, these probably would have been fine after only 1-2 minutes in the deep fryer. If you are using refrigerated leftovers, you might need to leave them in slightly longer. The whole mass of risotto is quite thick, so the centers of the fritters might not heat up as well. Luckily, from what I've experienced, it seems like the breadcrumb coating doesn't burn very easily, so you can keep it cooking for a while the inside heats up without the outside burning.

I'm a bit behind on posts from the deep frying I've already done, but the good news is that means I have a couple posts that should be ready soon. I have the pictures; I just need to get motivated enough to type them up.

And there's more good news: I'm not even close to running out of ideas of things to deep fry. In fact, while typing that last sentence, I just stopped, found a sticky-note and jotted down another idea to add to my big list at home. I also have many of you to thank, as I'm always getting more suggestions.