I’m jumping all over the place in the Bon Appétit series – I recently posted by November issue post (sourdough stuffing), but now I have to jump all the way back to September, and October’s post will be coming up in a few days.
The recipe for today, Citrus Arancine, just happens to be from Cakes & Ale in Decatur. At the time that I first read this recipe, I had never been to C&A, but fried risotto stuffed with cheese just had to be tasty. I decided this was the perfect recipe to cook from this BA issue, because I could taste test my results against the actual dish served at their restaurant.
By the time I actually cooked the Arancine, I had eaten them twice at Cakes & Ale, and the bar was set high. For just a few bucks they serve up five or six arancine, served in a cone lined with butcher paper. The arancine were smaller than I imagined, but just as delicious as expected. They weren’t overly greasy, the panko breadcrumbs were a good choice for the breading, and the small size makes for a good risotto to cheese ratio.
When I was eating by myself at the Cakes & Ale bar one night, I told the bartender I had just seen the recipe, and she said a few people told her they had tried it, with not so great results. Challenge!
I was cooking another recipe that day which called for fennel, so instead of using the fennel pollen the C&A recipe calls for, I used the leaves of the fennel (the part on the top that is similar to dill).
The recipe also calls for cooking fresh risotto, but then they say to cool it completely, so I don’t really understand why you can’t just use leftover risotto, which is what I did. I mixed up the citrus and the fennel leaves and was on my way.
I got my stations ready – risotto, egg, and panko. Does anyone else ever notice that every time the ingredient panko is mentioned in Bon Appétit, they also use the asterisks to denote a footnote that says “Panko is a Japanese breadcrumb available at blah blah blah”. After five years of this, c’mon, yeah, I’m familiar with panko.
I didn’t have the sheep’s milk cheese specified, so I used some fresh mozzarella. If you cut your cheese into the size specified in the recipe, your arancine are going to be too large. I recommend cutting the cheese cubes in half before you stuff each arancine.
I was running low on oil so I just pan fried them instead of a full on deep fry.
Just a few minutes each side, hit ‘em with some salt, and they are ready to eat.
Well, yeah, of course they were good. Fried risotto with cheese. Duh.
But how did they compare to Cakes & Ale? Yeah, they fell a little short. Mozzarella doesn’t have nearly as much flavor as the Greek sheep’s milk cheese specified in the recipe. The citrus and fennel flavor was apparent though. I’ll definitely make them smaller next time, and with a little practice, maybe I’ll give C&A a run for their money.
