1 cup of rice
2 cups of water
1 spoon of salt
cook for 15 mins in boiling water covered
let sit for 10 mins covered
Is this right? I got a big date tonight and the last thing I want is bad rice.
That sounds about right, albeit a bit of a bland diet. That won’t get your date all heated up, that’s for sure.
What are you going to put on that rice for extra flavour? I just thought I’d ask this before this gets moved to MPSIMS.
No, gonna try to attempt some sort of dish. Note the word try!
Here’s how we cook rice (and we cook it almost every day):
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However much rice you want to cook. 1 cup is fine. More or less is okay too. We just pour it into the pot.
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Cover with water so that the depth (including water and rice) is 2x the depth of just the rice. You can check this using your index finger and thumb.
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Cover and bring to a boil.
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As soon as it boils, reduce to lowest possible heat and simmer for 20 minutes.
I’m still waiting for your death rattle, d12, you promised.
By the way, you got 100 posts now, cool. You can die happy.
Yay! 100 posts! Ut oh! I think the onions are burning!
Too late to assist your date d12 [which I hope went all to plan] but cooking rice in the microwave is the way to go. No great savings in time but the results are spot-on every time. (Remember to leave the lid off)
d12, I think this is exhaustively covered in one of the Mockingbird books :). A rice cooker is the only way to go, and Zojirushi being the brand of choice. Microwave rice really tastes awful in my opinion, and the consistency is just wrong.
That said, ShibbOleth hit the nail on the head. If you want stovetop rice, that’s the way to do it.
Caveat is that different kinds of rice require different amounts of water. Especially between long grain and short grain rice.
You can always try Minute Rice.
Same for wild rice. Many people don’t cook rice long enough. Let it boil until the grains open up, resembling the shape of a butterflied shrimp.
I bring it to a boil, cover, and then simmer on the lowest possible heat for 20 minutes. Works every time for me.
Try cooking some andouille sausage and slicing it into the cooked rice. Add salt and cayenne pepper.
Or try this: Instead of water, use two cups (for one cup rice) of vegetable broth. Slice fresh mushrooms into the pot, as well as some broccoli. Cook as normal, adding soy sauce to taste before or after it is cooked.
Don’t know if this is too late or not, but during those 15min of cooking, the water shouldn’t be boiling hard, it should be just above a simmer, with little bubbles coming up. Too much heat will screw it up and burn the bottom.
I add the rice to the boiling water and let it get back to a boil, then lower the heat to 1-2 just so it’s barely boiling while covered, and cook for 20min, then serve, no waiting. Your 15 - 10 split should work fine, though.
On preview, what Johnny L.A. said. (too slow on the submit, damn!)
Best of luck on the date 
Some people also wash their rice before cooking. This’ll remove the excess starch and make it less sticky. Either run it under water until the flow turns clear, or bring to a boil, strain, run some water under it until it’s clear and start cooking it again. Some people swear by this; others say it removes vital nutrients; the proponents will argue that not much nutritional value is lost, etc. I generally don’t wash my rice unless the recipe explicitly calls for it; then again, I like stickier rice, anyway.
Buy a rice cooker. They are inexpensive and easy to use.
That way you will have perfect rice for your date, and if your date does not work out, you will at least be left with a fabulous appliance.
(Hmmm, sounds like a good idea for a poll – try to determine if kitchen appliance ownership is directly or inversely proportionate to dating success.)
How do they cook it so well in restaurants? I can’t believe they take the time to rinse it.
The closest I’ve gotten to restaurant rice is to stir it a bit in hot oil, add water and boil until it craters; holes appear in the rice, them simmer with a lid until the remaining water is gone.
Speaking of restaurants, anyone have a hot and sour soup recipe?
I must say that I have recently “got into” cooking rice, and it has been a suprisingly frsutrating experience.
When you got it down it is easy, but before then it is maddening. I burned a whole lot of it!
BTW, are you using a gas or electric range? The pot you use is important, too, as heating techniques, stirring, and covering methods differ. I use a copper-bottomed stainless pot which has almost perfect heat transfer and requires attention at crucial points to get it to come off smoothly.
That said, the advice given in this thread is pretty good for the general case of rice-making. Only practice will prevail after that.
And, forget about minute rice, blech. The taste, IMO, is totally different. I threw the box out.
Yep, cooking white rice is tricky. The hardest part is getting the perfect proportions of water to rice. Here’s my recipe:
add 1 cup rice and 1 2/3 cup water (I like my rice a little clumpier, you might want to use up to 2 cups) to a cold pot. Put uncovered pot on burner with high heat. Wait until it just barely starts to boil, then cover and reduce heat to low. Let it boil slowly on lowest heat for 12 minutes, do NOT lift the lid, ever. After 12 min, take off of the heat (don’t lift the lid yet, no peeking!) let sit covered for 5 minutes, then stir lightly with a fork.
At the end of the 12 minutes, your water should be boiled away and if you peeked and tasted a bite, the core of the rice would still be a little hard. The trick is letting it sit covered for the last 5 minutes, it completes cooking by its own heat.
Bulk. It’s easier to cook a huge batch of rice just right, than just a cup of rice. Most of the asian restaurants I know use the more traditional method of rinsing and soaking before cooking. That’s too much of a pain for me, it’s too hard to judge the amount of water the rice already absorbed, so I never know how much to boil it in.
Making fluffy rice is no secret, it is neither complicated or difficult.
A few tips on cooking rice;[list=A][li] ALWAYS wash your rice. Put the desired amount in a sieve and hang the sieve in a large bowl. Fill the bowl with fresh cold water until the rice is submerged. Agitate the strainer and shake the rice to move it around. Lift the strainer out of the bowl and you will see that cloudy water drains from the rice. Do this a few times and then replace the water in the bowl. Shake the strainer a few more times and then let the rice soak for five minutes. Repeat this one or two more times until the water drains clear off of the rice.[/li]
(The milling process opens up the surface of the rice kernels, it also creates a quantity of rice powder and fragments. All of this needs to be removed prior to cooking.)
[li] Start with fresh cold water in the cook pot. Use a little less than twice the amount of water as rice to be cooked.[/li]
[li] Add a small amount of salt and cover the cook pot while heating it over a high flame.[/li]
[li] Rinse and drain the rice a final time before cooking it. The water should run completely clear when rinsing it.[/li]
[li] When the water comes to a boil add the rice and stir to prevent sticking.[/li]
[li] Cover and bring to a boil again (~2-3 minutes).[/li]
[li] Once the rice comes to a boil again, stir once more and cover tightly. Reduce the heat to low.[/li]
[li] Avoid uncovering the pot more than a few times in order to stir it.[/li]
[li] The standard formula for unwashed rice is; twice as much water as rice (by volume), cook for twenty minutes in salted water.[/list=a][/li]Note: Because washed rice has absorbed some water in the rinsing process, reduce the ratio of water to rice to 1.75 to 1, instead of 2 to 1. I use the method recommended by Alice Waters. Cook the rice for twelve minutes and then turn off the heat and let it continue to cook covered for another eight. Check for when the water has been totally absorbed and test for doneness. It will take a few times to get the balance of factors right, but you will eventually have no problem in cooking fluffy, perfect rice every time.
I vote for buying a rice cooker. Every Asian-American household I have ever been in has had a rice cooker sitting on the counter.
(When my husband and I first moved in together, we had no appliances in common except for our Hitachi Chime-O-Matics. One of these days, I’ll be able to afford one of the “fuzzy logic” ones. Woo!)
If it’s Basmati, wash it AND soak it.