TGIFood

Three cheese and garden spinach risotto

8 Oct 2024

Combine the best of garden, dairy and pantry in this risotto made of spinach fresh from the garden, and a trio of cheeses.

The spinach patch in my garden is lush with dark green leaves. They’re Fordhook Giants, my favourite, and you can call it Swiss chard if you like, but South Africans have grown up calling it spinach, for generations, and that makes use of the word “spinach” valid in our terrain.

Meanwhile, in the fridge, I selected three cheeses to make a bit of risotto magic.

Last weekend we returned to Prince Albert in the Great Karoo, just for a day trip en route home from Cape Town, and we took our friends to Gay’s Guernsey Dairy on the edge of town. I brought home a wedge of their Queen Vic, a cheese in the Gruyere style, which holds plenty of flavour and melts perfectly into a sauce.

In the fridge I also had some Dalewood Jersey feta from the Boland, so we were mixing our regions and even our cattle breeds in this dish. Rounding it out was some regular old Grana Padano; nothing wrong with that either.

I don’t like to put raw spinach into a sauce, and I dislike the whitish spines, which I always cut away entirely. Then, I shred the green parts of the leaves very finely and put them in a pot with nothing other than themselves and the bit of water they were rinsed in before being shredded. On a moderate heat, I stir them, turning them over repeatedly with a wooden spoon while they wilt and most of the water cooks away.

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Top tip: like most green vegetables, spinach loses its colour while being cooked. Think of how broccoli looks dreadful if overcooked. The answer is lemon juice. I squeezed a little lemon juice into the wilted spinach and gave it a few stirs and folds, to prevent discoloration of the spinach, before adding the cream. I finished this part of the recipe by adding 500ml of cream and simmering that down to a generous coating for the now-cooked spinach. The creamed spinach would ultimately be combined into the risotto just before serving.

You could of course use this part of the recipe as a creamed spinach side dish.

Tony’s spinach and three cheese risotto

(Serves 3 or 4 as a main course, or 6 to 8 as a starter)

Ingredients

12 large spinach leaves

Juice of half a lemon

500ml cream

Salt and black pepper

Plenty of olive oil (don’t measure, use your instincts)

1 medium onion, chopped

3 garlic cloves, chopped

2 celery stalks, diced

2 cups arborio rice (do not rinse)

A glass of dry white wine

1 litre or more of vegetable or chicken stock

A few thyme sprigs

Salt and black pepper (for the risotto; the spinach has already been seasoned)

150g Dalewood feta, chopped or crumbled

150g Gay’s Guernsey Dairy Queen Vic gruyere-style cheese, grated

Grana Padano for grating on top

Method

Have the stock and white wine to hand before you start.

Wilt shredded spinach in a deep pot, add lemon juice and simmer until tender. Season with salt and black pepper to taste and stir again. Add the cream and simmer until it has become a fairly thick coating for the spinach. This will be stirred into the risotto at the end.

Sauté the onion, celery and garlic in 3 Tbsp olive oil, until softened.

Add all of the arborio rice and plenty of olive oil, and from now on you need to keep moving the rice around steadily but with a light hand, all the way. Never be rough with risotto.

Add the thyme leaves (picked off their stems), and keep moving the rice.

Add some of the wine, stir until absorbed, then more, etcetera until it is all incorporated. Season with salt and black pepper.

Add the stock bit by bit in the same way, until it has all been absorbed, but at the end make sure the rice is not cooked dry; there needs to be some liquid body in it.

Stir in the grated Guernsey and Jersey cheeses, but not the Grana Padano.

Finish by adding the spinach and all the creamy sauce coating it. Combine quickly, so that the cream adds to the risotto’s creamy finish, and serve with grated Grana Padano. DM

Tony Jackman is Galliova Food Writer 2023, jointly with TGIFood columnist Anna Trapido.

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This dish is photographed in a risotto bowl by Mervyn Gers Ceramics.

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