Recipe Testing: Rice Fritters

I decided to trial Rosselli's recipe for rice fritters using different types of rice, to find out which worked best and also to work out the ingredient proportions ahead of the event I'm cooking these at.

I trialled the recipe with normal long grain white rice, risotto rice, and sticky rice.

For each test, I cooked 1/3 of a cup of rice. I drained off the cooking water and reserved it to make the almond milk with as Rosselli says to use this. The down side of the sticky rice here was that it absorbed all the water so there was nothing to drain off.

I made the almond milk using 200g of freshly ground almonds, adding one cup of reserved rice broth to the mixture as well as about half a cup of water extra. I squeezed the almonds out well to make it as strong as possible. I split the resulting milk between the three rice mixtures, so a half cup of liquid was added to each mixture.

I added a tablespoonful of sugar to the white rice and risotto rice, and only a teaspoonful to the sticky rice to try and make a less sweet variant (forgetting of course that sticky rice is sweeter to start with). I chose this volume because this appears to be another recipe where sugar is being used in place of salt to bring out the flavour.

I decided to cook the long grain rice first. I added two heaped tablespoonfuls of rice flour to the mixture and combined it well. I had chosen to use rice flour because I really wanted to make these gluten free, since we have a lot of gluten free people in our group. Rice flour is an appropriate substitute as it is often specified in recipes anyway.

I heated some olive oil in my cast iron frying pan, and dropped a heaped tablespoonful of the mixture onto the heated pan, flattening it out with the spoon to make a fritter shape. There was too little flour in the mixture, and the fritter stuck to the pan and steadily became less fritter-like. I upped the flour until it was much thicker, and ended up adding around half a cup of rice flour in total to produce a much stiffer mixture. The second fritter I tried with this mixture worked much better, browned nicely and didn't stick.

Since this volume of flour worked well, I added the same amount to each of the other recipes. The risotto flour mixture worked equally well to the long grain rice mixture. The sticky rice mixture was too soft and stuck to the pan a bit more.

Tasting the finished fritters, the sticky rice fritter was too sweet. Given the other issues with it, I wouldn't use this again. Either of the other two varieties I would use again. The sugar volume I think was about right, as neither of these two fritters tasted sweet at all. The fritters tasted quite oily, so I would be inclined to sit them on paper towels after cooking to drain some of this off, as I think a modern palette would find them more appetising this way.

The volumes I have used here would make about six large fritters.