Iron Chef Recipes – Cabbage, Scallops and Foie Gras Risotto

Iron Chef is the greatest culinary show ever produced. Even till this day, I can think of no cooking programme that approaches close to it the skills and techniques you can pick up by watching battles between real chefs using all the imaginable tricks up their sleeves to win. Unlike in scripted programmes where everything is nice and easy and the results are always perfect, Iron Chef is raw, every mistake and miscalculation is immediately apparent. Also to its benefit is that Iron Chef predates the age of avant garde molecular cuisine which I am apathetic towards. I first got interested in cuisine watching Iron Chef and I cannot imagine a better start. Visit ironcheffans.info to download episodes.

Here is a rough recreation of Challenger Hiromi Yamada’s dish in Battle Cabbage (217) – a Cabbage, Scallops and Foie Gras Risotto.


The risotto I made this time is one of my best so far after many experiments. Here’s what I learnt:
1. Use more onions that you think you need, they add sweetness and lightness to the risotto.
2. Cook slowly on low heat and stir gently. To diffuse the heat evenly, the pot was placed over a thick carbon steel pan. Towards the end, check the doneness frequently and remove just before al dente.
3. Don’t be shy with the seasoning. Also, for risotto I tend to use white pepper instead of black.
4. For a wetter risotto, add more stock and then thicken with cream/mascarpone cheese. I find that the rice alone has insufficient starch to make a creamy but wet (as in the liquid to rice ratio) risotto.
With these tricks, combined with the basic techniques which are left as an exercise to the reader (inside joke, by the way) to discover, you can apply it to any variation of risotto dishes.


The scallops are large frozen Hokkaido ones which can be found at the more upscale supermarkets. They were done in a ghetto sous vide (under vacuum) style. I never thought that I would have the need to sous vide anything until my repeated frustrations with controlling the doneness of scallops. The molluscs were bagged in a small ziplock and immersed in a large insulated mug of water at 56 ˚C (some people go as low as 50 ˚C ) for 30 minutes. Check out the results for yourself.