Risotto Recipes For Any Night Of The Week

Everyone enjoys a good risotto, but that doesn't mean everyone enjoys making it. As Serious Eats notes, the most traditional version of the rice dish involves lots of elbow grease. It needs to be stirred for long periods, and you must be pretty familiar with the ingredients — the type of rice you're using, in particular — in order to bring out the best in the meal. As such, risotto might not be the first thing you want to start cooking after a hard day at work, even though the creamy, tasty dish might often be precisely the pick-me-up you'd need.

Luckily, risotto doesn't have to be intimidating. While there indeed are common mistakes you can make with risotto, there are also all sorts of surprisingly easy, yet absolutely delicious risotto recipes out there. In fact, we just went and collected a whole bunch of them to get you through the workweek. Just follow these handy recipes, and you can light up your weekdays with an opulent meal with surprisingly little time or effort. 

Chicken and risotto go together so well that you're probably imagining the unique mouthfeel as you read this very sentence. That being said, no one likes messed-up risotto or dry chicken, and since both can be fairly easy to botch if you don't pay attention to what you're doing, it's worth having a great go-to chicken risotto recipe at your weekday disposal. 

Well, here it is, courtesy of chef and recipe developer Ting Dalton of Cook Simply. For this delicious chicken risotto recipe, you naturally need the basics for making risotto: proper risotto rice (Arborio), butter and olive oil, Parmesan cheese, garlic and onion, and a good set of basic spices. In addition, this recipe requires some dried porcini mushrooms, chicken stock, and cooked chicken. Of course, if you want, you can also take things further. The dish is pretty versatile, so you're free to customize the recipe with some of your favorite veggies to give it that extra oomph.

Instant pot is a handy and versatile cooking aid for those busy days, and wouldn't you know, it can also be used to make a mouth-watering risotto. What's more, the dinner is ready in barely any time at all! This lavish, yet easy Instant Pot risotto recipe comes courtesy of dietician Kristen Carli of Camelback Nutrition & Wellness, and it combines the risotto basics with frozen peas, lemon, thyme, vegetable broth, and sliced baby bella mushrooms. 

The whole process takes just 20 minutes, making this possibly the easiest, quickest way that'll allow you to make delicious risotto as a double-quick weekday meal. The best thing is that the minutes that you save just happen to be the most annoying ones in the risotto-cooking process: the stirring part. "Because this recipe is made in the Instant Pot, you save the 20 minutes of active stirring that stove-top risotto requires," Carli says.

Many risottos are meat-free, but sometimes you might want to skip the Parmesan as well. So why not dedicate one day of your week for a fully vegan five-ingredient risotto that's both easy to make and absolutely tasty? From certified holistic health chef Maren Epstein of Eating Works, this minimalistic take on risotto combines Arborio rice with just olive oil, garlic, shallots, and lemon. For liquid, you can use vegetable stock or water, whichever your heart desires.

Though simple and relatively quick to make, this risotto still packs every bit of the taste you'd expect from a nice risotto — and if you feel like adding yet another layer of flavor, just add a little white wine to the recipe. 

Gordon Ramsay is one of the most famous and successful chefs in the world, so it makes sense that the man knows how to make a great risotto. However, just because a source is great doesn't mean that the end result can't be improved — and recipe developer Sher Castellano has been able to take Chef Ramsay's risotto recipe and take it to a cool, new level. 

Castellano's recipe for Gordon Ramsay's risotto with a twist takes the original mushroom risotto with Portobello and white mushrooms, halves the amount of butter, and swaps some of the broth for half a cup of red wine. This allows for a much healthier recipe, while giving the risotto a rich, complex taste.

Risotto is never not opulent, but if you want to take things to a completely next level, why not try the luxuriously creamy Parmesan risotto that might just be the best you've ever tasted? Created by recipe developer Maren Epstein of Eating Works, this delicious creation is not the quickest snack you'll make, since it takes over an hour to whip up. However, as risotto recipes go, this is actually one of the easier ones out there, since it eschews the traditional hands-on stirring process. Instead, the risotto is cooked in an oven ... and with a magnificent amount of Parmesan cheese and a healthy amount of white wine to boost the flavor, this cheesy treat is completely irresistible.