These Sicilian goodness should be enjoyed on any occasion, for example lunch, dinner or snack. Many Sicilians have a snack with arancini in the mid-morning. The secrets to achieve excellent arancini are: using suitable rice (starchy); preventing the filling comes out and finally doing a dry and crispy frying . Some people, in addition to meat sauce, put in fresh Pecorino cheese cut into small pieces or add some classic bechamel sauce. These solutions are used to make arancini tastier, but I think they are very good even without these ingredients..
Ingredients
Serves: 4
- 200 g tomato paste
- 280 g ground beef
- 140g frozen peas
- 300g Arborio rice
- 600ml vegetable stock
- 70g of grated Parmesan cheese
- 1/2 white onion
- 4 garlic cloves
- 4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
- 1 carrot of medium size
- some leaves of celery
- 1 sachet of saffron or 2g saffron pistils
- nutmeg to taste
- salt
- ground black pepper
- sugar
For the breading
- 80 g breadcrumbs
- all-purpose flour
- cold water
- peanut oil for frying
- salt
Method
Gently brown two cloves of garlic and chopped onion, chopped celery and chopped carrot in olive oil, until golden brown. Pour the tomato paste (diluted in a little water). Bring to a boil and season with sugar, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Then add the peas still frozen, stir and wait for the sauce boil resumes. Now add the meat. Cook over low heat for another 60 minutes. You’ll have to get a very thick sauce. When the sauce is ready, let it cool and set aside. Then prepare the rice. In a pan, fry the remaining cloves of garlic with extra virgin olive oil, so add the rice, toast it and add the vegetable broth gradually. When it is cooked, stir in the Parmesan and add the saffron; stir again and put it in a pan covered with baking paper, until it cools. Put the flour in a bowl and after pour cold water: you’ll have to create a thick batter without lumps. In a bowl place the bread crumbs. Now you can start to create the arancini. Bathe your hands and take a spoonful of rice, place it on the palm of the hand and create a kind of cup. Then place inside a little sauce and close the cup to form a ball. Compact it very well and dip it in the batter, then bread the arancino. Proceed as for all arancini. Heat abundant peanut oil until it has a temperature of 175° Celsius degrees and fry few arancini at a time. When they are golden brown, you can drain and place them on paper towels. Salt and eat hot.