Mushroom Risotto

Warm the stock in a pan and pour 250ml of it over the dried porcini in a bowl.

Soak the porcini for 20 minutes, until they are soft right through.

Lift the porcini out, squeeze them over the bowl and chop them roughly.

Pour the soaking liquid back into the stock through a fine sieve, leaving the last spoonful behind in the bowl. Dried mushrooms carry grit, and it settles at the bottom.

Hold the stock at a bare simmer on a back burner for the whole of the cooking. Cold stock ladled into hot rice drops the pan off the boil every time and the grains stop cooking while it climbs back.

Set a wide frying pan over high heat for 2-3 minutes, until a flick of water skitters and vanishes.

Add the olive oil, then the fresh mushrooms in a single layer with bare metal between the pieces, working in two batches if they will not fit. A crowded pan cannot let their water evaporate and they steam themselves grey, which the mushrooms on toast in this collection sets out at length.

Sear for 4-5 minutes, turning once, until deeply browned at the edges, then tip them onto a plate.

Melt the 20g of butter in a heavy, wide pan over medium-low heat.

Cook the diced onion for 6-8 minutes, stirring, until it is soft and translucent with no colour on it at all.

Add the rice and stir for 2-3 minutes, until the grains are hot to the touch, glassy at the edges with a white dot at the centre, and smell faintly toasted.

Do not skip that toasting. It firms the outside of each grain so it can take half an hour of stirring without breaking down into porridge.

Pour in the wine and stir until it has all but disappeared and the sharp smell has gone, about 1-2 minutes.

Add a ladleful of hot stock, roughly enough to just cover the rice, and the 4g of fine salt.

Stir until a spoon dragged across the base leaves a trench that holds for a second before the liquid closes over it, then add the next ladle.

Stir often but not frantically. The point of the stirring is agitation: rubbing the grains against each other and the pan is what pulls their starch out into the liquid, and that suspended starch is the whole sauce. A pan stirred every twenty seconds does as well as one stirred without pause, and a pan left alone gives you rice sitting in stock, then a scorched base.

Carry on ladle by ladle for 16-18 minutes, keeping the pan at a steady, gentle bubble rather than a hard boil.

Start tasting at 14 minutes. A grain should be tender all the way through with a firm point at the very centre, and no chalk in it.

Stop while it is a shade underdone and looser than you want to eat it, because it goes on cooking and tightening in its own heat between the pan and the table.

Take the pan off the heat and stand it for 1 minute.

Beat in the cold butter and the parmesan hard with a wooden spoon for 30-60 seconds, until the risotto turns glossy and comes together as one mass.

Loosen with a last splash of hot stock until a spoonful dropped back into the pan spreads slowly instead of holding its shape.

Fold through the seared mushrooms, the chopped porcini and the parsley.

Season with the ground peppercorns and taste for salt, bearing in mind how the stock was seasoned.

Serve into warm shallow bowls straight away. Risotto held for five minutes sets into a solid mound and no amount of stirring brings the wave back.

Note that the paella in this collection does the opposite at every step: same short-grain family, never stirred, and dry separate grains are the aim.