A Million Ways to Prepare Rice

Rice is perhaps one of the easiest foods to cook and is probably something we all learned how to cook back when we were eager to learn how to cook like mum. I mean I can bet you that even if you’re trying out a new brand of rice or even a new variety, chances are you only read the cooking instructions to reaffirm what you already know.

It’s very difficult to mess things up with rice and you perhaps only have to overcook it once in your life to learn. Even for those who prefer not to de-starch their rice it’s really hard to mess things up.

If however you do overcook it or that and the “excess” starch makes it appear to be more like a samp or porridge, you can always roll it up into rice balls or press it into small cups as part of a refreshing “presentation,” much like how they do in restaurants when you order a rice dish like curry and rice or even grilled fish with rice.

Otherwise if your desire to prepare the rice in your rice dishes is strictly by design, there are many different ways of doing so.

Fry it

It took me quite a while to master what is otherwise the very simple dish of fried rice, which is served with a range of salads, meats and paste sauces. Fried rice is a popular dish in Indian Ocean islands such as Mauritius and is quite a healthy dish given what the rice is usually paired with. But yeah, I guess you can fry what most of us would refer to as “normal” rice — that rice with the medium sized grains which you find everywhere, but obviously you’d have to boil it first in the manner you usually cook rice and then fry (preferably in a tiny splash of olive oil) in little chunks in a shallow pan while stirring all the way through.

Otherwise use long grain fine rice if you don’t want to first boil the rice and then fry it as some extra cooking work, since long grain rice cooks much easier and quicker and so it can be cooked almost exclusively through frying.

Season it

This is something they particularly love doing in South America, which is adding seasoning to the rice. Seasoning gives rice a nice flavour to it if you’re not content with boiling it in salt water to give it some taste and the great thing is that you select any seasoning of which the flavour you’d love to dominate the taste of your dish.

This Chick Cooks

Butter it up

This particularly makes minced meat dishes taste that much more special, even in the case of the minced meat baked into a meatloaf or something like that. Simply add a spoonful of butter to your rice when it’s simmering and getting rid of the remaining moisture. The butter should turn the rice all the way yellow, but this yellow hue would be much deeper than that of seasoned rice.

These are just a few of the many ways you can prepare rice and don’t be afraid to experiment.

Sam Roberts