Name: Lobster and Scampi Risotto
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Italy
Ingredients: 50 g (2 oz) butter; Salt and Freshly ground black pepper; 12–16 fresh scampi (langoustines or Dublin Bay prawns); Juice of 1 lemon; 350 g (12 oz) Arborio (short-grain) rice; Thin shavings of Parmesan cheese, to garnish; 1 live lobster, boiled in water with a glass of wine, a piece of carrot, a few sprigs of parsley and a bay leaf, seasoned with salt and Freshly ground black pepper (or buy a lobster that is already cooked); Chopped flat-leaf parsley, to garnish; 900 ml (1½ pints) fish or chicken stock (preferably from cooking the lobster); 1 wineglass of cognac or grappa; 50 g (2 oz) Parmesan cheese, finely grated; 1 wineglass of dry white wine; Few strands of saffron; 75 g (3 oz) butter; 1 onion, finely chopped

Preparation info

Serves
4

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

Floyd on Italy

By Keith Floyd

Published 1994

About

In Northern Italy especially, risotto is a very popular dish and at the first opportunity I ordered one in a restaurant near Milan. What a disappointment it turned out to be. The bowl of slightly sour, undercooked goo covered with congealed grated cheese tasted like half-cooked birdseed – a one-off mistake, I decided. The next day at lunch somewhere in Piedmont, I tried the speciality della casa – risotto with three cheeses. In what appeared to be an elegant, long established, frightfully m