I admit it, for years I was too intimidated to cook rice in a pot on the stove. It's ridiculous, I know. I'm good at cooking many things, I'm intuitive as a cook but I also prefer to cook by feel than by exact measurement which means I'm prone to cooking things that are forgiving. I measure when I bake, but I don't bake that often.
Growing up we were a rice cooker household. Every Sunday, for years and years, we made vegetarian sushi (and accompanied it with caprese salad sort of randomly but that's neither here nor there) together as a family. It began when my brother returned from a school trip to Japan when he was thirteen. It continued for years, well after I'd taken my middle school trip to Japan. Just like in The Big Lebowski, on Sundays "we rolled". Rad Rice and Fabulous Farro
I admit it, for years I was too intimidated to cook rice in a pot on the stove. It's ridiculous, I know. I'm good at cooking many things, I'm intuitive as a cook but I also prefer to cook by feel than by exact measurement which means I'm prone to cooking things that are forgiving. I measure when I bake, but I don't bake that often.
Growing up we were a rice cooker household. Every Sunday, for years and years, we made vegetarian sushi (and accompanied it with caprese salad sort of randomly but that's neither here nor there) together as a family. It began when my brother returned from a school trip to Japan when he was thirteen. It continued for years, well after I'd taken my middle school trip to Japan. Just like in The Big Lebowski, on Sundays "we rolled". We took a more traditional approach to the rice preparation. We used Japanese sticky rice, poured "su" (vinegar) over the back of a wooden paddle across the rice we transferred to a big glass bowl before fanning it and turning it over and over again with the paddle to cool it. I remember that sticky rice fondly. It was glutenous and the fragrant acidity of the seasoned rice wine vinegar we used to flavor it wafted as we fanned.
Years later, in college, my freshman roommate had a rice cooker and cooked rice almost daily in our small room. It meant I had a lot of opportunity to eat rice, and never had to cook it. Our senior year, we were a rice cooking household. Someone taught me the finger trick. Put your dry rice into the cooker, cover with water so that when the tip of your index finger rested on the surface of the rice, the water level matched the first knuckle of the index finger. It always seemed absurd to me, that a trick could work universally when, ostensibly all of our first knuckles were different lengths. It didn't matter because whenever I made rice, it was always unspectacularly mediocre. Rice that I made stuck to the bottom of the rice cooker, not necessarily burning but coating it in a sticky mess. The rice was gluey, it didn't matter if it was brown, jasmine, or sticky rice. It never turned out the way it did at restaurants, steamed just right so that each grain of rice had individual integrity. My rice performance was consistently average, and of that, I was not proud.
I'm not sure why it took me so long but in a moment of bravery a few weeks ago, I decided to do a little online research to see if I might overcome this obstacle I felt in the kitchen. The source I opened was the first result after searching "cooking white rice on the stove". It said:
Rinse your rice until the water runs clear
cover with water up to your first index finger knuckle
bring to a boil uncovered
then cover and turn your burner down to its lowest setting
leave it for twenty minutes
remove from the heat, still covered and let sit for another ten minutes
fluff with a fork
Seemed easy enough, I followed the directions except for that first one. In my attempts at rinsing, my rice water never ran clear. With the first rinse it was milky, with the second rinse it was still milky. I forged ahead anyway. The outcome was prefect rice. I couldn't believe it. It was so easy.
I had another triumph a few days later when I looked up how to cook farro. Again using the creative search term "How to Cook Farro on the stove". First search result was a lengthy posting that only needed to be this long:
Measure 1 cup of farro
add 2.5 cups of water
salt the water
bring to a boil uncovered
reduce heat to low cover and cook for 20 minutes
remove heat and let stand, covered, for 10 minutes
fluff with a fork
Just like the rice (except I did have to measure the water). And the resulting farro was perfect, plump and a little bit toothsome.
A third attempt with brown rice wasn't quite as triumphant. I took the same approach as I did with the white rice. Ultimately it probably needed 30 minutes on low instead of just 20. The result was edible, just a little more al dente than I would have preferred. I'm not sure I've been this proud since the first time I "made" French Toast when I was five.
To conclude on an especially high note, here's a link to my favorite brown rice of all time.
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