Deleted.
Mod, fix this attack on me.
Mod, fix this attack on me.
Rice can vary, high starch to low starch, short-grain to long-grain, sticky, non-sticky, raw to parboiled. They're used as a base for other dishes including sushi, fried rice, pudding, biryani and porridge. All these require different amounts of consistency.
While cooking at home, if you just mess it up a little bit, the dish will still serve its purpose. But that's not true if you're cooking an Asian dish with perfectly good rice used just as a base.
I didn't downvote your comment but your dismissive snark seems out of place since the _history_ of "tricky/difficult/labored" was explained in the article:
>It was painfully tricky. Cooking rice this way, says columnist and food writer Makiko Itoh, takes heat modulation: high heat until the water and rice boils, then low heat, then high heat again. “And that, with a wood-burning stove, is very difficult.” Each day, Japanese women rose at dawn and labored for several sweaty hours to make rice. (A contemporary restaurant in Nara, Japan, offers a kamado-cooking experience that starts with 15 minutes of pumping a bellows to fan the flames.)
In some rice eating countries, automatic rice cookers never really took off because of the 'quality' of the product is obviously East Asia centric, which is considered 'mushy' rice in West Asia.
With some rice cooking approaches, the amount of water makes no difference as whatever is left is drained after a fixed period of time, and then it's simmer time.
"Burning" of the bottom is also locale dependent. In Persian Cuisine for example, the art of making 'Tah-Deeg' (lit. bottom of the pot) is one of the stepping stones of becoming a serious cook, and generally this is the bit of the rice that family fights over at the table.
Bottom line, OP is correct, imho.
The more basic models don't have features like that, however.
Your quote shows that the article is wrong.
I did NOTHING at all wrong. Instead I just explained how darned easy it is to cook rice. For anyone taken in by the article that there is a challenge to cooking rice, I did a good service.
What wrote is just what I got off the back of a plastic bag of rice decades ago. It was a good recipe then. It's a good recipe now. There is NOTHING wrong with what I wrote.
I will delete my post and let others struggle with the severe "challenge" of cooking rice.
The article was absurd -- cooking rice is EASY.
Enjoy your struggle of hours cooking rice.
Bye bye.
The simple lesson here is: what is easy for you is not necessarily easy for everyone else, and you should not get pissy if you state your opinion so miserably and everybody fights back.
Also, yes it's fairly easy to cook rice in a pan. I cook rice probably 4 days a week, and I now use a rice cooker. My rice cooker:
- Can be set up ahead of time
- Has different cooking profiles for different varieties of rice
- Can keep the rice warm, safely, for many hours after it's cooked
- Cooks the rice very well. It even has a special mode for cooking the rice longer in a specific way, which results in extremely nice-tasting rice
It means that I have rice ready and waiting when I finish cooking the rest of the meal, which no longer has to be timed alongside the rice, which means I can focus on cooking the interesting food and not the bloody rice.
Your experience is different from many others.
Fix your attitude.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-rice-coo...
I think I'm going to start with a $20 one and see.
YumAsia ship to most of Europe and have some cheaper models, if that's useful to you.
I originally went for it because there honestly aren't that many options in the UK, and this was the only Induction Heating model on the market here when I bought it, as most of the Japanese brands aren't CE marked I think?
I imagine the technology exists in other rice cookers under different names, as I would think it's pretty rare for there to be anything truly unique in this market.
I do highly rate that model though. I've had it about 1.5 years and use it at least 4 times a week. There is a notable difference in taste between its "Yumami" and "Short-grain" settings. Not that the standard mode tastes bad; it's just that the Yumami setting does have something a bit different about it that I really like.
Check out some of their cheaper models as well, they're also quite well-reviewed and they import Zojirushi stuff too.
>For centuries, most Japanese cooks made rice with a kamado, a box-shaped range topped with a heavy iron pot. It was painfully tricky. Cooking rice this way, says columnist and food writer Makiko Itoh, takes heat modulation: high heat until the water and rice boils, then low heat, then high heat again. “And that, with a wood-burning stove, is very difficult.” Each day, Japanese women rose at dawn and labored for several sweaty hours to make rice.
The engineer who made the first, widely successful design relied on his wife’s expertise in this traditional cooking method to perfect it.
"Until now, this was the only way to get cooked rice from rice..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viejY6UZ5Bk&t=42s
Okay, but in that case the best thing to invent would be a non-horrible stove. I've made rice, and even as an incompetent cook, it really is a non-issue.
The standard to be measured against was also, again, Kamado rice, which most rice cookers today would struggle to meet and I guarantee few bachelors are measuring up to with their sauce pans.
Yep, needs more automation and less human thought. We need single-serving-sized pouches of rice, and single-serving-sized bottles of water. Feeding four people? Use four packets and four bottles. The cooking device can monitor its own temperature and sing a ditty when it’s done.
...But for the next step I'm using my instapot while I do something else.
- I turn the heat off (but do not open the lid) at 15 minutes
- If I'm planning on making extra, sometimes I like to add some oil (usually coconut, sometimes olive or butter), which I find helps it keep better. Oil and rice added before water, to spread it evenly.