Risotto alla Milanese

You can make a pretty good risotto with water instead of stock, but you can’t make it at all without the kind of medium-grain rice they grow in the Po Valley in Italy near Genoa. That’s because long-grain rice, the variety we grow here, or that is sold as Carolina rice, will turn to mush long before it absorbs all the liquid and fat that risotto rice will slurp up. And so you won’t get the rich and creamy result that the right kind of rice will give.

Risotto just means a rice (ri