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Comment by cabalamat | Hacker News Reader

> Unlike rice, it's fine to "soak" pasta in the sauce

Why is this bad with rice? When I make a stew I often put some rice in, with the expectation that the rice will absorb some of the stew.

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Rice can almost fully disintegrate if left in water, and will become something that disintegrates even more if stirred or agitated. In many other applications it replaces a pleasantly tactile and textured starch with a sort of sludge slurry, but as is often the case if you know and expect this it can be used in some applications advantageously. Thickening a stew is one of them. It's actually my favorite stew thickener. We discovered this the hard way once, though. We just "threw some rice" into a stew, and, well, if you put enough "sludge slurry" into a stew it starts to dominate... since then, though, it's been something very useful, especially since I'm allergic to flour, one of the traditional choices.

Same. Also to make risotto you cook the rice with everything else and keep stirring so the rice absorbs all of it whilst releasing starch to make that creamy texture.

It's not bad, per se. It depends what you're going for. There's a lot of different ways to cook rice "properly" depending on the end dish. Congee, risotto, paella, sushi, etc. all have you cook rice differently while adding various degrees of liquid at different times.

It doesn't work well with most Asian dishes with sauces. Such as butter chicken, curry, the stuff with coconut milk, sambal.

I think stew might be an exception, because you want it to be porridge-like. But for many sauces, that's too soggy. You usually want it to soak for a few seconds to minutes but not an hour.

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