My Filipina wife and her family can eat their white rice plain. This Sicilian American is learning to, but prefers when rice when it has some flavor.
Like any boiling starch, salt should be added to the water so that it integrates with the starch through the cooking process. It needn’t be much, but it is preferable to adding salt at the end. If I don’t have a gravy, rice is best flavored with olive oil and a bit of freshly grated parmesan.
Never salt the water. You just consume excess salt that way. Absorbed salt is not tasted.
Salt just the portion you are ready to eat, and you will need very little salt to get the same taste.
My tastebuds disagree, Pliny, on boiled starches from rice to potatoes to pasta. I can instantly tell an unsalted batch (such as when I ask Mrs. D_Odds to cook the pasta).
I’ve always thought of adding salt to rice as a “western” thing – I’m used to dousing my rice (white/fried/etc) with sauce after it’s done cooking. Fish sauce, Kikkoman, kecap asin, kecap manis, what have you.
Although I have to admit I rather like fish sauce more than the other kinds of sauce. 
(And for the record, I’m Indonesian)
I bow to your superior sauce knowledge.
furikake :mad:
How to cook rice. I don’t know about all this olive oil and garlic business, unless you’re making risotto. That’s a different variety of rice though.
I usually season my rice with the sauce of whatever I’m eating it with. This can be anything from Chef Boyardee to pork adobo. Rice goes with anything. Otherwise, it’s furikake, particularly the aji nori one. Don’t care for bonito.
I put shoyu on my rice only for breakfast meals. I think this started when I was a kid; we’d go to McDonald’s and I’d get the portuguese sausage, eggs, and rice (lucky you live Hawaii ;)) and put ketchup on my eggs and shoyu on the rice. This is the only way I use Kikkoman, incidentally. Normally, I find it too sweet.
If we’re talking Uncle Ben’s type rice, it gets cooked in chicken or beef broth, and seasoned with butter and pepper.
Putting straight salt on any rice is just wrong, IMO. There’s more interesting sources of flavor out there.
Hey that’s my rice cooking secret! Who told you?
Some time ago I ran across a recipe which called for heating a little oil in the pot (you can add onion or garlic, too) and then adding the rice and stirring it to coat. Then add water or broth, bring it to a boil, and then simmer for exactly 17 minutes without removing the cover. Always makes great rice.
My thoughts exactly, although I did like bonito when I was a kid. And those little dried fish with the eyes and everything. When we went to McDonald’s for portuguese sausage, rice and eggs my method was to cut the sausage and eggs up, mix with the rice, and drizzle soy sauce all over it.
I sometimes put soy sauce on my rice in the rare occasion I have it plain, but I find that the rice I get (Nishiki or Kokuho Rose) has such pleasant flavor on its own. I soy sauce brown rice more frequently. Now one of my favorite minimal cook meals is rice, canned salmon and edamame, with a bit of soy sauce and wasabi.