Tell me the details like what makes yours perfect, why, and your cultural influence if any. I mean, rice is totally different with Mexican, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Persian food just to name a few. It is not just the spices or sauces I’m mostly interested in. These matter too. I am really interested in the grain variety and specifically how you prep, cook, and absolutely anything you do after. Don’t skip the cultural details that you might otherwise presume everyone does. Do you know why some brand or region produces better ingredients, say so. I know it seems simple and mundane but it really is not. I want to master your rice as you make it in your culture. Please tell me how.
So, how do you do rice?
I have a wheat allergy so I eat a lot of rice. I wanted the best rice cooker and got one from Zojirushi that uses a microcontroller with fuzzy logic to sense and compensate for if there is slightly too much or too little water. It does take noticeably longer for it to cook the rice, but it comes out perfect every time. It also has different modes for white rice, brown rice, semibrown rice, and rice porridge. The white rice setting is also perfect for quinoa, although for quinoa the water ratio is 1:2 instead of following the marked lines on the pot.
For rice porridge: I’ll season with garlic salt and ginger, and cook it with onion and black mushroom. Serve with lime and jalopeno.
For quinoa: I like to substitute 25% of the quinoa with millet, and cook it with Consommé, golden flax seed, and lemon.
For brown rice: diced or shredded carrot works really well since the brown rice cooks for longer. I’ll usually season with garlic salt, ginger, cumin, and curry powder.
For white rice: it normally has to be plain to add to something else like curry or a stir-fry, but my favorite white rice dish is cooking it with lots of bok choi, season with salt, fresh ginger, white pepper, sesame oil.
I haven’t researched rice cookers yet but have been sort of interested in one for a while. Are there any that are comparable to Zojirushi that would be worth considering, or is that the one to you?
Honestly I didn’t really think too much about it, I used to use a simple on-off rice cooker but it kept on burning and sticking on the bottom. I saw an article that said Zojirushi is the best and the rice is the same consistency from top to bottom, and it completely worked as advertised. Now we have a Zojirushi water boiler and steel waterbottles as well, all their stuff is so high quality.
Well that’s pretty high praise for that brand, at least. Thank you for answering my question.
Standard rice cooker uses magnetism to turn off. The steel bowl loses its magnetic attraction when it gets hot - like 400 oC - and it can’t get that hot when there’s water. Basically, they go full blast until the water boils off, then shut down. As long as the cooker is pretty full, the residual water/steam in the rest of the rice will bring the whole bowl back to 100 oC pretty fast and rehydrate any of the bottom layer that got crispy. If you run a conventional rice cooker under-loaded, you’re more likely to get stuck/burned bottom.
I have a cheap, 4 cup rice cooker, but I usually make just 1 cup at a time. Unplug it after 7-12 minutes and it won’t burn. I’re pretty forgiving. I’ve used rice cookers from the little 4-cup to big 5-pound commercial cookers. Rice, water to the fingernail/1st joint, go. It’s amazing. If you cook rice regularly, just get one.
But which one? What’s a “standard” or “conventional” rice cooker? Is Zojirushi considered one of these? I haven’t gotten one b/c the options are overwhelming to me. I’d love to narrow it down to 2 or 3 recommended options and then see which one I like best.
The Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzy Rice Cookers cost about $200. I picked one up at a thrift store for…drum roll please…$8. I love it too. Nothing else to add, I just love telling that story.
Great find! Best I’ve done was find a perfectly good table next to the dumpster lol
What are your thoughts on book choi versus cabbage? I have been testing how different fresh and precooked vegetables alter the texture of fried rice. I usually use a medium or large cheese grater to get my fresh vegetables small enough to sauté quickly. I can size carrots to cook well in the same amount of time as a finely chopped onion (between 5-8mm square onion chunks/around 5mm × 15mm × 1mm carrot). The same grater with cabbage produces a thin almost shredded size, but this needs about 1.5 times longer to sauté well. I kinda like the texture it adds the few times I’ve tried it recently, but it isn’t really worth the extra effort for fried rice.
I typically do half an onion, green onion, 8-10 cloves of garlic and an equivalent amount of ginger, with some carrot sautéed, then I add precooked broccoli stocks (I wouldn’t eat otherwise) in a small chop, a bit of left over meat, any other left over veggies, and a half bag of frozen green peas.
What would you add/change to make this more interesting? I’ve thought about trying different beans.
I also often make rice with a few handfuls of roasted mixed nuts (peanut, almond, cashew, pecan, Brazil) and a handful of mixed raisins. This is half inspired by some rice at an old Persian restaurant I frequented. It is a really good rice mix to combine with some fresh fish. At some point I’ll probably try using this in a fried rice, but I’m skeptical where this experiment goes. I’m also curious about soy sauce alternatives. I use the pan stock from whatever meat I’ve cooked recently, or a small amount of canola oil. Any suggestions are welcome.
What interesting questions, I’ll start with a suggestion for an addition: mushrooms! I think they’ll really help to bring out the umami of the dish, and there are so many different types with variations of flavor and texture: I add portabella mushrooms to risotto, king oyster to soups and stir-frys, enoki is also really good in soup, black mushrooms are good in anything… I’ll just grab a few random varieties every time I’m at the store.
If the seasoning feels lacking try adding some acidity (lemon, lime, or rice vinegar), white pepper, and/or curry powder.
Also I’m not great at estimating dimensions, especially now that I’m trying to think in metric units, but I think when I saute things my cuts are considerably larger to preserve more of the texture of the ingredients. I’ll only shred the carrots if I’m cooking them with the rice in the rice cooker, otherwise I’ll go for something like this and have the onion julienned instead of diced, cabbage in like 1 inch squares, baby bok choi leaves whole. Oh also I feel like the baby white bok choi is better for cooking in the rice cooker, but the baby green bok choi is better for sautes.
Also choy-sum is like my new favorite vegetable but I just normally have it on its own, as opposed to bok choi, cabbage, or brocolli which I normally saute with other things. I’ll also usually cook gai-lan on its own, as well as green beans, asparagus, and brussels sprouts. Since green beans need so much time and heat to cook, I’ll normally use snow pea pods or sugar snap pea pods instead if I’m working with a mix of veggies.
For brussels sprouts I cut them in half and saute them face down on high heat until they fully caramelize to a golden brown, then flip them on their backs and add a tiny bit of water so they steam just enough to cook through. You don’t want to boil them or steam them too much or it will create bitter notes.
My curry will always have onion, carrot, mushroom, and cauliflower. Daikon, cabbage, yamaimo/nagaimo, bamboo shoots, and water chestnuts, are also good additions. For lentils I’ll usually cook them with onion, mushroom, carrot, celery, and tuscan kale. I prefer them to still have some texture but my wife prefers it as a soup instead. Oh and I forgot to mention I’ll usually also pair the quinoa with sauted spinach, kale, and bell pepper.
Thanks for the shopping list to try out! Lots of great ideas here.