Courgette flower & gorgonzola risotto
Mediterranean rice salad
Rice cakes with mozzarella & tomato
Rice pudding with almonds & raisins
pastastories
You could say that rice is, to Italians, a second pasta. By that I mean that if an Italian is not sitting down at lunch to a steaming bowl of pasta, then they’re probably eating rice. And when they do so, it is always the star of the show. The idea of eating heaped tablespoons of rice as a side is anathema to Italians. Today, Italians eat on average between 5-6 kilos of rice per capita per year, with roughly one family in three eating rice two to three times a week. However, the figures are significantly biased to the Piedmont and Lombardy regions in the north, where most of Italy’s rice is produced and where the population is estimated to eat approximately 55 per cent of Italy’s rice.
This should not come as any surprise as Italy is the largest producer of rice in Europe, accounting for just over 50 per cent of total production. The main varieties of rice cultivated in Italy today are subdivided into four categories:comune,semifino, fino andsuperfino. The first, a native variety, is used
