Cooking - Rice

In lots of places on the globe, people cook rice by rinsing it (if you can afford the water) then adding enough water to cover the rice up to the point where the water is level with the first joint of your pointing finger if you stick it into the pot of water until it just touches the rice.

So... submerge your rice by one pointing finger joint.

Where I'm from we just read the packet.

Not everybody gets a packet.

It turns out rice doesn't come from the supermarket, but actually grows as the seed of a grass.

But the interesting thing about the Western world view on rice cooking, is that it often depends on making exactly one dose as described on the packet, and in a saucepan exactly like the one they used when they wrote the recipe.

All different kinds of rice absorb the same amount of water, but they take different lengths of time to do it. The result is you get a lot more evaporation when you cook brown rice compared to white rice because it takes so much longer to cook.

If you want to make an extra big stack of rice, you cant just triple your normal recipe, because if you are using a pot that evaporates the same amount of water (or for example, the same pot), you only need to add a single cup of water for every extra cup of rice. There isnt a lot of evaporation until the water starts to simmer, so even if it takes a lot longer to get to temperature, it's still around the same actual cooking time once it has. So you get the same amount of evaporation.

Roughly.

If you follow the two and a bit cups water to one cup rice recipe you find on brown rice, then triple it to make enough for everyone, you get glue.

You start with at least a couple of cups more water than you need.

To avoid glue it's important to only add one cup of water for every extra cup of rice more than the recipe on the packet calls for.

Or just stick your finger in your pot so it touches the rice, and fill with water to the first joint on your pointing finger. The finger method also ingeniously accounts for the width of the pot, and thus the surface area of the water, so it works even when you change pots. It works all the time.

120ThingsIn20Years thinks it works all the time.