Prepare the mushrooms:

• If you are making the risotto with fresh mushrooms, clean them and cut the caps from the stems. Boil the stems with the chicken stock. Cut the caps into ½cm thick slices and fry in butter for about 5 minutes. Stir them into the almost ready risotto with the parsley towards the end of the cooking time.
• Dried mushrooms are best soaked in lukewarm water for about an hour. Then take them out, squeeze out the water gently and cut into small pieces. Pour the soaking water through a fine sieve, then add ½ litre of the liquid to the stock and bring to the boil, then simmer gently.

Prepare the risotto:

• Take a pan and gently sweat the finely chopped onion in the butter until the liquid has evaporated, but it has not taken on any colour. Then turn the heat up a little and add the prepared dried mushrooms and saute for two minutes.
• Saute the rice in the butter-onion-mushroom mixture, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon.  
• Deglaze with the white wine, which gives the dish a hint of acidity, and continue to cook. When the wine has evaporated, pour in a few ladles of hot stock, stir and only add the next ladle of stock once the rice has absorbed the previous ones.
• If you are working with unsalted stock, salt it carefully because if you add butter and cheese at the end, the risotto will become even saltier anyway.
• Depending on your taste, you can keep the risotto drier or soupy at the end. The rice should not be too soft and not too hard.
• At the very end, put a knob of butter and Parmigiano Reggiano on the risotto, wait a little and then mix vigorously so that the butter and the cheese combine with the small amount of stock in the rice to form a creamy emulsion.
• Stir in the sautéed fresh mushrooms and chopped parsley, if desired, and serve immediately on warmed plates.