Video 5 Transcript: Cooking with whole grains from Dr. Preston Maring’s Kitchen
Some people think that cooking brown rice is hard.
I have for years!
I’ve tried it several different ways.
One of the ways that I’ve cooked brown rice is in a rice cooker.
I’ve ended up with kind of a wet mush, and extra water would run around on the plate.
It tasted ok, but the texture was just terrible.
So then I thought, well, maybe I could do it in a sauce pan on top of the stove.
So I did it that way, but more often than not, I ended up with kind of a brown crust
on the bottom of the pan.
I ended up with rice that didn’t taste all that good, kind of stuck together, and I ended
up with a sauce pan that took forever to clean.
Now, I’m going to show you an easier way to cook brown rice that I just learned from
a friend recently.
One of the confusing things about cooking brown rice is trying to figure out the right
ratio of water to rice.
For one cup of rice, some people say that you should just use one cup of water.
Others have said a cup and a half.
Some people even say two cups.
And then it also matters what altitude you’re at.
If you’re high in the mountains, it may take two or three cups for every cup of rice.
Well, with the cooking method here, it doesn’t matter how much water you use.
There are no ratios to worry about, so it’s simple.
It’s also a great way to cook other whole grains like quinoa.
Quinoa is a grain that’s 2000 years old from high up in the Andes.
It’s high in protein.
And all you have to do is put it in boiling water until its tender.
Fifteen or twenty minutes, strain it out, and you’ve got a great whole grain dish.
For the brown rice, we’re going to take the first step, and just take this cup of
brown rice, and put it into some boiling water.
That’s all there is to it.
Now we wait for 20 or 22 minutes.
It’s time to drain the rice.
We’ll just put the rice over here into a colander.
And then we’re going to take the rice and just put it back over here, right into a cast
iron skillet.
Cover this up with some aluminum foil, reasonably tightly.
And now, all we do is put this in the oven, 350 degrees.
Your oven has been preheating the whole time.
We set it for ten minutes.
Pretty soon, we’re going to have great brown rice.
Ahh!
Perfect!
You know, rice is great as a side dish.
I also like to use it as a one dish meal.
So let’s just take this rice.
Look at that!
It just comes out of the pan.
It’s perfectly done, it doesn’t stick, excellent!
So we got this warm rice.
We can take big handfuls now of spinach or arugula.
Just toss that into the warm rice.
We’ll stir this up for just a little bit.
It’s also good to add some sliced cherry tomatoes in season.
If the cherry tomatoes are not in season, and not nice and red and luscious and tasty,
you could always use sun dried tomatoes.
I’ve got some leftover roasted chicken breast from just a couple of nights ago.
Adds a little more protein to the dish.
And then, all we need is a simple lemon vinaigrette.
Oh this looks good!
There you go!
This is a one dish meal for four people.
Perfect!
If I can do this, you can too!
For today’s recipe and more like it, visit my blog and get cooking!