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For this vibrant, healthy take on the Italian staple, we use the whole dang beet to create a ruby-red-and-emerald dish with fresh, bright flavors and a remarkable creamy texture that utterly belies its vegan status. (Vegan, that is, unless you choose to top with some fresh parmesan—and, oh, we do.) Though it’s not necessary to use beet juice as cooking liquid (you can substitute any portion of stock or water instead), we love how the super-absorbent short-grain rice soaks up the earthy beet flavor and turns the rice an eye-popping magenta. And we particularly love how satisfied we feel when we use every part of the vegetable to get the job done.We prepare this risotto traditionally, in an open pan, gradually adding cooking liquid and stirring constantly until it’s all absorbed. The method, while popularly known to be painstaking and hard to master, is a tried-and-true technique with simple culinary science to back it up: all that stirring gradually erodes the starches on the surface of the rice grain, freeing them to thicken the cooking liquid added to the pan and slowly build up the thick, luscious texture we expect in great risotto. We stir the rice constantly for two reasons: to rub the starches off the grains so they can thicken the cooking liquid, and to prevent scorching. In a properly cooked risotto, the entire outside of the rice grain will be soft and supple, while the inner kernel will remain firm and chewy. We add more liquid (in the form of cream or butter or, in this case, Onion Cream) at the very end to further round out the consistency of the risotto.This risotto recipe may take experimentation to scale up or down due to surface area evaporation in your pan as well as variations in quality, age, and type of rice. But once you have the method down, you really can’t go wrong.