For if, when you are eating with gusto, you don’t have a person eating with the same gusto beside you, the pleasure of eating is as though obscured, diminished.
Montalbano’s First Case and Other Stories, Andrea Camillieri
When I found out this week’s theme — Street Food — I knew immediately I wanted to make: Arancini, fried balls of risotto filled with meat and cheese, a Sicilian street food delicacy.
I’d tried making them once before years ago, without success. The risotto was too gloppy and stuck to my hands, never forming balls or making it to the deep fryer.
But I’ve learned a lot more about cooking since then, including the most important part of any recipe: Do your research and follow the steps exactly.
To accompany these deep fried balls of cheesy goodness, I needed a book featuring arancini. Enter Inspector Montalbano and his love for these rice fritters.
The book
Montalbano’s First Case and Other Stories is a collection of short stories about Inspector Montalbano, a Sicilian detective. The stories range from humorous to puzzling to tragic, and some were more entertaining than others. If you enjoy mystery novels with an amusing cast of characters, along the lines of Agatha Christie or Louise Penny, you might enjoy these stories. My favorites included:
Dress Rehearsal: A tragic tale of an elderly couple rehearsing their own deaths.
Montalbano Says No: The inspector and his author have a disagreement about the grisly nature of his story. Very meta and humorous.
As Alice Did: The Inspector and his colleagues search for a fugitive who is hiding right under their noses. A interesting puzzle of a story.
Seven Mondays: The Inspector investigates a series of ritualistic killings, all involving animals. Very weird, with a tense ending.
Montalbano's Rice Fritters: Montalbano wants to enjoy his New Year's Eve meal of arancini, but crime gets in the way. Very funny.
The food
Inspired by Montalbano’s Rice Fritters, these arancini are not dainty appetizers; they are a full meal, worthy of a New Year’s Eve feast. Like most good holiday food, they also take some time to prepare — plan a few days ahead to allow time for the mixtures to chill and set.
After some research, I picked a recipe for Sicilian arancini from Vincenzo’s Plate. I chose this recipe because the ingredients were simple: arborio rice, broth, ground beef, carrots, onions, tomato paste and lots of butter and cheese. The recipe also included a detailed YouTube video that showed all the steps for making the arancini, which helped immensely when it came time to form the fritters.
First, I made the rice and the beef ragu to go in the middle. Then I chilled both mixtures overnight. All the ingredients have to be cold, so the fritters don’t fall apart when you make them.
Each rice ball is filled with a mixture of beef ragu, shredded mozzarella and fresh mozzarella cheese, then packed tight. After I’d made all the arancini, I chilled them again for about six hours — overnight is better — before I breaded them for frying.
Vincenzo’s Plate deep fries the arancini, but I used our air fryer as an experiment, to see it would give me the same crispy results with less mess.
The verdict? While deep-fried arancini are likely the best, the air fryer still turned out crispy rice balls with gooey melted cheese in the middle. My only complaint was the fritters leaked some butter in the air fryer, so I made not add as much next time.
We topped the arancini with marinara sauce, and served them with roasted asparagus and some grilled shrimp.
While arancini won’t make it into our weekly meal rotations — it’s a lot of work — I’m keeping the recipe for the next time we need an impressive dinner party dish.
Next week: Boards