At the table: Risotto al Barolo
By Joanna Simon | April 29 2021
Risotto al Barolo. Photography by Francesco83/Shutterstock
In the first of a monthly series exploring classic dishes from the world’s great wine regions, the award-winning wine and food writer Joanna Simon reflects on a Piemontese rice dish and selects some accompanying local wines
We may think of Italians as pasta eaters but, in the north, rice rules. Italy is Europe’s leading producer of rice, most of it is grown in the Po basin, in the so-called rice belt stretching from Piedmont through Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna, and more than half of the country’s 220,000 ha (543,630 acres) under rice are in Piedmont.