Arancini is a Sicilian street food staple with ancient origins dating back to around the 10th century when hunters and diplomats would fry fillings inside balls of rice and take them on the road. Today, that portability makes them perfect for Sicilian vendors to sell out of street carts and market stalls, but these crispy risotto balls can also be found with all sorts of solid and saucy fillings in sit-down Italian restaurants and bars.
Assembling arancini at home is pretty straightforward when you're working with solid fillings like meat, cheese, and vegetables. But getting sauce inside those deep-fried balls of risotto at home requires a little bit more finagling. The usual procedure of making a mound of filling and wrapping the risotto around it doesn't work so well when your filling is less than solid. Even the thickest meat sauce can challenge arancini amateurs and pros alike.
Thankfully, Jasper J. Mirabile Jr., owner and chef at Jasper's Restaurant and host of "Live! From Jasper's Kitchen Radio," has a life hack that will take your arancini game to the next level. Instead of fussing around with a runny filling, Mirabile recommends freezing the sauce first. "Yes, you can freeze tomato sauce before using," he said. "Freezing the sauce ahead of time can help make the assembly process easier, especially if you want to ensure that the sauce doesn't make the rice mixture too wet."
Frozen fillings make saucy arancini a breeze to whip up
There are a couple of ways you can go about freezing the sauce for your arancini, depending on how thin it is. If it's especially thick, you may be able to use a teaspoon to dish out mounds onto a parchment-lined baking sheet before freezing. But for thinner sauces, you'll need a mold of some kind. You can use a standard ice cube tray, filling it about halfway, or a silicone mini-cube mold, which makes it easier to control how much sauce you put inside each rice ball. You could even use a mini muffin tin, if you've got it, filling the bottom of each well to make frozen sauce discs that you can fold into your arancini.
Then, after rolling and breading your rice balls, arrange them on a baking sheet and pop them in the freezer for 20 minutes to firm them up before frying, or freeze them solid and transfer them to a storage bag to fry another day. Making arancini in one go is like running a gauntlet, but you can make them in big batches over a couple of days and freeze them for later. Try making a double batch of risotto for dinner, prepping and freezing your sauce at the same time. The next day, roll and bread the arancini from the leftover risotto, freeze them, and whenever you're ready, all you have to do is throw them in some hot oil, and dinner's on.