Can anyone tell me how to stop cooked rice sticking to the container when I have to try and keep it hot? I help out at our church soup kitchen for the homeless, and we always get this problem with the rice. It’s in a heated trolley with the stainless steel food containers kept warm by a reservoir of hot water. How can we stop the rice sticking?
To be truthful, you really can’t. In the heated environment, the moisture in the rice will begin to evaporate and the starch in the rice will develop and begin to leach out, causing it to become stickier and stickier as it sits. It will stick to itself and to the pan, and the only way around this natural process is to create some kind of moisture barrier – either between the rice and the pan, most appropriately via a nonstick spray – or on the outside of the grains of rice themselves, by adding a sauce or oil, butter or margarine.
Would it be possible to cook the rice in smaller batches, or bring it to the heated trolley in smaller batches? That would also alleviate some of your stickiness problems. Time is the enemy of fluffy, non-sticky rice.
Sparrow, you might want to try rinsing the uncooked rice in several changes of cold water until most of the starch is rinsed off. I watched a show on Food Network and the host did this. Hope this helps.