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Monthly Archives: January 2012

How to cook rice (2)

ALL THE RICE!

Have you ever been in a position where you needed to cook a lot of rice?  A lot of rice.  Like 100 servings of rice.  And you don’t have a big enough rice cooker(s) for such a job.  Well, I have been in such a predicament before.

There was once a time when I needed to make A LOT of chicken and rice casserole to feed a lot of people and I neglected to borrow any high capacity rice cookers.  Also, my experiment from earlier in the week told me that to dump everything in a pan raw and shove it in the oven would take prohibitively long to cook.  So I needed to cook a lot of rice.  Enter a 4″ full sized steam table pan, which I did remember to borrow, and the oven.

Did you know you can cook rice in the oven?  It’s a really good way to cook a lot of rice.  Normal, family-sized rice cookers will only feed…a family.  And not an overly large one, either.  An industrial rice cooker is pretty expensive and you don’t often need that much rice.  It’s just a waste of space and energy.  Oh, and you can’t plug two of them into the same circuit in your house because I think each one pulls about 12A.  A typical household circuit breaker is 15A.  You’ll definitely trip the breaker.

So, here’s how I ended up cooking 16 cups of rice.  I would give you the weight, except my notes are at home and I am not and I know I cooked about 16 cups.  Btw, these are normal cups.  Not the silly 0.75 cup that rice cookers seem to think is a full cup.

Oven-cooked Brown Rice

How to cook rice (1)

I saw this article recently on making rice.  tl;dr?  Well, it just points out that billions of people depend on rice as a staple and then gives you some “common mistakes” about cooking rice.

What I find interesting about this article is that it implies that even though billions of people eat rice in their diet, no one knows how to cook it properly.  What?  How does that make sense?  No one knows how to cook rice properly?  Even though billions of people eat it everyday?  I find this hard to believe.

What I think they mean to say is that the average USian family doesn’t know how to cook rice.  Think about it.  Have you ever gone to an Asian (including Southeast Asian)/Middle Eastern/Indian (which is technically also Asian) restaurant and thought they didn’t know how to cook rice?  Have you ever been invited to an Asian/Middle Eastern/Indian family dinner and worried that they didn’t know how to cook rice?  No.  Because they all know how to cook rice.  Because it’s a staple in their diet.  They would have developed all the proper techniques and tricks already to cook rice to their liking.

Also, many Asian families own a rice cooker, since rice is so important in their diet.  They have a machine dedicated to cooking rice (not that the modern ones can’t do other things, but mostly it’s used to just cook rice).  Don’t you think they know how to cook rice?  I think they know how to cook rice.  Billions of people around the world know how to cook rice.

Now, USian families, for the most part, don’t count on rice as a staple.  The base of their meal tends to be a wheat product.  Thus, it makes sense that some families don’t know how to cook rice.  They just don’t eat it much.  And then think about all the “instant” rice stuff that’s out there.  No wonder they’re at a loss when it comes to actually cooking rice.  And that’s ok.  It’s not a crime against humanity.  They can use whatever tips were offered in the article.

But maybe the writers should have mentioned this.  Maybe they shouldn’t have implied that the whole world doesn’t know how to cook rice.  Or maybe they shouldn’t have implied the US is the only country that matters in the whole world.  Whatever the case, I found it rather annoying.

And by the way, not everyone eats their rice “fluffy.”  Short grain rice doesn’t fluff.

Related post on Friday.