Risotto is a typical Italian dish.
Most risotto recipes include butter and cheese, but they’re not strictly necessary since the creaminess is created by the rice’s starch molecules.
You can easily have a vegan risotto, as long as you:
- Find a specialized vegan restaurant;
- Ask a restaurant to prepare you vegan risotto beforehand;
- Make a vegan risotto recipe at home.
So whether risotto is vegan or not depends on the dish/recipe.
Let’s take a closer look into what makes most risotto recipes non-vegan, and what you can do to make it vegan.
What Is A Risotto Made With?
Simply put, risotto is a combination of rice, broth, and aromatics.
For the risotto to have the perfect texture, you must warm up the broth ahead of time. If you don’t have the right temperature, not only will it take longer but it might cause the starches to seize up.
Here are the ingredients in most risottos:
- chicken broth
- olive oil
- onions
- arborio rice
- cloves
- white wine or water
- Parmesan cheese
- butter
- salt
- pepper
- parsley
You could easily make this recipe vegan, but you would need to replace the chicken broth with *vegetable broth and remove the parmesan and butter.
Lest not forget you can find vegan parmesan and butter quite easily nowadays. So you could either skip those ingredients or simply replace them with the respective vegan versions.
Here is a delicious, yet different vegetable broth recipe by The Minimalist Baker.
Can I Use Any Rice?
You can use any rice, but the result will be different. Long-grain varieties (white, basmati or jasmine) usually stay separated when cooked. But short-grain varieties like arborio and carnaroli rice get chewier and clump together when cooked.
Arborio does the trick, but experts recommend carnaroli for a restaurant-worthy risotto. Since carnaroli is starchier than arborio, you get an even creamier risotto.
Parmesan Cheese Alternative
If you want to include the parmesan cheese in your vegan risotto, you have to find an alternative. Amazon has a pretty popular parmesan alternative made from organic cashews.
You can add it to risotto like you would add regular Parmesan cheese.
This being said, if you find this parmesan alternative a bit too expensive, you can always create vegan parmesan at home. I’ve always been a fan of cheese but I can’t afford to always buy it, so I generally follow a vegan cheese recipe at home.
The Minimalist Baker has a wonderful parmesan recipe that only requires 4 ingredients. Plus, it should only take you 5 minutes to make.
You can save both money and time while enjoying a healthier parmesan alternative.
Vegan Risotto Recipes To Make At Home.
Would you love to gather your friends or family, and prepare them a wonderful vegan risotto? One that would make them join the green side? Yes?
Then let me show you some of the best vegan risotto recipes online.
The recipe above is brought to you by the Minimalist Baker.
According to the Minimalist Baker, making this recipe should take about 30 minutes. This is a healthier risotto without oil or butter, that replaces regular parmesan with vegan parmesan. It includes plenty of vegetables that cover the majority of your nutritional needs.
Loving it Vegan also has an amazing vegan mushroom risotto recipe.
This is a creamy and rich vegan risotto recipe. I personally love mushrooms, so the light mushroom flavor that takes over my palate is very addicting.
Like the previous recipe, you can make this one in less than an hour.
My Darling Vegan has a vegan risotto recipe, but instead of using parmesan, the author decides to use ricotta cheese.
Typically risotto does not have a solid protein source. So if you want to have more protein in your meal, you can always add frozen peas to go with your risotto.
With these three different recipes, you can easily impress your family and friends.
My family has a more traditional outlook on both life and food, so they can’t exactly conceive eating food without meat or dairy. That’s why I usually want to get these recipes right so that I can slowly but surely shift their thinking.
Vegan food is also delicious, you just have to put in some effort.
Summary
The risotto you find in restaurants is bound to contain cheese and animal-based butter.
So unless you specify your dietary needs in advance or choose a vegan restaurant (with a risotto recipe), it will be difficult to find any restaurant that makes vegan risotto. Especially if it’s a restaurant known for its risotto recipe.
However, it’s not the cheese or the butter that adds the creamy texture to the dish. It’s actually the short-grain rice (arborio or carnaroli). Therefore, if you decide to make risotto at home, you certainly don’t need to include cheese or butter.
Though I do admit cheese makes the plate more enticing.
Fortunately for us vegans, we can find both cheese and butter alternatives in the supermarket, so making vegan risotto is actually easy. Thank you for reading this blog post, and let me know if you’ve ever had a delicious vegan risotto in the past!
