The Slavic east and the Balkans · Volume 29, Bura, Smoke and the Ottoman Line

Crni Rižot

Name: Crni Rižot
Total time: 45 min
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: The Adriatic and Albania
Ingredients: 600 g cuttlefish, cleaned, cut into pieces, ink sacs reserved (or 2 sachets cuttlefish ink); 1 onion, finely chopped; 2 cloves garlic, chopped; 320 g risotto rice; 150 ml white wine; 1 litre fish stock, kept warm; 1 bay leaf; a little of each, to finish olive oil, butter, parsley to finish

Coastal Croatia

Crni rižot, cuttlefish-ink black risotto: a deep, glossy, jet-black mound of risotto rice mounded in a wide shallow bowl, a faint sheen of oil across the surface catching the light.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 45 minutes

Researched: 14 sources cited
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

by Coastal Croatia

Venice's imprint runs down both the Croatian and Montenegrin coast as one continuous zone. Venice took Dalmatian towns and islands piecemeal from around 1000 CE and held effective control until the Republic's fall in 1797; in Istria it expanded from the 13th to 15th centuries until it held roughly two-thirds of the peninsula. Kotor and the Bay were administered, on and off, within that same system from 1420, under Venice's own official label for its remaining eastern Adriatic holdings: Albania Veneta, a term covering coast that is now both Montenegrin and northern Albanian, and a useful reminder that Venice itself saw this whole littoral as one administrative and culinary zone rather than the several nations it is read as today. Istrapedia, the regional Croatian encyclopedia, states plainly that Venetian cuisine left the greatest single trace on Istrian gastronomy of any outside influence, importing cod from the Baltic and spices from Asia while building its cooking around Istria's own produce. Concretely, this layer gave the coast the rice-and-stock technique that becomes crni rižot, the pasta tradition behind fuži, the Malvazija grape family, and, on the dessert side, both fritule and Dubrovnik's rozata, whose oldest documented form is a 14th-century Venetian "friar's pudding" before it becomes Dubrovnik's own. The "Italian" gloss commonly put on Adriatic cooking is itself several centuries of local adaptation of one specific empire's foodways, not a recent import.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4. About 45 minutes.

Ingredients

600 g cuttlefish, cleaned, cut into pieces, ink sacs reserved (or 2 sachets cuttlefish ink)
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
320 g risotto rice
150 ml white wine
1 litre fish stock, kept warm
1 bay leaf
a little of each, to finish olive oil, butter, parsley to finish

Method

Sweat the onion in olive oil, add the garlic, then the cuttlefish, and cook gently for a full 15 minutes, letting it release its own liquid and begin to tenderise.
Deglaze with the white wine, then stir in the ink and bay leaf.
Add the rice, and cook by the standard risotto method, ladling in warm stock gradually and stirring, for 18 to 20 minutes, until the rice is just cooked and the sauce is glossy.
Finish off the heat with a little butter and parsley, and rest 5 to 10 minutes before serving.

What a modern chef changes

The ink cooked in properly, given more precision at each stage.

Rung 3

Method

Reserve a little of the cuttlefish's own cooking liquid separately, and use it, not extra stock, to loosen the finished risotto, keeping the marine depth concentrated rather than diluted.
Sear a few extra pieces of cuttlefish hard and fast in a separate pan, and scatter them over the top at the end, giving the dish a textural contrast, char against the soft braised base, that the single long-cooked method alone does not.
Use a high-power blender to purée a small portion of the finished risotto with a little extra ink and fold it back through, deepening the colour and the marine flavour without diluting the dish with extra stock.

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