Skip navigation

Tag Archives: baked goods

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

National brownie day! Yay!

As of this writing (Thursday, 12/8), it’s National (or Chocolate) Brownie Day.  Now this is a (fake) holiday I can get behind.  I really like chocolate.  No, really.  I REALLY, REALLY like chocolate.  I have my theories about why, but now is not the time to air them.  Anyway, I like chocolate.  I like brownies, too.  Not as much as I like chocolate, but seeing as how this is CHOCOLATE brownie day (as opposed to blondies), it’s totally fine.  So I celebrated tonight by making brownies.  Huzzah!

I haven’t made brownies in a long time.  I’ve traditionally only made box brownies.  My sister and I have tried making brownies from scratch now and then, but they’ve never really turned out the way we thought brownies should.  And see that making cookies is a bit faster than making brownies and they’re pre-portioned, we’ve typically just made cookies (a cookie recipe is forthcoming).  But!  Today is not Chocolate Cookie Day, it’s Chocolate Brownie Day.  So I decided to try my hand at making brownies again.

One thing that’s always been a source of irritation to me about brownie recipes is that the overwhelming majority of brownie recipes I find involve cocoa powder.  Sometimes I have it, but most of the time I don’t.  But I almost always have semisweet chocolate chips on hand (and now I have A LOT of chocolate chips, but more on that later).  Why can’t more recipes feature chocolate chips as a base?  So here’s my stab at making brownies with chocolate chips as a base, rather than cocoa powder.

Dry components are measured in weight instead of volume, because using volume for dry goods is stupid.  I firmly believe this.  The only exceptions I made are for granulated sugar, table salt, and piddling small volumes.  I like using metric for weights, because a base 10 system is a lot easier to work with than the weird Imperial but not really standard the US uses.  If you don’t like it, then try going here for conversions.  Recipe after the jump.