As the article states, the challenge is already lower for you because you can turn the heat to low, unlike the old days.
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.
The other factor that makes cooking rice today quite trivial (even without a rice cooker), is the quality of our rice. A typical bag of rice from the supermarket (even in most developing countries), will be of a much more consistent higher quality than you’d expect to have gotten 70 years ago.
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.)
The article makes general statements about cooking rice, but it is really about cooking rice Japanese style.
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.
+1, in countries like Turkey, Persia, India, Pakistan rice cookers are pretty uncommon. In my home country of Turkey where rice is eaten very commonly, I've never heard of a single person use it. Further, rice is typically first washed several times, fried with a bit of oil and perhaps some spices before being simmered. I don't know if it's possible to do this with a Japanese style rice-cooker.
I use a Japanese-style rice cooker and mine will do this I believe, and even has a specific tahdig setting, though as I have nothing to compare it to, I can't attest to its authenticity :) https://www.yumasia.co.uk/bamboo-induction-heating-ceramic-r...
The more basic models don't have features like that, however.
Then the article is wrong, wildly, overwhelmingly, brain-dead wrong. For the "hours" story, that must be wrong. Cooking rice is EASY, over any heat source with just a covered pot, iron, stainless steel, aluminum -- just a pot.
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.
Good lord this is one of the saltiest posts I've ever seen on here, which is an accomplishment.
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.
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.
Thank you! Unfortunately, I'm in the EU, where these are hard to find, and also they cost an absolutely preposterous amount of money for something that cooks rice, which is a little odd given that their claim to fame is how simple they are.
I think I'm going to start with a $20 one and see.
The thing you did wrong was come across like a jerk in your writing. You can be correct and still look like an asshole. That’s a pretty common cause of downvotes since rude comments just hinder conversation.
I’m not sure how you could read the article and miss the historical context. In postwar Japan, many women were not cooking with saucepans on gas or electric ranges with high-quality, industrially processed rice:
>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.
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.
Most Japanese houses postwar were not equipped to have good gas ranges. The article highlights that widespread electrification had occurred, which favored rice cookers, especially because cooking food on electric ranges is anathema for huge swathes of Japanese cuisine.
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.
We often use the timer in our rice cooker such that when you come back home the rice is ready, and it also maintains the temperature after it's done. I wouldn't want to leave a stove at high heat while not at home.
So measure water and rice, monitor boiling status, modify cooking temperature...
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.
What you're describing is pretty close to a Zojirushi fuzzy logic cooker, which has a greater tolerance for mismatched rice/water ratios (and most importantly sings a tune when done!)
Jo Koy has a bit about cooking rice on his newest special that points out an even easier trick. Put as much rice as you want to cover the bottom of the pot, then put your index finger on the rice and fill the water up to the first knuckle.
...But for the next step I'm using my instapot while I do something else.
I was taught this method also, by a Japanese woman in the 80s. I think it works because the cooker cuts the heat exactly when it's all turned to steam, which is held at a minimum pressure by the lid. So the amount of water is very forgiving because there's those two automatic functions regulating the process.
- 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.
1 cup rice 1.25 cups water is what I use as a ratio for short-to-medium grain white rice (I recommend kokuho rose extra fancy). That also is the one typically inscribed on the side of a rice cooker pot. You can go a little over water-wise for a mushier rice, or under for a chewier/drier rice - white rice is forgiving.
Mod, fix this attack on me.