I found that I had never closed, emptied, or turn off my rice cooker yesterday. It was full of hard little shriveled warm rices.
But it got me to thinking, that it wouldn’t be a bad way to make minute rice*. It would be precooked, so it would only need to hydrate, not chemically be cooked anymore. Not that I’m a big fan of minute rice, but it is a neccesity for backpacking when water and heat may be at too high a premium to cook normal rice over propane in water for that long.
I’m curious if anyone has ever tried it.
*I also realized that I do not know if the ‘keep warm’ setting can maintain temperature with the lid open, nor do I know when it went dry. And since wet startchy, and warm for hours overnight is primary breeding ground for nasty microorganisms I decided not to check out if it would work as minute rice myself.
I seem to recall reading that Japanese foot soldiers (ashigaru) back in the 1500’s and earlier would actually do something similar for trail rations-- take cooked rice and dry it out so that it would reheat very quickly with a little water.
I imagine you could toss cooked rice in a dehydrator, or simply spread it on a cookie sheet and bake it for a long time at a low temperature if you wanted to have more control over the process.
(Here in Thailand, a common treat is the crunchy crust from the bottom of the rice pot, fried into crisp crackers and topped with assorted stuff. Yummay.)
So-called commercial “minute rice” takes 15 minutes to cook, as I recall. Regular rice takes…15 minutes to cook. I don’t see the advantage. Unless you’re talking about freeze-dried or something.
You might be thinking of converted or parboiled rice, which doesn’t cut down on cooking time but improves consistency, i.e. seperate grains and all that. With Minute Rice, you just add boiling water and let it steep for a minute or three (then eat the box, as it has a better flavor).
Your estimates seemed off to me, so I went and looked at the packages in my pantry. Starting with boiling water, Minute Rice™ takes 5 minutes to cook, regular rice (Mahatma™ Long Grain Enriched Rice) takes 20 minutes.
I’ve never played around with dehydrating cooked rice, but whenever I make rice, I make a triple batch and freeze two portions of it for another night. Perks up just fine in the microwave. Not that rice is hard to make, but if my timing’s off, it can get overcooked waiting for the rest of the meal.
I also freeze batches of homemade “Rice-a-Roni” with gluten free pasta and rice; again, it’s just easier to make a huge batch once a month than chop and sautee and stir while I’m trying to make a main dish and two sides for multiple meals.
I haven’t quite ventured into Once a Month Cooking, but I’m trying to do more Double Batch and Freeze One cooking.
Oh! You mean you don’t have an army of minions chopping onions, measuring spices into their individual teeny tiny matching white bowls and reducing stock for you? My illusions are shattered…
