Adding the Final Ingredients to Mushroom Risotto

Hi, I am Sam, the chef of Pomodoro in Fairfax. We are finishing up our porcini mushroom risotto. We finished adding the rest of our stock, and as you can see, it's almost ready. What you always want to different is taste it, before you serve it or before you finish it. We are going to add our rest of the ingredients in about a minute, but what we are going to do is taste and make sure that the rice is cooked through. I am using this spoon no double dipping, just take it. Its pretty good; it's almost ready to go. Use a little more salt, season as you go. You actually, dont want to add too much salt because you have to keep in mind you are going to be adding grated cheese, and grated cheese tends to be a little bit salty. Not this particular one we are using, but most of the time, what you want to do is allow the person to add a little more or a little less. You just want to do a nice little plain field. This one needs black pepper. As you can see, see how it's getting nice and creamy, and thats because of the starch in the rice. Let's stir in the salt and the pepper. You dont want to serve a wet risotto; you want to serve a creamy risotto. Right now, it's still at the wet stage, it's about 45 seconds away. So we are going to constantly stir, it's almost there. Now, what we are going to different is, actually shut the heat off, because we dont want to add cheese and parsley, because we have nice fresh herbs. Off the heat, or the cheese tends to clump up, and we dont want that. So, thats pretty much you can see is that, like a lot of the liquid is absorbed. It's pretty much gone. So, now what we are going to do is, I'll show you, shut off the heat. We are going to take our chopped parsley that we chopped. It's fresh and it's good, so, we are going to add lots of it. I am going to add about -- I'll use my fingers today, about a tablespoon-and-half, of nice healthy amount, thats going to help the flavor also. Just stir that right in. See how that looks, nice. Dont be afraid to use it. What we are going to do, just stir, stir, and let all the flavors come together. See how the parsley just doesnt dissolve in the dish. It's still there and it's flavoring, it's helping, its still part of the dish, but believe me, nothing is taking anything away from the mushrooms. Thats the last step of our risotto.