Ciao! Welcome to my blog!
I’m Francesca (The Spaghetti Girl) and today I want to show you how to make a perfect oven baked rice or called “riso al forno” in Italian . This is one of my best family recipes and it’s very very easy to do.
This time, I made the “riso al forno” with ham, that in Italian is called “prosciutto cotto”, and I used some shredded mozzarella cheese. I basically used what I had in the fridge! You can really add anything to this recipe, even leftovers! Oven baked rice, in fact, is an excellent way to recycle leftover vegetable side dishes, such as peas, peppers or zucchini squash, or even tomato sauce or ragu.
For example, I had some sauce with meat and mushrooms, which I had prepared a couple of days ago for “polenta” (another delicious Italian dish for which I’m gonna write the recipe soon) that I recycled for this recipe. I think it’s cool to recycle leftovers to make a completely new dish. So, when you have leftovers, don’t throw them away, but use them to prepare this recipe too!
The list of ingredients is not very long, they are things that you probably already have at home. For this recipe I used:
RICE: obviously rice is the main ingredient of this recipe, I advise you to use good quality rice. In particular, for this recipe, I recommend “carnaroli rice”, “arborio rice” or “vialone nano”.
MOZZARELLA CHEESE: this time I used shredded mozzarella cheese, just because I had this in the fridge. I think, the mozzarella cheese, is gonna be the best option, but you may use provolone cheese, fresh mozzarella, burrata, gouda…anything that can melt nicely.
PARMESAN and PECORINO CHEESE: to make everything even more tastier and creamier!
HAM: for this recipe I used the Italian “prosciutto cotto“, but a good variant could certainly be ham, or mortadella. If you prefer something non-pork based, a great alternative would be deli roast turkey or roast chicken. You choose!
TOMATO SAUCE: as I already said, I had some leftover sauce that I used for this recipe, but you can use a sauce with vegetables and make everything vegetarian (not using ham obviously), simple tomato sauce, meat sauce or a delicious ragu!
ONION: for a great flavor, I recommend using a white or golden onion.
BROTH: we’ll need it to cook the rice. I used chicken broth (it was what I had in my pantry), but you can also use vegetable broth…or even simply water.
BREADCRUMBS: for a delicious crunchy texture!
BUTTER and OLIVE OIL: to cook the onion.
Now let’s start cooking!
Ingredients
Here is the complete and detailed list of all the ingredients I used for this recipe. With these doses you can prepare 4 large portions, or 6 small portions.
Tools
To make this recipe you will need a pan to cook the rice, a wooden spoon to mix the ingredients during cooking and a tray to cook the rice in the oven.
Steps
1. Heat the olive oil (3 tbs) together with the butter (30 g). Cook the chopped onion until it is gonna be translucent.
2. At this point pour in the rice (200 g) and toast it. This step is fundamental because it ensures that all the rice is covered in oil, which keeps the grains distinct and more prepared to absorb the broth that we will use later.
3. Pour part of the broth and let it cook until the rice has absorbed it. Then continue to pour in the broth and let it cook for about 15 minutes.
4. Add the last remaining part of broth and the tomato sauce. Mix and let cook for about 10 or 15 minutes.
5. Turn off the stove and add the parmesan (50 g) and pecorino (50 g) cheese. Mix well until the cheeses are completely absorbed.
6. Grease, with a little bit of butter, the pan and then sprinkle the buttered surface with breadcrumbs.
7. Now, put half of the rice that we previously prepared into the pan and sprinkle with half of the grated mozzarella cheese.
8. Now, add the sliced prosciutto cotto or ham (150 g) to the preparation.
9. Cover with the remaining mozzarella cheese and the other half of the rice.
10. Now sprinkle with some breadcrumbs, a drizzle of olive oil and cook in the preheated oven at 400° F for about 30 minutes.
This is our oven baked rice after cooking. In this house we are real foodies, so about 5 minutes before the end of cooking in the oven, I also added a little extra mozzarella on top for an extra cheesy result. And now, you try it and let me know what you think of this delicious recipe!
Varied doses for servings