REVIEW: Sacla Sauce for Risotto
As promised, here is the follow up to my post about making home made pasta and trying out Sacla’s sun-dried tomato pesto. That was a very successful operation, and we have had numerous yummy dinners with our Sacla products since. Unfortunately, The Boy is too quick off the mark and used most of them to cook me tea (which I am not complaining about!) before I had the chance to blog about them. One tip that he especially recommends is using the Sacla stir through Italian tomato sauce with olive as a pizza sauce! I would never have thought of that, so it’s a good job that he’s here, but I can completely recommend it, it’s delicious!  |
| Warning: stir before looking at contents of pan |
Today, we were trying out the Sacla butternut squash with parmesan for risotto. I must confess, this is the last of the products we have tried because I don’t typically use ready made sauces and the idea of using a sauce for a risotto confused me a little bit! However, we perservered, and I added a few extra bits, as is my wont.
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| Ta da! (Still looks a bit like sick) |
I thought of using this today because I had some baby sweetcorn in and I’d seen a recipe online that involved baby sweetcorn with butternut squash, which triggered off some secret receptor in my brain saying “You have something involving butternut squash in the cupboard”. Upon remembering this, the plan was formed.
I chopped up some baby sweetcorn and a bit of garlic and stuck it in the pan. Then as per the actual instructions, I added 200g of rice (regular rice – I was desperate for a quick tea and there was no risotto rice in, sometimes time is of the essence), the contents of the jar, 3 jars worth of water (nice and easy that) and a stock cube. Simmered for just over 15 minutes and Robert’s your dad’s brother – tea was ready!
Well, as you can see from my final photo, I actually added some soft cheese stirred in before I served it, but in the interests of fairness, I tasted it first. It was actually really good. There were some actual pieces of butternut squash (extra points to Sacla from me for that) and they had a nice sweet flavour. The sauce was really quite creamy, although of course the texture would have been slightly better had I used risotto rice. It didn’t require any extra seasoning – the sauce mixed with a stock cube were quite sufficient, although as with most meals a twist of black pepper was the icing on the cake. The best thing about the flavour, which actually surprised me, was the parmesan flavour. It was clearly discernible and really yummy! All in all, this was really enjoyable. For people where the nearest we come to prepared sauces is Sacla pesto, this was a nice quick fix. Certainly something I would have stored at the back of the cupboard for emergencies.
An extremely high ranking 9 out of 10 Extreme Points for me. A very pleasurable surprise.
