With dried pasta, we use an excess of water, boil until tender and drain off the remaining water. With rice, we measure out an exact measurement, cook until absorbed (and make sure it’s tender enough). In both cases the food absorbs water until it reaches the tenderness desired, and in both cases undercooking or overcooking is possible.
So why with pasta we do it one way, and with rice another?
I don’t know why we cook rice the way we do, but my guess on the method for pasta is that the pasta probably needs to keep moving so as not to stick together. But that’s all I got.
I could be totally wrong here, but I thought I heard somewhere that with rice, you’re steaming it. Of course, I’ve never had a problem dumping raw (or minute for that matter) rice into soup and it comes out just fine.
First WAG is that it’s easier to strain pasta without losing any through the strainer, prior to the advent of modern fine-mesh metal strainers and colanders. That could explain why we don’t cook rice that way.
Also, pasta is made from a recipe, which can vary from one batch to the next, so the same amount of water can’t be specified for two batches of pasta (particularly if one is fresh and the other is dried). Rice is pretty uniform and works well with that process. And, as NGC2024 poitned out, if you cooked a pot of pasta so that it ended up cooked like rice, you’d have a great, big lump o’ pasta.
You can cook pasta in a rice cooker. I’ve done it before, but not often because the pasta turns out softer than I prefer. It does save you having to drain the water, although the trade off was that I wound up having to scrape some cooked pasta off the bottom of the rice pot. That may have been due to poor technique on my part, though.
Of course you can cook rice like pasta. That’s one of the ways to do it. I do the pasta boil method if I’m making rice for a lot of people (20+). It’s low stress and absolutely fool proof, as long as you have more than enough water.
I tend to like my rice on the slightly stickier side, so I don’t wash it, and I like to do it the usual 2-to-1 water-to-rice method (although I’m more to 1.75:1 or so). Or sometimes I like to cook it in broth or some flavorings, so the pasta method wouldn’t work for that.
Thanks for the replies, folks! I always suspected it could be done, though it wasn’t as obvious as an “of course” for me, I guess!
I think there are probably advantages, like reducing the risk of scorching. For I’ll probably keep doing what I already do pretty well, but it’s to get an answer!
I think polished rice, where the bran coat is removed, is enriched with thiamine in some countries to prevent nutritional deficiency leading to a disease called beriberi. The thiamine naturally in rice is concentrated in the bran. So this is not such a far-fetched idea.
(Lose not loose.)
Martha Stewart’s Cooking School has shown on PBS and is available online. In the Rice episode, she cooked rice the “usual” way. Then showed what she called the French method. Which was essentially like we cook pasta.
I think when you measure the water, you control how much of it the rice absorbs. If it were cooked like pasta the rice could cook too long and be mushy, especially if you don’t watch it. Measured out, you don’t have to watch it, and timing is less of an issue.
