Red Wine Risotto

You have a cup of leftover red wine, too little to make a toast but just perfect to make a fantastic red wine risotto. Although you could make this fabulous dish without any other ingredients than a regular risotto would call for, we decided to add a touch of charm with stovetop caramelized plums and beets to make it surreal!

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Serve it as a first course, as Italians would do, or make it the centerpiece of any memorable year-end holiday or Valentine's Day. If you make it the main course, you can start a fabulous meal with a fall-inspired kale salad with maple syrup and balsamic vinaigrette.

We also used the same risotto techniques for our lemony winter and pumpkin risottos on this site. You can use the same steps over and over, simply changing your choice of vegetables to make a bowl of creamy risotto rice all the time.

Jump to:

• 🧾 Ingredients
• 🔪 Instructions
• 🍶 Substitutions
• 📖 Variations
• 🍽 Equipment
• 🥡 Storage
• 💡 Top tip
• 🥢 How to serve
• ❓ FAQ
• 📚 More risotto recipes
• 📋 Recipe
• 🌡️ Food safety
• 💬 Reviews and Comments

🧾 Ingredients

Make this wine risotto with just a handful of staple ingredients.

• Red wine - the best wines for this risotto are those that are young and not aged in the wood. Tempranillo and Garnacha are excellent choices.
• Risotto rice - use arborio rice or if you have access to carnarolli rice, go for it! This is the rice Italians use to make the creamier risotto.
• Onion - this recipe calls for the red onion to match the red theme of this dish, but also because red onions have a sweeter flavor that helps to balance out red wine's tannins. Also, we decided to cut it into fine slices (Jullien) instead of risotto's classic fine-diced cut. Why? Caramelized onions' texture, which we really wanted to integrate into this creamy Italian rice, is better appreciated with this particular cut.
• Vegan butter - we like using Earth Balance or making our own vegan butter.
• Nutritional yeast is the regular parmesan cheese replacement in most vegan risottos.
• Vegetable broth - instead of the regular chicken broth, we always pick an organic vegetable broth that may come in cubes for you to dilute, as per packaging directions, buy liquid vegetable stock, or make your own with vegetable leftovers.
• Garlic - together with onions, they add the flavor kick necessary to bring all the rest of the dish together.
• Parsley and lemon zest- adding an herb to all risotto recipes is a good idea. The usual ones are rosemary and fresh thyme, but we picked the delicious gremolata which we discovered while living in Italy.

Because we wanted to add some fresh lemony, and wintery notes, we nailed it as the perfect seasoning pairing for this dish.

Optional:

• Beets - It is pretty challenging to get the right color for a red risotto. To sort it out, we used red beets. They have just the right color and sweetness, and if you buy them already peeled and packed in the supermarket, you can use all the red juice that comes from them to give your risotto a more intense color.
• Plums - we wanted to add a citric note in addition to the lemon one, and plums have a sweet and sour taste that is very common to find in red wine, so we added plum to this risotto as an optional to intensify the sweet and sour red wine’s natural notes. We decided to cut half of the plum to braise it with the beets and use the other half to serve it fresh as a garnishing option.

Both fresh and braised plums add their own touch to the final dish.

See the recipe card for quantities.

🔪 Instructions

This red wine rice recipe involves three simple steps.

1. Braising the beets and plums.
2. Stir-frying onion, garlic, and rice.
3. Deglazing and adding broth slowly until you get the right creamy consistency.

💡 When to add wine to risotto? The moment to stir in the red wine is when either the rice starts looking brownish, or the onions are about to start burning.

Hint: you don't need to use all the broth. Just enough so you don't run out of liquid before the rice is creamy enough.

🍶 Substitutions

• Nutritional yeast - use vegan parmesan cheese or a tablespoon of marmite.
• Red onion - use any kind of onion, like yellow, white, or spring. Leeks are also great for risotto.
• Beets - use two tablespoons of tomato paste to get some of the sweetness and color that beets contribute to the dish.
• Parsley - use fresh or dried thyme or Rosemary.
• Vegan butter - use olive oil, grapeseed, coconut, or avocado oil instead.

📖 Variations

• Peas - make this red wine risotto with peas by simply adding a cup of frozen peas five minutes before turning off the heat. Peas barely need any cooking, so it is better to add them to dishes when they are almost ready just to defrost and keep their beautiful bright green color.
• Mushrooms - you can substitute the beets and plums with mushrooms. To make a red wine risotto with mushrooms, pan-sear them before making the risotto, as we do in our creamy mushroom risotto, so the mushrooms keep their golden color and don't look soggy.

🍽 Equipment

1. Medium saucepan - it is your most important piece of equipment to make creamy rice. I like using one that is somewhere in between a shallow and a deep saucepan. This way, it can hold vegetable broth but has enough hot surface for the risotto to cook quicker and evenly.
2. Regular chopping board and knife.
3. Soupspoon to add broth into the saucepan.

🥡 Storage

Store risotto in a BPA-free airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 days.

You can freeze risotto in an airtight container, but it doesn't stand up well to freezing for more than 3 months.

You can reheat it in a saucepan or microwave.

🥢 How to serve

• Appetizer - serve risotto as a first course. This is what Italians do; they have a small portion of risotto before the main dish, which usually consists of a protein centerpiece and contorno (side dish), which can be a salad.
• Side dish - Risotto can also make a delicious side dish when you make a banquet; just be sure to serve it warm.
• Main course - when serving risotto as the main course, be sure to calculate at least 100 grams (3.5 oz) of rice per person.

❓ FAQ

📚 More risotto recipes

If you are a regular reader of our blog, you know we have all kinds of rice, from basmati rice for our Indian curries to steamed Jasmine rice as side dishes for our Thai curries.

Risotto is what we cook when we just want something easy, cozy, and flavorful with just a handful of ingredients.

If you love beets, don't forget to check out our stunning beet carpaccio, an authentic Italian gem!

Try our roasted pumpkin, butternut squash, sun-dried tomato, asparagus, lemony winter, mushrooms, or Milanese saffron risottos.

⭐ If you try this amazing recipe, let us know! 💬 Leave a comment, rate it, and don't forget to tag us @ourplantbasedworld on Instagram. Cheers!

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