Adam Pawlak

Sharing a kitchen with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay – as he did on season 19 of the reality cooking show “Hell’s Kitchen” – will forever define Adam Pawlak’s cooking career. In the Milwaukee restaurant scene, Pawlak is known for scratch-made pasta and classic sauces like Bolognese. He’s a purist when it comes to cooking those classics, which is what brings us to Italian risotto. “It's a dish that can be so amazing but so simple. And it's really just a rice dish, if you think about it,” he says. Because it’s so simple, the quality of the ingredients is important. You can switch up your add-ins – here, it’s wild mushrooms – but when it comes to cooking it, there are cardinal rules. The first is a wooden spoon for stirring, and you’re going to be doing a lot of stirring. “I always use it to move things around. You always want to use it to get the rice kernels off the side of the pan, too,” he says. Second, start with a white onion, the “foundation of a good risotto,” he says. “You never brown it. You cook it until it’s just translucent.” And the texture of the finished risotto is key – “if you can scoop it with a spoon and it sits on top of itself, that’s not risotto. That’s just cooked rice.” When you serve it, the risotto should “lay flat on the plate. It should not clump up,” he says. If you tilt the plate, the risotto should slowly spread out like sauce. The lesson: Perfect risotto is achievable if you follow the rules.