Here’s How to Easily Make Butternut Squash and Kale Farrotto Like an Italian Chef

I can’t say for sure who invented farrotto, in which the grain farro is cooked in the style of risotto, but I can say that I worked for the chef who maybe invented it and definitely popularized it. That chef is Cesare Casella, one of the United States’ foremost experts in Italian cuisine and Tuscan cooking in particular, and farrotto was always on the menu when I was his sous chef at his old restaurant Beppe in New York City.

Cesare was one of the original proponents of the technique when running his family’s restaurant Vipore in Lucca, Italy and then, once he moved to the United States, helped make it a well-known dish here. At Beppe, the farrotto was almost always vegetarian and it changed frequently with the seasons, sometimes made with fava beans and pea purée, sometimes tomatoes and eggplant, and often, in the winter, made with butternut squash. His butternut squash version is arguably his most signature of them all, though even that changed from time to time. I know he sometimes crumbled amaretti cookies on top, but I especially loved the rendition with Tuscan kale (aka black kale and dinosaur kale), which I’ve recreated from memory here.

It’s easy, it’s filling, it’s nutritious and satisfying, and it’s so, so delicious. I love the simplicity of the dish—it calls for relatively few ingredients, and, aside from having to turn on the oven to roast the squash, it all happens in one pan. The farro, which is an ancient type of wheat, can take a little longer than risotto rice to cook, though the cooking time is hard to pin down because different brands of farro cook at different rates. I recommend buying pearled farro, which has some of the bran removed to speed cooking, though even then I’ve had different brands take different times to cook.

No matter, just keep stirring in your liquid until it gets there. One note: farro doesn’t release as much starch as rice does, so it won’t become quite as creamy on its own, but between the butternut squash, which breaks down into a partial-purée in the pan, and the cheese (and some good stirring), it’ll end up creamy in the end.

Oh yeah, and about that creaminess: The art to all risotto-like preparations largely comes down to controlling the viscosity. You don’t want it loose and watery, but you want to keep it thinner than you might imagine, since the farrotto continues to absorb water and thicken as it sits and cools, so you’re always racing against time and a too-thick and stiff porridge. Keep it creamy but flowing right up until it hits the (warmed!) plates, and it’ll be good to go. Remember, it should spread and flow slightly on the plate and not sit in a hill-like pile.

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