You can also get the frozen kind, which is available in the frozen veggies section of the supermarket. It’s a LOT faster than cooking it from scratch, and it’ll come out just fine. Season to taste.
Yeah, don’t eat plain rice, either brown or white. Learn how to cook it appropriately for its style, and use it as an ingredient in a dish. You probably wouldn’t eat plain pasta, even with a little salt or a little butter, so don’t eat plain rice either.
I’m a fan of brown basmati rice, myself, but brown long-grain rice is good too.
Black rice is another option (although I’ll also go with working on your method … also once you get the method down you can make it in bulk for the week).
Other starch options, Buckwheat as Jeff sugests, bulgar, and barley. (Huh, all begin with B!)
In white rice not only fiber is removed and the then refortified B vitamins, but a host of other phytochemicals. White rice counts as a “refined grain.”
Put coconut milk in the water. Look for it in the Asian market frozen section.
This from The Barefoot Contessa isn’t bad. I cut back the vinegar a bit th.
In Cook This, Not That!, from the Eat this, Not that! book series, the authors ranked ten carbohydrate sources, with fiber the most important factor, followed by calories from protein, calories from sugar, and the nutrients. In order from best to worst, their list is:
Bulgur
Quinoa
Oatmeal
100% Whole wheat bread
Pearled Barley
Enriched Pasta
Brown Rice
Couscous
White rice
White bread
Brown rice is better than white, but it’s still pretty far down that list.
ETA: Are there whole grain boxed rice or other boxed whole grain mixes available where you live? If you have a Trader Joe’s nearby, you could look there.
Give me Quinoa, Buckwheat or Barley any day over Brown Rice. All are better and healthier, especially Quinoa.
I would recommend hulled barley over pearled barley, and I agree with everyone else. You might not have cooked your rice long enough. It can be chewy, but it shouldn’t be crunchy.
I just came here to echo that QUINOA is much better imho than brown rice. Easier to cook, more nutritional value and a soft fluffy texture.
I buy mine by the pound at the local bulk food store ($7.29/pound) where its organic.
Rinse in a sieve to get the bitter flavor off of it
Then cook covered on medium heat with twice as much water as quinoa for 15 min.
Fluff with a fork and add some plum seed oil, Braggs ACV and Braggs aminos, toss with some black walnuts, dried currants and some kalamata olives for a healthy treat! om nom nom.
If the OP can’t cook up a decent side of brown rice, what’s going to happen to the oats and barley? Blech. 
Quinoa is less likely to get mushy I guess, but also needs to be a pilaf or something if plain grains aren’t your thing.
I hated whole rice all my life. Like you, I found it mushy and uncooked at the same time, slimey yet crunchy, Blecgh.
Then I tried out the store brand and cooked it exactly according to the package. Man, was that a revelation. Yum.
So, what everybody else said. Try different brands of rice, different kinds (chinese, indian, basmati, surinam, etc) try following the exact cooking recepies, and try different recipies for combining it with other stuff.
Or try quinoa.
Googled up “cooking brown rice” instructions. Odd how different the recommendations are. They’re all over the board. Water rice ratios 2-1 or 1.5-1 or 12-1 and then drain and steam etc. etc. Interesting.
We’ve never done a great job with cooking brown rice, despite using a rice cooker - always a major burnt crust on the bottom despite adding plenty of water for the amount of rice. Also even our white rice winds up sticky (as does the brown) - nothing like the fluffy stuff you get at Indian and Chinese restaurants. Annoying as heck.
That said, we DO prefer brown when we plan enough ahead to use it - as others have said, it takes longer to cook. We’ve also found that even using the recommended water quantities, it turns out kind of too chewy / crunchy unless we let it soak for 10-15 minutes before cooking it.
Alton Brown recommends cooking it in the oven, and a similar-sounding version is here. I haven’t tried this, but want to do so at some point.
For the best bare-bones cooking directions for just about anything, stick with Alton Brown or America’s Test Kitchen.
there is apparently a variety between white rice and brown rice. I think it is referred to as pink rice.
There is Red rice.
Good photo on that site of some of the different varieties of rice.
Personally, I quite like brown rice. Cooked properly it has a nutty flavour and is a lot more filling than white rice.
That is why you should follow the directions on the package to the letter. The manufacturer of that rice knows his stuff.
The foolproof method is the “pasta method,” which sounds like the 12-1 method, but it doesn’t nearly need to have that much water. You can get by with fine at 6-1, and I suspect even less. That’s the method I use for brown rice. It’s easier, it’s a little faster (cooking time is only about 25 minutes, and then 5 minutes of rest/steam time after it’s drained) and it’s pretty much impossible to screw up. You can use this method for white rice, too.
But brown rice itself does take some getting used to. It certainly has a different flavor profile and, personally, I’m not convinced that it’s that much healthier for you. It has a similar amount of calories, similar amount of protein, a hair of fiber, a few grams less of carbs. At least when I’ve compared Riceland brown vs white rice, the differences seemed negligible (and the nutritional content of the white rice in that case happens to be better, as it seems to be enriched.)
Still, while I prefer white rice, I enjoy brown rice from time to time for its nutty and more grainy flavor. Wild rice (which is not a rice) is the one I really like, but it’s fantastically expensive.
It’s still worth experimenting and tweaking. I find the 2:1 water-to-rice ratio on most rice packaging to produce rice that is too wet. The ratio that works best for me (for white rice) is around 1.75:1, sometimes even closer to 1.5:1, depending on the brand and freshness. So I don’t take the instructions on the packaging to be gospel.
Trainers spew a lot of incorrect information. At least one other poster has mentioned in this thread that calories are about identical. Choosing this food over that usually means nothing; it’s your overall diet that matters. White rice can be just as beneficial to a healthy diet as brown rice. Okinawans are the longest lived people on the planet (with a high quality of life) and collectively they average about 840 grams of white rice per day, or about 3 to 4 bowls. Every food can have benefits another doesn’t. Some reasons white rice can trump brown: