“Hey, look… we’ve finally got squash!” I say to Allie in early fall, when we’re circling through the Uptown Hoboken farmers’ market and butternut is back. And we make soups, salads, pasta, and so on into the next year. The end of winter comes. We hit a market or a grocery store. There’s a pyramid of squash. “Man,” I say, “if I have to eat another squash or root vegetable I’m going to go insane!” Even then, when we’re tired of the rest, we like to get one last butternut risotto or farotto in before winter ends.

Farotto is farro cooked like risotto. Allie doesn’t eat many grain-based foods, but loves farro, which is essentially whole heads of hard-wheat grain. Farro is nutritionally rich. It has better flavor than rice. It can, for me, provide a portal to another world. I spent a summer working on farms and vineyards in Italy. At the end, right before I left for home, I watched a colossal harvester sweep through a hillside wheat field on a farm high in the Apennine Mountains. That grain was of the ancient, hard-wheat variety that comes under the lexical umbrella of “farro.”

Standard risotto is dope. I don’t think I need to elaborate here. Farotto is much easier to cook than risotto, especially when you’re incorporating squash. The reason is that you don’t have to stir constantly, like you do to create the chemical changes in risotto rice that make the standard dish creamy. Here, we’re getting creaminess through olive oil, squash, and (when Allie isn’t looking!) a mountain of cheese.

Above is a picture of plain butternut squash farotto. I went two ways with this one. First (and first below), I added pancetta, fried sage, and a balsamic drizzle. Second, for the meat-averse, I went old-school with sage and Parmesan. Hope you enjoy this simple but good recipe. You can sub other squash in other seasons. Recipe below!

Actually, we’re going to try something new: farotto recipe after this jump.