Arancini

I have always been enamored of these little "snacks" that are part of the Southern Italian cooking repertory. Crisp, hot, and filled with softly melting cheese, or meat, or green peas or some combination of these things, when they're good, they're REALLY good. But when they're bad, they are TERRIBLE. I have eaten some terrible ones. Including my own. There is no question about it, mine were awful. I could never get the things right. They'd fall apart in the oil, leaving disgusting, fried cheese mixed in with the fat, the rice would not cook, and it was just a total, total mess.

Well, I may have the problem "licked" so to speak. This weekend, thinking about the friend I wrote about in the last blog, I decided to give them another try. Heck, I knew my chicken meatballs would work, and so I had SOMETHING to bring even if the arancini didn't work out.

These weren't perfect. But they sure were good. Two of them didn't cohere very well, and Guy and I ate them right out of the pot. I'd do this recipe again, with some changes, like I outline in the recipe. So, perhaps you'd like to give this a try. And if yours are good, tell me. PLEASE.

I started by cooking 1 heaping cup of carnaroli rice, in 2.5 cups of chicken stock. I think that the recipe might work better next time if I add more liquid. One of the issues with these guys is that the rice has to stick together. The rice I had did in fact stick, but not as well as it might have. Softer rice might have solved that. Anyway, I cooked this, until the liquid had all been absorbed by the rice, and it was making little "craters" in the pot. That's my sign that rice is cooked. I then poured it out onto a cooking sheet lined with parchment, to cool off. I think this is a really critical part of this: your rice must be at room temperature. While it was cooling, I cut a half pound of mozzarella into what I THOUGHT were small pieces. It turned out that really, they were too big for my arancini. I think the answer is not to make the cheese pieces smaller, but to make the balls bigger than I did. I also cooked up half a cup of green peas that I had just shelled, and let them cool.

When the rice was ready, I put it in a bowl with one egg and mixed this together. I was able to shape balls, about the size of a golfball and a half, and then I pushed a hole into each one, inserting a small piece of cheese and some peas. My biggest problem came with trying to incorporate the filling into the rice. Riceballs are very dense, and there isn't much room for this kind of thing, at least if you want the balls to "recohere" when you reshape them. Probably, they should have been the size of a tangerine or a small orange (like the name implies). I then dipped them in unflavored breadcrumbs, and fried them in about an inch of hot oil.

Turning these guys over, to cook them on all sides, was not easy. They are very delicate, and handling them too much, did break them up. I was fairly successful with a slotted spoon, turning them after two minutes, and cooking them on each side, before I drained them on paper towels.

The two that Guy and I ate were really tasty. How could they not be? Fried rice, bread crumbs, cheese, peas? But they were very, very soft. I thought about combining breadcrumbs into the rice, and discarded that idea. I also thought that they needed more filling, even though I had all that trouble forming the balls around the filling. A larger ball would do.

I got 16 of them out of this recipe. T ime to start doing some research. I think next time, I'll double the size, and see what happens.

So, this is one where I could really use your comments. Write in, folks. Help Annalena perfect her recipe. I guarantee I'll credit you.