Rice with flat green beans from Restaurant Riff

Judging by how few posts have appeared on this blog of ours lately, you can tell I'm on holiday and, on top of that, don't have many chances to get online.

The team at Riff in Valencia are also on holiday until 29 August. So that their customers (myself included) can have a good time while they're away, Bernd H. Knöller has sent us a recipe for one of his modern rice dishes. I've written about this restaurant before, here and here.

Bernd has a mailing list he uses to send all sorts of news to his customers. This time, along with the goodbye for the holidays, he sent a rice recipe.

The last time I was at Riff I got to talk to Bernd and told him he should switch to blogging; besides being a brilliant chef, he's a really fun guy.

Without further ado, here is the recipe with his comments.

Light rice with flat green beans (ferraura), summer savory and prawns. Rest. Riff

This is a rice cooked with poultry stock and ferraura beans, a flat green bean variety. Flat beans in general are perhaps the most important vegetables in Valencian cooking.

We cook the ferraura beans in plenty of water with enough salt for 3 minutes. By "enough salt" I mean saturating the water with so many minerals (salt) that it stops the vegetables (but also potatoes, pasta, etc.) from losing their own minerals, which are far too valuable to be thrown away afterwards with the water.

The amount of salt is usually quite high, more than usual, as if you were making a consommé. This is important, because otherwise you lose a huge amount of flavour.

We cool the beans in iced water (to keep them green) for just 2 minutes and then put them through the juicer.

Just as in Spain you get given parsley when you buy fish, in Germany you get given summer savory when you buy green beans. In German, savory is even called "bean herb" (Bohnenkraut). The fact is that in Germany this herb is traditionally cooked with beans because it boosts their flavour incredibly. This is one of the secrets behind the success of this rice at my restaurant.

Sauté a garlic clove and 2 shallots, both diced, in extra virgin olive oil; add 2 small (coffee) cups of bomba rice and a ladle of poultry stock. After 10 minutes (out of 18 in total), add the ferraura beans, finely sliced (2 mm), to the rice. Add stock (always boiling) whenever needed and stir the rice a lot so that it releases its starch. In the last 10 minutes, add the bean "juice" instead of the poultry stock, together with a few sprigs of savory, which we remove before serving.

It's important to stir the rice a lot in the last few minutes, so that it releases plenty of starch. "Light" refers to a fairly loose rice, more liquid than creamy, which, because it has been stirred so much, eats lighter, since there is more broth on the spoon in relation to the rice.

Finish the rice with salt and a good drizzle of extra virgin olive oil (Dauro).

To finish, blend about 100 ml of the warmed bean "juice" with a teaspoon of soy lecithin using a hand blender, to create a little "air", which we place on top of the rice once it is served on the plate.

All that's missing are some good prawns (from Burriana), sautéed just right...

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