LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, I went to Phoenix’s Pizzeria Bianco for the pizza, but the dish that stuck with me was the dessert. Torta di riso is a common enough Italian sweet, but this particular rice cake was harmony on a plate: rich custard balanced by vibrant lemon, dense with rice that still had some bite to it. A lot was going on inside that unassuming slice, and I was not going home without a road map back to it.  I walked right up to the chef-owner, Chris Bianco, to ask for the recipe. He was at the oven, mid-pizza, but he said sure, write down your email address and I’ll send it.  That was back in the late 1990s, and Mr. Bianco was busy in the years that followed. He opened an adjacent bar, a second Pizzeria Bianco and the sandwich shop Pane Bianco in Phoenix, plus another pizzeria in Tucson. In 2003 he became the first pizza maker to win a James Beard award, for Best Chef, Southwest Region. But he never sent that recipe.  Life gets in the way, email addresses and priorities change; I know that. And yet, consider fate: Back in Phoenix recently, I stopped into Pane Bianco to pick up a sandwich for my plane trip home to New York, and Mr. Bianco walked in just as I was walking out. He could have been at any of his other restaurants that day, or at home, or he could have shown up 10 minutes later. Clearly, he was here to make good on the recipe offer. I reintroduced myself and reminded him.  What a smile. He hadn’t thought about that cake in years. It was his mom’s, and it was awfully good, wasn’t it? He would ask her for the recipe and send it to me, for certain this time.  There was no recipe, as it turned out. Or rather, there was an oral tradition that he and his mom, Francesca, would try to quantify. Their torta di riso came from Francesca’s grandmother in Carrara, Italy, who handed it down to her son, who brought it to the Bronx and passed it on to his daughter. Francesca, in turn, baked it for Chris when he was a boy.  Mr. Bianco said that “time and place” distinguish one torta from the next across Italy. The lemon flavor that brightens his family’s version came more to the fore after he moved to Phoenix, where he was overwhelmed by the abundance and quality of the citrus. “You pulled a lemon off a tree and its heart was still beating,” he said. “Really great, fragrant lemons, in season, are such an opportunity.”  Francesca made the cake in the early days of Pizzeria Bianco, but about a decade ago, when the restaurant got so popular that people willingly endured four-hour waits, Mr. Bianco took dessert off the menu altogether. There just wasn’t time. When he reinstated sweets in 2011, the rice cake wasn’t among them.  He figured the only way to nail the recipe now was to have his mom start baking the cake again, this time with him sampling and tweaking.  Unlike many dessert recipes, which require precision, this one has some give to it. Mr. Bianco encourages home cooks to try limoncello or rum instead of amaretto, or more lemon juice in place of the alcohol if you want a stronger citrus flavor. You can replace lemons with oranges, though he stops short of Meyer lemons because he doesn’t think the rind has the right flavor for this cake.  Mr. Bianco urges home bakers to audition several variations—my favorite is the one with extra lemon juice—or to come up with one he hasn’t yet tried.  “Make it your own,” he said. “Find the way that you like it.”
Chef Chris Bianco’s family recipe for lemony torta di riso is remarkably adaptable and fuss-free. This creamy rice cake makes the most of winter’s windfall of citrus.