A Comeback: Lentil Curry Risotto

The Italian Corner is back, at least for today, with one fusion recipe.

One day I was thinking, curry has this rich aromatic flavour and Indians - and Japanese too for that matter - like to eat it with rice.

And I like curry and also risotto, the Italian way to rice dishes. Lentils too go well with curry and with rice. So, why not combine the two in a lentil curry risotto?

And that's what I did.

Ingredients (they weren't measured accurately).

- 50 to 60 g per person of risotto rice
- 25 to 30 g per person of split (yellow) lentils

For 2 persons:


- 2 garlic clove
- 1 cube of Japanese curry mix (or 1 tbsp of curry paste)
- Fresh ginger: 2 cm piece of root
- Curry powder: ad lib
- Coriander seed powder: ad lib
- Dry curry leaves: ad lib
- Chilli powder: ad lib
- Hot vegetable stock (or salted water): roughly half a liter
- Olive oil
- Half a glass of dry white wine, or lager, or ang chiu*, or dry mead, or anything boozy and not sweet
- Butter (optional)
- Cream cheese: 1 heaping tbsp
- Fresh coriander leaves (optional)
- Splash of lime juice (optional)

No special equipment is required; all it takes for good risotto is a thick-bottom pot of sufficient capacity and a wooden spoon.

Chop thinly garlic and ginger, cover the bottom of a pot with olive oil or oil/butter mix, then sautee the ginger and garlic until soft; add curry powder, coriander seed powder, dry curry leaves and chilly powder and and keep cooking until garlic and ginger starts to brown. Curry spices need to be toasted lightly up for best taste, but be careful not to burn them.

At that point, add the rice and lentils and toast for a couple of minutes in the hot spiced oil, mixing well. Add the half a glass of booze (you may want to take the pot off the fire for this; it should not be too hot), mix well and let the liquid dry up. If you wanna, for obscure reasons, keep this completely alcohol-free, you can use half a glass of a tangy fruit juice; orange should work.

Add enough hot stock to cover the rice; chop up the curry cube and throw it into the pot and add a good pinch of salt too. Mix well but gently to dissolve the curry; let simmer until the liquid has dried up then add more stock and mix.

Keep simmering, adding stock and gently mixing until rice grains are well cooked and soft. Parboiled rice is not so organically-correct but much safer because it's almost impossible to overcook it. Some people like risotto dry, other prefer it soupy like a porridge. The choice is yours on this.

Turn off the fire, add a nice tablespoon of butter if you're so inclined, but don't skip the cream cheese. Mix vigorously to release the rice's starch and make a nice cream, adjust seasoning, rest a couple of minutes and serve.
This risotto can be topped with fresh coriander leaves and the idea of a splash of lime juice sounds good too, but I didn't try it. The result was creamy, rich, spicy, a bit aggressive on the tongue but so satisfying.

If cooked this way, lentils may still be underdone at the end. That was not a problem for me, but if you like lentils nice and soft, you can blanch them first and add to the curry risotto halfway through cooking.

*Chinese rice wine used for cooking