Friday, August 10, 2018

Recipe: Pork Mushroom Risotto w/ Vegemite Butter

I enjoy watching MasterChef Australia, and there was one episode (Season 10, Episode 27) where a professional chef cooked Vegemite prawn risotto for the immunity challenge. The Vegemite butter idea looked awesome, so I decided to try making a risotto dish with Vegemite butter as well.

A pork mushroom risotto with Vegemite butter!!!

You may be wondering why I did not try to make the same Vegemite prawn risotto the chef made. That's because personally I think Vegemite goes better with mushrooms and pork or chicken rather than seafood. But that's just me. Vegemite may actually go well with seafood and I haven't actually tried it before. That said, if you really want to try making the Vegemite prawn risotto from MasterChef Australia, you can check out the official recipe.

Now, onto my Vegemite butter risotto!


Not pictured: umami stock, Vegemite butter and soy sauce.

So, here is a list of ingredients I used to make the risotto:

  • ~100g of fatty minced pork
  • 3 large brown mushrooms (sliced)
  • ~1 cup of (ordinary) uncooked rice
  • 2 medium red onions (chopped)
  • 2 cloves of garlic (chopped)
  • ~2 tbsp butter mixed with ~1tsp Vegemite
  • ~1 litre of kombu dashi stock
  • ~1 tbsp olive oil
  • some red wine, maybe a few dashes
  • and some soy sauce.

For the stock, I used a sachet of Shimaya kombu dashi stock (bought from Shojikiya) which was mixed with roughly 1 litre of water. This stock mixture was brought to boil and then left on low heat to keep warm throughout the cook.

I was originally going to try this stock for something else but I may as well use it now.

For the Vegemite butter, I just mixed roughly 1 tsp of Vegemite and roughly 2tbsp of butter together with a fork (and spoon).
I had a slightly different Vegemite on hand.
Looks gooey, lol. 

Some of the ingredient choices may look odd, but that's because I made do with what I had. It was kind of an out-of-the-blue decision to try making this risotto.

Anyway here's how I cooked the risotto:

  1. On high heat, pour olive oil into a large frying pan, toss in the fatty minced pork and fry it with a bit of soy sauce. Transfer the minced pork to a plate once it's cooked. Leave the oil/fat in the pan.

  2. Break it up~!
    Set it aside~!

  3. Next, pour the mushrooms into the pan and fry it in the pork fat. Transfer the mushrooms to a plate when they're cooked. (I used the same plate as the pork.)

  4. Mushrooms shrink when they cook!
    Onto the plate you go!

  5. Next, put the Vegemite butter into the pan and toss in the onions and garlic. Use medium heat and saute until onions are tender.

  6. Hmm.. is this enough butter?
    Whoa damn, it looks like curry!

  7. Increase heat to medium-high and add the uncooked rice into the pan. Stir the rice around and make sure the rice is coated with that delicious Vegemite Butter. Stir it until the rice becomes semi-translucent.

  8. Coat it with butter!!!

  9. Pour some red wine into the pan to deglaze it. (I used red wine because I had no white wine, and I forgot to buy lemon. It should be ok, right?) Scrape the bottom of the pan to dislodge any tasty bits.

  10. Turn the heat down to medium low, and add 3 ladles of warm kombu stock. Stir the rice occasionally until most of the stock is absorbed by the rice.

  11. It looks like curry again, lol.

  12. Continue to add the kombu stock to the rice (one ladle at a time) and stir the rice until the liquid is mostly absorbed. Repeat until the rice is cooked to your liking. (Keep tasting it to check for your preferred doneness.)
  13. Looks about right.

  14. Add the cooked minced pork and mushrooms into the rice and mix it to heat them up.

  15. Reunion!!

  16. If you have any leftover stock and you want the risotto to be a little bit more creamy, pour the rest of the stock into the risotto. (It shouldn't be much.) If you have any leftover Vegemite butter in the bowl, you can also add them to the mixture. (I did it by putting some risotto into the Vegemite butter bowl and mixed it around to absorb the leftover Vegemite butter.)

  17. Almost done...

  18. Remove risotto from heat and transfer to a serving plate/bowl. At this point, you can add some grated parmesan cheese if you want.

  19. And it's done!
Blurry pic!

Hmph, not bad for a first time trying this recipe! I've made risotto several times before so this one turned out alright, I think. The rice is not too hard and not too soft, and since the Vegemite is already quite salty, there's no need to add any salt in it. (Though, I did add some soy sauce to the pork when cooking it.)

So, how does it taste?


Quite nice, actually! Although... the taste of the Vegemite is quite mild and not as pronounced as I had hoped. Strangely, it has a familiar nostalgic taste which I cannot quite put my finger on.

This risotto should go well with grated parmesan cheese (and maybe some pepper for a bit of bite). However, at this point I was too lazy to grate the parmesan cheese, so I just slapped a slice of cheddar cheese to it.


...Which was a bad idea. That slice of cheddar cheese overpowered the taste of the risotto! Definitely use proper grated cheese next time!

Overall, I like how this risotto turned out! There's room for more experimentation with this dish, like using bacon instead of minced pork, or adding dried nori seaweed as garnish.

If I have to improve this recipe, I'd either increase the amount of Vegemite (and butter) for this dish, or reduce the amount of rice to cook, just so that the taste of Vegemite is more prominent. (You don't have to do it, I just like the taste of Vegemite!)

Anyway, if you too like Vegemite (or if you had bought Vegemite because you were curious about it but found that you don't actually like the taste), there's no harm in trying out this recipe! Hope whoever tries it will like it as well!

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