Sage and onion might not have the same draw as other more fashionable food pairings; it’s a combination seldom seen outside of a sausage or a packet, but this is a classy looking risotto let me tell you. It’s a risotto for grown-ups, one to really separate the sheep from the goats.
The onions are roasted whole, in their skins until soft and worked as a pulp into the risotto base, with a few rogue ‘petals’ added on top for presentation purposes. The whole affair is started off in clarified butter in which sage leaves have been deep fried until crisp, and they too are scattered over the finished dish along with shavings of parmesan.
Your choice of sausage will be a question of what’s available in your neck of the woods. Some supermarkets stock Italian style sausages, but for those of us out in the sticks, a rare breed pork variety with simple herbs, like a Toulouse for example will do very nicely. If all else fails a decent ‘Lincolnshire’ would fit the bill, and is after all, the best sausage the world has ever seen… in my opinion.
Like the onion, the sausage is crumbled and partly worked into the risotto and the rest used for top dressing. This is not an Italian toad in the hole.
The whole thing can have its individual elements prepared well in advance leaving you with just 20 minutes work to heat through and assemble the finished dish.
Ingredients
(serves 6)
8 x pork sausages
450g risotto rice
1 x 250g salted butter
6 x small brown onions (snooker ball size)
2 x large cloves of garlic
250ml dry white wine
Small bunch of sage (1 x supermarket size packet)
1l chicken stock (preferably homemade)
150g parmesan cheese (keep a few shavings to decorate each plate then finely grate the rest)
50g butter, cubed
Preheat the oven to 180 ⁰C.
Place four of the onions, just as they are, (no oil, no peeling, nothing) on a baking tray and bake in the oven for 50 minutes. Remove and leave to cool.
Meanwhile, clarify the butter* by placing it in a small pan and set it over a low heat to melt. Once melted, skim off any whey that is floating on the surface, then pour off the butter leaving the milky white solids behind in the pan.
Rinse the pan out and return the butter to it, placing back over a medium heat (to deep fry the sage leaves).
By now the onions will be cool enough to peel; chop two of them into a pulp and quarter the other two and separate into ‘petals’ to use as decoration.
Allow 5 or 6 sage leaves per person and deep fry in the clarified butter in small batches for 30 seconds at a time until crisp and rigid. Remove to drain on kitchen paper.
Heat a little vegetable oil in a frying pan over a medium heat. Remove the sausage meat from the casings and squidge with the back of a spoon in the frying pan, moving constantly to squash out any lumps. Fry until golden and crispy then remove to a plate and keep warm.
Finely chop the two remaining raw onions along with the garlic, and fry in 4 tablespoons of the sage flavoured butter without colouring, until soft and translucent.
Add the rice and stir to coat with the buttery onions. You should have some sage left over in the packet, add a couple of whole sprigs to the pan to flavour the risotto– pick this out before serving. Add the wine all in one go and stir until absorbed.
Now add the chopped roasted onions, a quarter of the crumbled sausage and a good ladle of chicken stock. When all the stock is absorbed, add another ladle full and continue to add the stock in this way for another 15 mins or so until the rice is just about cooked.
Add the grated parmesan and the cubed butter, then taste for seasoning.
Divide the risotto between each plate and top with the onion petals, the crumbled sausage meat, deep fried sage leaves and the parmesan shavings. Drizzle over a little of the left over clarified butter.
*Clarified butter can be heated to a much higher temperature than unclarified butter because it’s had the whey and milk solids removed, which would ordinarily catch and burn turning the butter dark and nutty and unsuitable for ‘deep frying’.